Grace & Peace: Proverbs 11:29

At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

“He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: But the righteous shall flourish as a branch” (Proverbs 11:28).

Like the rich man in the parable of the bigger barns, a wealthy man who places his trust or his faith in his riches is going to discover the angular side of a proverb about money. It is true that money talks . . . it says good bye.

This proverb is interesting in some surprising ways. The man who trusts in riches will fall. But what happens to the person, the righteous man, who does not do that? Well, it turns out that he will flourish. Not only will he flourish, he will flourish like a branch.

A branch is connected to the tree, and that is the source of its flourishing. The man who trusts in his riches is the man who is disconnected from the source of flourishing, which is why he falls.

So the comparison here is between two men of means, two men who have wealth. One of them trusts in that wealth idolatrously, and the idols lets him down, as all idols do. The other man, a righteous man, has the key to continued flourishing. He flourishes because he places no faith in the fact that he is flourishing.

We all have a tendency, when things are going well, to believe that this pleasant state is somehow our birthright. This is the way it will be forever and ever. A righteous man refuses to do this—he knows that it could all disappear tomorrow, and this is the reason—a most excellent reason—why it doesn’t disappear tomorrow.

Those who depend upon their wealth will find that it collapses beneath them. Those who stand on something else, something more permanent, find that they have a stable footing, which means they can continue to hold their wealth in their hands.

But they hold it with an open palm, which means the Lord can give and take away. If we clutch at our wealth, the Lord can still take it away, just as easily, leaving us with broken fingers.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

“The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable: But the mouth of the wicked speaketh frowardness” (Prov. 10:32).

We have here a contrast between the speech of the righteous and the speech of the wicked. The focus of the contrast shows that the righteous considers how and where his words are going to land. The wicked just goes forward with his frowardness. Frowardness is an archaic term meaning perverse or perverted.

The wicked just wants to vent. He is going to say what he is going to say and, as it were, damn the torpedos. The righteous knows what is acceptable. He considers what is appropriate, given the circumstance and situation. He speaks the truth, but he navigates as he goes. In this situation, the wicked is simply a bulldozer.

Communication consists of three elements. There is the speaker, there is the message, and there is the recipient. A godly speaker—a preacher, say—needs to be a student of all three. He is engaged in constructing a bridge, to use the image John Stott used, between two worlds. There is the world of Scripture, and there is the world inhabited by the listeners. Each one has its own language, context, grammar, and syntax. The speaker is a translator, translating from one language to the other.

If he is a righteous preacher, as per our proverb, he knows how to state the unchanging truths of God’s Word in a way that is “acceptable.” He must not trim God’s Word in order to make it acceptable, but there is a way to frame it that does not ruffle feathers unnecessarily.

But the wicked man is a blunderbuss. And because he is advancing perversions, and all of his listeners come from a sinful race, this is one of the reasons why he can get away with it for a time. But only for a time.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

“The integrity of the upright shall guide them: But the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them” (Prov. 11:3).
“The integrity of the upright will guide them, But the perversity of the unfaithful will destroy them” (Prov. 11:3, NKJV).

The import of this proverb really is straightforward. The integrity of an upright man is a guide. The perverseness of transgressors is something that destroys them. But how does this destruction come about? The parallelism here would indicate that the transgressors are destroyed because they have no guide.

Whenever we make decisions about our path forward, we are looking at a world filled with countless variables, and they are variables that we don’t know. An unjust man is out for number one, and this means that he is on his own. And that means that he has to guess at all the variables, and to troubleshoot as he goes, trying to calculate what will redound in his best interest.

A man of integrity has the law of God in his right hand, in his heart, and in his mouth. And what that does is simplify his decision-making. I don’t know the future, but I can know the book of Deuteronomy. I can read the book of Proverbs.

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105).

The hymn says it well. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future. And, as it turns out, He has written a book. The perverse man ignores the book because he would rather drive on into the darkness, just so long as he is behind the wheel.

It is not difficult to see how this results in what the proverb promises—the car upside down in a field, all four wheels pointing toward the sky.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

“An hypocrite with his mouth destroyeth his neighbour: But through knowledge shall the just be delivered” (Proverbs 11:9).

A hypocrite is someone who is two-faced. In this proverb, he destroys his neighbor, and the implication seems plain that he does it by presenting one face to his neighbor, and the other face to others outside. He tells the outsiders, for example, just part of the story, withholding key information.

The hypocrite is the one who puts this operation into motion. The fool is the one who passes that information on to the world of the Internet. This person is not a hypocrite, but his folly consists in the fact that he believes hypocrites. But it is not only a sin to tell lies, it is a sin to believe them, and this sin is compounded when a person believes them and passes them on. Sometimes among those neighbors who get destroyed, certain just ones might be found.

The same proverb tells us that they will be delivered “through knowledge.” Through knowledge of what? Well, it would appear that this is referring to knowledge of the situation that the hypocrite is lying about, and which the gullible ones are passing around as gospel truth. As one who has been misrepresented in online controversies multiple times, I speak with a certain measure of authority here. Virtually every story can be told in such a way as to condemn the protagonist, and all that needs to happen is for certain key details to be left out. So it turns out that the best answer to lies and shades of truth would be something like “nothing but the truth, the whole truth, so help me God.”

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