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

“A wise man scaleth the city of the mighty, and casteth down the strength of the confidence thereof.”

Proverbs 21:22

A certain kind of power, or wealth, or might, is the kind that you can see with your eyes, or rap on with your knuckles. It is evident, physical, and manifest. And for many, this is all the information they need to conduct their calculations. People look at the number of the troops arrayed against them and say, “That settles it. Might as well recognize the inevitable.”

But wisdom knows how to scale a wall. Not only so, but wisdom can scale the walls of a mighty city. What the wise do in this instance is that they cast down the strength of their confidence—which is what they were relying on. Put another way, the hubris that arises from apparent strength is the weakness of perceived strength. This is quite different from the strength of perceived weakness (2 Cor. 12:10).

In 1863, during the American Civil War, before the disastrous battle of Chancellorsville, the Union general Hooker said, “Gentlemen, if I can plant my army there, God Almighty can’t drive me out.” This is the kind of statement that Nebuchadnezzar made upon the walls of Babylon, right before he went into bovine mode. It is the kind of statement attributed to a complacent person before the Titanic disaster—“God Himself couldn’t sink this ship.”

At any rate, when Hooker had his position, not only was he driven out, and defeated, but this was done by Lee’s 60,000 men against Hooker’s 130,000.

Confidence is a mojo thing, and once the mighty are rattled, everything can start to go to pieces. I think of the waning days of the Soviet empire, when they, a nuclear superpower, went up against Boris Yeltsin, holed up in a house. A mighty superpower against one Russian with a drinking problem. But the thing about that mojo is, when it goes, it’s gone.

The wise are those who can see this beforehand, and who know what to do. As Peter Drucker once put it, you should be able to see the future that has already happened.  

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

“The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”

Proverbs 21:16

“A man who wanders from the way of understanding will rest in the assembly of the dead.”

Proverbs 21:16 NKJV

“One who wanders from the way of good sense will rest in the assembly of the dead.”

Proverbs 21:16 ESV

I have cited this proverb from three different translations. The overall thrust of the proverb is not hard to understand. The person who wanders off from the path of understanding is going to find himself a full member of the congregation of the dead. He who steps off the sidewalk of good sense is going to get hit by a truck, and he will remain at rest—but he will not be resting in peace. 

The way of understanding is the way of life. To wander off from life is to wander into death. As Lady Wisdom says at the end of chapter 8, all who hate her love death. This explains why the secular and atheistic world today is little more than a death cult. This can be seen in their love of sterile sexuality, abortion, and trans-surgeries, and their hatred of teeming populations, productivity and innovation. Death cult about sums it up. 

The judgment that falls on those who veer off from good sense is a severe judgment. This is indicated by the word for “dead” here. The word is rephaim or, put another way, giants. The allusion is the devastating judgment that fell on the antediluvian world, and which wiped out all their overweening ambitions.

Those who leave the path of understanding do so in the name of their own understanding. They head off into death, but they would not put it that way to themselves. Their end will be as final and as complete as a world full of drowned giants.

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

“A wise king sifts out the wicked, and brings the threshing wheel over them”

Proverbs 20:26

The civil magistrate is not supposed to be a neutral umpire. The “teams” that assemble under his oversight will not two baseball teams, or two football teams, with the magistrate needing to not care who prevails. 

No. Because the magistrate wields power, and does so in a fallen world, there are two different kinds of people who are interested in how he wields that power. Those two kinds of people are the righteous and the wicked. It is the assigned task of the magistrate, and particularly of the chief magistrate, to take sides. Moreover it is his task to take the right side.

Because of the growth of libertarian assumptions, we have drifted into the idea that the magistrate is just supposed to call balls and strikes, not caring which team wins the game. So if the drag queens want story hour at the library, then they should be treated in exactly the same way as the ladies from the Wholesome Readings for Kids Hour. But this is absurd, and the only way we might wind up not thinking it absurd would be if we were in the grip of a really bad idea. 

A good king attacks the wicked. If he refuses to do so, for whatever reason, then the effect this will have is that it will attract the wicked. His court, his circles, his advisors, will soon be populated by wicked men, and by no one else. If the magistrate is not attacking wicked men, then his circles will be safe for wicked men. And as soon as it is determined to be safe, they will start to congregate there. 

So there is no neutrality. There can be no neutrality. If a magistrate is not at war with the wicked, then his only other option is to be at war with the saints.  

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

“A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men”

Proverbs 18:16

A question that arises from time to time, particularly among Christians who have to travel in dysfunctional countries, or function in corrupt institutions, concerns the question of bribery. What is the Scripture’s teaching on bribery?

The bottom line is that it is wicked and lawless to take a bribe. 
“Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, throughout thy tribes: and they shall judge the people with just judgment. Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Deuteronomy 16:18–20).

This is the sin committed by Samuel’s sons, and which helped prepare the way for Israel’s defection (1 Sam. 8:3). So we can see that taking bribes is a great sin.

Reasoning by analogy, if a culture of not taking bribes is in place, it would be really sinful to try to introduce the practice. What you are trying to do is the equivalent of seducing a virgin.

But if the system is already corrupt, and all you are trying to do is get through customs, or otherwise persuade an official to do his job, it is not necessarily sinful to give him what he is angling for. This is radically different than giving a gift to keep someone from doing his job. At the same time, you might want to refrain if you have larger issues in view, but this is a tactical decision. For example, the apostle Paul could have gone free if only he had bribed Felix (Acts 24:26), but Paul wanted his case to be heard by Caesar. 

This corruption can occur on a grand scale, or it can be a petty nuisance. For example, when I was in the Navy in the submarine service, and we were due to go to sea, there were various shops on the sub tender that had to service equipment we needed before we could leave. There was this practice called kumshaw, whereby someone would go get a case of steaks from the supply officer in order to expedite the work that was being done on the periscope, for example. As a way to get to the head of the line, it would work, but that didn’t keep it from being disgraceful.

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

“A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: But knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth” 

Proverbs 14:6

Not that we should routinely look to him for wisdom, but Oscar Wilde once said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

It says here that a scorner seeks wisdom. He is hunting for wisdom, looking for it. His search is in vain, however, because he continues to use a metric fashioned by his spirit of scorn and mockery. He assumes that there must always be “a catch,” there will always be a “fatal flaw.” If he doesn’t identify the fault right away, he is fully capable of identifying the potential fault, the potential flaw, right away. What could go wrong?

The one who understands is the one who does not over-engineer things. He understands already, and so it is that knowledge comes to him easily. The task may be hard, but the wise man does not throw any extra complications from the heart into the mix.

So we have to hold this in tension with other truths that we find in the book of Proverbs. Hard work is the way of wisdom, and hard work is, well, hard. But the need for hard work is not hard to understand, just hard to do. Running a marathon is conceptually easy. Just run around the block and you have it down—one foot ahead of the other. It nevertheless takes discipline and training. 

The scorner is capable of mocking the whole enterprise—the race, the training, the discipline, the idea, the running shoes, and so forth. And then later, when he wants to go home with a medal, he “findeth it not.” It turns out that the more a man hustles, the luckier he gets.

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