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

Judgments are prepared for scorners,
and stripes for the back of fools.

Proverbs 19:29

Scripture does not just teach us particular things, but also what might be called a general outlook. If we pay attention to what the Word says as we read it, we will start to notice certain common patterns or themes. There is a biblical worldview that is shared by all the authors of Scripture, and they share that outlook regardless of what particular issue they may be addressing. Over time, that background set of assumptions starts to settle in the minds of those who are in the Word regularly and who are being “transformed” by the renewal of their minds (Rom. 12:1-2).

For example, we are told in the passage cited above that scorners are having judgments prepared for them, and that fools are having stripes stored up for them. And the great Solomon says this as though it were a good thing. He doesn’t seem to mind it. It seems fitting to him somehow.

But a modern progressive would object to this strongly, because one of the tenets of the progressive faith is that dialog and talk should be able to solve all our problems. Progressive parents try to reason with an obstreperous two-year-old boy. Progressive law enforcement wants to spend a lot of time talking about the root causes of crime. Progressive diplomats want to negotiate with terrorist states. And they all want to do these things because, according to their deeply held vision, violence solves nothing. Force solves nothing.

This collides with what Solomon tells us here. Fools and scorners cannot be reasoned with. They could not follow the argument, and wouldn’t want to even if they could do it. But they can respond to judgments and stripes. That is something they are capable of figuring out. Put another way, according to Scripture, deterrence works. “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil” (Eccl. 8:11, ESV). And flipped around the other way, the absence of deterrence also has an impact on society.

And this means, in its turn, that all those in authority (parents, teachers, magistrates, cops, and so on) need to be prepared for the times when they insist, and enforce that insistence, even though the person who is being forced to behave doesn’t agree. Not only do they not agree, but they don’t believe you have sought strongly enough to persuade them. Like the peasant in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, they think you are oppressing them.

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

Most men will proclaim every one his own
goodness: But a faithful man who can find?

Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love,
but a faithful man who can find? (ESV)

Proverbs 20:6

Scripture teaches us that one of the consequences of living in a sinful world is that the citizens of that world grow acclimated to it. The abnormal has become normal. The twisted calculus of selfishness bends everything into the wrong shape, and as a result a straight line can look positively legalistic.

Now a handful of people will embrace wickedness as such. They get a kick out of embracing the perverse precisely because it is perverse. They have come to the place where Milton’s devil came—“evil, be thou my good.”

But most sinful people, while admitting to faults here and there, have a positive view of their own relative virtue. This is why persecutors feel persecuted. This is why bullies believe themselves to have been greatly wronged. This is why the person in the classroom or office or family who is the greatest affliction to all the others is a person who consistently feels greatly put upon.

Man is a creature who was designed by God to live in a narratival way. And so it happens that most men appoint themselves the role of protagonist in their own story. We are all like ten-year-old boys playing football in an empty lot—we all want to be the quarterback. With the advent of Bluetooth technology, all of us can now walk down a street accompanied by a soaring soundtrack, occasionally glancing at the reflections in the shop windows to see how our movie is going. We are the lead actor and the director andthe producer.

This proverb lets us know that our perception is grossly distorted. Judging from how we all proclaim how good we are, the world should be filled with that goodness. But the Word tells us that such goodness is really pretty rare.

Right after Paul tells us not to be conformed to the world’s pattern of thinking (Rom. 12:1-2), he moves immediately to make this point. “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith” (Rom. 12:3). This caution is obviously necessary because the world, the flesh, and the devil are the three great flatterers.

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

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it,
it is folly and shame unto him

Proverbs 18:13

This verse is found in the same chapter as Prov. 18:17, and is a close brother to it. When you hear one person present his case, everything seems compelling and reasonable—up until the cross-examination starts. At that point, you discover that there was quite a bit more to the story.

The sin of jumping to conclusions is addressed in a different way in this verse, but it is in effect the same sin. A person who answers too quickly, or too abruptly, is a person who is answering before he actually knows what the question is.

Too often we try to mortify the sinful reactions of our flesh when what we really need to do is mortify the wrong-headed analysisdone by our flesh. Suppose there is someone whose default settings cause them to “find fault” with someone else whenever something goes wrong. That someone is usually in the immediate proximity, and so the instant “analysis” is that they did something wrong that “caused this unfortunate event.” And then, supposing the person with these negative settings to be a sincere Christian who wants to do right, he spends all his spiritual energy trying to mortify those feelings of resentment over the wrong-doing of others.

To take an absurd example, he wakes up one morning to find his dog dead in the neighbor’s driveway. He assumes immediately (and erroneously) that his neighbor ran over his dog, and so he spends a great deal of time mortifying the sin of resenting his neighbor. But he is mortifying the wrong sin. He actually needs to be mortifying the sin of jumping to conclusions. He needs to inculcate the virtue of withholding judgment.

Before we can learn how to appropriately respond to any situation, we have to understand what that situation actually is. If we do not do this, then we are answering before the question is even out. Because this kind of analysis is frequently so quick, it is easy to mistake it for insight or wisdom. But this proverb says that this is not quick-witted, but rather hasty-minded. And to be hasty in this way is folly and shame.

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

He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster.

Proverbs 18:9

Modern businessmen talk about opportunity cost, which is when you pay for the privilege of going right by foregoing whatever you would have gained by going left. We all have to make these sorts of decisions all the time—it is part of what it means to be finite. We don’t know what the future holds when we go right, and we certainly don’t know the contingent future of what would have happened if we had gone left. In other words, opportunity costs are difficult to calculate.

But there is another kind of opportunity cost, one far more severe, and therefore easier to see. On top of that, Scripture even tells us about it in blunt and unvarnished terms—as in this proverb. It is what we see when we choose to work hard instead of being slothful.

Now of course we cannot see the future perfectly here either. It is possible that the hard-working man will get hit by a bus on the way home, and his lazy bum of a co-worker will pop into a 7-11 to buy a winning lottery ticket. Worse things have happened.

But as Scripture notes, perhaps sardonically, that doesn’t usually happen. What usually happens is that the hard worker accumulates wealth, and with a pretty good idea of how it is all coming to pass, and poverty comes on the sluggard like a thief with a gun, and how this is all happening remains a grand mystery to the baffled victim.

Time is an essential resource on all labor, and a lazy worker is throwing it into the dumpster in the back alley. It has a financial cost for the business as much as if that worker were throwing away perfectly good lumber, metal, paper, or glass. The man who burns the wood that was going to be used to make the cabinets is a true brother to the one who burns the daylight that was going to be used to make the cabinets.

And so it is that many Christians need to learn repentance here. If they are going on a bathroom break at work, they would not dream of taking a ream of paper with them and throwing it in the trash bin on the way. That would be destruction of someone else’s property, that would be stealing, that would be wrong. But they think nothing of spending twenty minutes in the john, scrolling through items of interest on their phone.

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

A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth:
And a word spoken in due season, how good is it!

Proverbs 15:23

Hebraic parallelisms take different forms. Sometimes it is a simple parallel, stated in different words, with each clause informing the other. Other times it is a contrast, setting forth opposites. In this case, the repetition takes the first thought as expressed, and rolls it out a little bit further.

The way this is stated, we do not know exactly where the joy of the apt answer lands. Is it something that brings joy to the one whogives the apt answer, or to the one who receives it? Or perhaps both?

In either case, the additional information that comes to us in this second phrase is found in the words in due season. We are talking about the aptness of a timely word. As one of our sages has expressed it, the only difference between salad and garbage is timing.

Whoever finds this joy, whoever experiences the goodness of a good answer, the goodness is to be found in the fact that it was a word in due season, the right word for the right moment. Someone who spouts falsehoods is never a blessing. But someone who offers truisms at all the wrong moments is like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Some are so distracted by the truth of what they are saying that they never notice how their timing makes the truth into an odd sort of lie.

So when we have done something that is verbally maladroit, we cannot excuse our poor timing by retreating to the dictionary in order to plead for our lexicographical justifications. But I was blessing him. “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, It shall be counted a curse to him” (Proverbs 27:14).

We must not take our words as though they were an odd collection of silver links of chain and small pearls, tucked into a little box, and pronounced to be a necklace. No. The setting matters (Prov. 25:11), and an important part of the setting is the timing.

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