I keep paying for things with a card I cannot clear, and the balance has quietly become a number that frightens me. How did I let it get here, and how do I stop?

“He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man: he that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich.”

The proverb is blunt about a slow mechanism rather than a single bad decision. In an agrarian economy the man who chased pleasure did not go broke in a day; he went broke through many small preferences for comfort over cost. The Hebrew wisdom tradition rarely shames the poor for being poor. It does warn plainly about the ordinary appetite that spends what has not yet been earned.

“Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”

Paul is writing to believers in the imperial capital about their obligations to neighbours and to authorities. The line about debt sits in the middle of that: settle what you owe people, then let the one permanent obligation be love. Paul is not banning borrowing outright. He is treating unpaid obligation as a weight on relationships, something that quietly binds you to another person's terms.