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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article

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.

Read Full Article