What Does Proverbs 1:31 Mean?

The consequence is stated with a bitter simplicity concerning how they shall eat the fruit of their way and have their fill of their own devices. The agricultural image of eating the fruit of your way is deliberately ironic. In Wisdom literature, fruit typically describes the good harvest of a righteous life — Psalm 1 describes the blessed person as a tree bearing fruit in its season. Here the fruit is the harvest of chosen foolishness: what was planted by the repeated decisions of verses 22-30 is now ready, and it belongs entirely to the person who grew it. There is no one else's work in it. It is entirely your own. That is the point.

Devices (mo'etzah, from the same root as counsel) carries the same weight as the counsel wisdom offered and they refused. The devices they chose over wisdom's counsel were their own plans, their own strategies for getting through life without the fear of the LORD as the starting point. Proverbs 19:21 will frame this contrast directly: many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that stands. The devices of verse 31 stand, too — they stand long enough to produce a harvest. But the harvest is what the person who planted them deserves from what they planted.

Galatians 6:7-8 puts this principle in the broadest possible theological frame showing that everyone reaps exactly what they sow. The one who sows to the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. The eating of verse 31 and the reaping of Galatians 6:8 operate on the same law of moral correspondence that Proverbs consistently treats as foundational to how God's ordered world works. The good news in Galatians 6:8 is that there is also a corresponding law for sowing to the Spirit. Lady Wisdom was offering, in verses 23-24, precisely the seed that produces the other harvest.