Click on the newsletter below to enter full screen..
You can also open a PDF here and print.
At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house
Proverbs 21:9
We again see a typical approach to scriptural wisdom, an approach that is repeated a number of times in Proverbs. If you have two variables, x and y, in this case a pleasant wife and a big house, we are told that it would be better to have x without y than to have y without x.
A clever fellow might say that he would prefer to have both x and y. Yes, but because we are being taught how to prioritize, the path of wisdom makes you decide which of them you should prefer. And Scripture tells us which is “better.” You should prefer life in a little cubby hole in the attic, hiding behind some boxes, than to have your run of a sprawling mansion presided over by a quarrelsome wife.
The ESV renders the word brawling as quarrelsome, and NASB and NKJV as contentious. If we compare Scripture with Scripture, we can see what is likely happening here. “Every wise woman buildeth her house: But the foolish plucketh it down with her hands” (Prov. 14:1). Since this is almost certainly a metaphor (very few women dismantle their physical homes with their actual hands), we can see that the destruction accomplished by the foolish woman is largely done with the tongue. The wise woman builds her house with wisdom and kindness. “She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness” (Prov. 31:26).
If a woman is wise enough, she can build an expansive home with her kindness. If she is foolish enough, she can make a great house an intolerable place to be.
“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (Prov. 9:1).
Scripture does not hesitate to confront men with their sins, or women with theirs. And in this case, it is not likely that the quarrelsome wife would recognize herself in this description. That is why she is foolish. She doesn’t think she is being contentious; she just wants to make her point. Again.
At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
Judgments are prepared for scorners,
Proverbs 19:29
and stripes for the back of fools.
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.
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,
Proverbs 20:6
but a faithful man who can find? (ESV)
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.
At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment: For if thou deliver him, yet thou must do it again.
Proverbs 19:19
We have two important principles established in this brief proverb.
The first principle is that you cannot have sin without consequences, and you cannot have great sin without great consequences. If a man is a volcano, it is useless for him to complain about all the cooled lava down the sides.
And the problem with angry men is that they focus on all the irritations that others provide for them. That is their default drive. And then, when they suffer the consequences of their own anger, they tend to attribute this to others as well. The recoil of their own actions is taken by them as some random third party slapping them in the face. They think the lava must have come from some other volcano.
This relates to the second principle taught here. If you help such a man, if you bail him out, if you help him pick up the pieces, he will almost certainly not take away the right message. The helper is thinking “I hope he sees how much I care, how much I am helping him. I trust that this will be the last time he will do that.” At the same time, the man with the temper is concluding that everyone seems to be taking things in stride, and that it must not be that serious. The person who delivers him from the consequences of his own folly is going to be called upon to do it again.
So the principle is this. You get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you penalize. In this case, the penalty can simply be allowing the angry man who pay the fines that he inflicted on himself. He will be tempted to blame others for these fines, for that is what angry people do, and the person who helps him pay those fines is reinforcing the misinterpretation.
Christ Church
Douglas Wilson
Christ Church