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

“He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly: And a man of wicked devices is hated.”

Proverbs 14:17

This proverb talks about two different kinds of sinful men. The first is the quick-tempered or hot-tempered man. The issue is not anger per se. The Lord Jesus was angry on different occasions. He was angry at the tomb of Lazarus, and He was also angry over the incident with the man who had a withered hand. The text of Scripture doesn’t tell us this explicitly, but he was probably angry when He cleansed the Temple. He was certainly zealous over it because we are told that zeal for the Lord’s House consumed Him.

What then is sinful anger? What is the kind of anger is it that does not accomplish God’s righteousness (Jas. 1:20)? Paul tells us to be angry without sinning (Eph. 4:26), but even righteous anger goes rancid overnight.

But the problem here is that the anger is on a hair trigger. This is a man who deals foolishly because he is soon angry. We see the same thing elsewhere in Proverbs. If a man has discretion, this means that he is slow to become angry (Prov. 19:11), and he experiences the glory of overlooking insults. Men who explode because of slights to their honor are actually foregoing an honor—the honor of being insulted without retaliation. There is something glorious about a man who is secure enough in his own character to simply smile and let it go.

The second kind of sinful man here is the devious one. He is full of plots and stratagems, and he can fool people for a while. But after a bit, the word gets out. People find out about him, and he is hated and avoided. He is not explosive, like the first man, but rather corrosive.

Read Full Article

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

“A faithful witness will not lie: But a false witness will utter lies.”

Proverbs 14:5

Taken at face value, this proverb seems almost tautological. A faithful witness will in fact be a faithful witness, but a witness who lies will be the one who is lying. But it is a godly tautology, and one that we really need to keep in mind at all times. Especially if you are on Twitter.

If I may be permitted to bring in an autobiographical element here, I speak and write as someone who has been lied about for a very long time, and the total of the lies, reckoned in tons, has also been significant.

First there are the liars who have given themselves over to the practice. They follow their father the devil, who carries lies with him wherever he goes. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). These people, sons of the devil, will chase after lies until they are completely out of breath.

After this are the middlemen. These are not the inventors of lies, but they do circulate them assiduously. Some of them are more than halfway malevolent—they wanted the lie to be true, and it was too good to check. But there are also people who do this that may be classified as chumps. And, truth be known, there are some Christians out there who are the very chumpiest. They will confidently pronounce something to be true, which I know for a fact to be utterly false, and then they will add the extra topping of “just look it up.”

And last in line would be those good-hearted people who do not invent the lies, and they do not circulate them, but they do hear them, and they are unsettled by them. They do not act, but remain right where they were . . . but now in a destabilized and unsettled condition. They don’t have as much trust in their pastor as they did before. They still trust him, but sometimes . . . it makes you wonder. These are the ones who have been softened up by the artillery prior to the invasion proper.

So what should we remember? Liars lie.

Read Full Article

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

“Fools make a mock at sin: But among the righteous there is favour.”

Proverbs 14:9

The basic breakdown of this proverb is this. Fools are those who mock at sin, and by this is not meant that they are mocking sin as sin. Rather, they are mocking the idea that sin is sin, or that sin is serious, or that sin leads to disaster. In other words, they mock at the idea that sin will have any dire consequences.

The righteous are privileged to dwell where there is “favor.” The word here is rason, and it is rendered in quite a number of different ways. A small representative list will help to give some idea—delight, pleasure, good will, or desire.

What this means is that the pleasure that the fool takes in mocking at sin is an acrid sort of pleasure. It is sharp, unsettled, biting.

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis discusses a point related to this when he dissects the sin of flippancy. He says that it takes real talent to make a joke, but the flippant man never has to do this. What he does is cut to the head of the line, assuming that the joke was already made by someone else, and so he just starts laughing.

It takes no special talent to mock. All that is necessary is a crowd of people who are willing to do the same thing. If someone is sitting in the seat of mockers, this can usually be arranged pretty easily. The spirit that drives this is a sort of demonic laugh track, a comedic cattle prod, letting everyone know when to jeer. The jeering is the point. Everything about such mockery is hollow.

With the easy laughter that attends the conversation of the righteous, sitting around the table with good friends, things are different. The joke is the beer, and the laughter the foam.

Read Full Article

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

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, But the end thereof are the ways of death”

Proverbs 14:12

While they are doing it, everybody thinks they are doing the right thing. If they know they are doing a wrong thing, they put quotation marks around the “wrong” because they have some excuse or rationale for why the wrong thing is actually the right thing in this instance.

This is why men take the road to death. It seemed like the right thing to do. They took that road, thinking it was a road that went somewhere else. Or they took the wrong road, knowing it to be the wrong road, but they only intended to go down that road a little ways, not all the way. As William Gurnall once put it, men will often yield to go with Satan one mile who did not intend to go with him two.

But the end thereof is death. At some point the ground opens up beneath their feet, and they arrive at the destination they did not intend, and thought they were successfully avoiding.

Our problem is that we make decisions on the basis of what we see around us, and we choose this way at the crossroads rather than that way, doing so according to our own lights. But our “own lights” are ignorant. We are in a foreign land, and we don’t know the terrain. What we need is a map from an expert map maker.

This is what we have in the Scriptures. God knows the world. He knows the terrain. He knows which path leads to the Abyss, and which road leads to the Celestial City. We need to follow the instructions, instead of consulting our own hearts, and winging it from there.

Read Full Article

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

“When pride cometh, then cometh shame: But with the lowly is wisdom.”

Proverbs 11:2

We know from Scripture that pride is sinful and that humility is good. That is pretty straightforward. But this proverb tells us something in addition to that. This proverb tells us that pride cannot see what is coming, and humility understands what is going on.

In earthly affairs, we seek out the high ground in order to be able to see further. Houses on a ridge are most expensive because of the view. In military matters, the general wants to stand on the mountain to survey the terrain. Zacchaeus climbed up in a tree in order to be able to see Jesus better. But, as William Gurnall pointed out, if he had climbed up there in order to be seen better, the whole thing would have been quite different.

The haughty man takes his place at the head table in order to be able to survey the room. He positions himself to be able to get there, and perhaps throws an elbow or two. But Jesus, presumably in the back of the room, saw the whole thing. The carnal proud man climbs up in order to be able to see, but what he does not see is the approaching shame. And the person who is willing to take the lowest place discovers that this enables him to see quite well.

So pride is conceited and foolish, and humility is wise. This of course excludes the faux-humility which is nothing more than pride in a fetal position. There is the unctuous person, who is constantly going on about how worthless he is, but he is doing this in order to be the center of attention. He may consider himself the least talented person in the room, but at the same time his hang dog approach declares that he wants everyone else to drop everything and treat him as the most important person in the room. This is not true humility. There is not that much difference between a man who climbs a tree to be seen and a man who crawls under the table to be seen. Wisdom has fled from both.

But for the lowly, the lowly and humble man in truth, there is true wisdom.

Read Full Article