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

“If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; Doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? And he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? And shall not he render to every man according to his works?”

Proverbs 24:12

“If you say, “Surely we did not know this,” Does not He who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, does He not know it? And will He not render to each man according to his deeds?”

Proverbs 24:12

The problem for those who get into the habit of making excuses is that most of their practicing is on those who are finite and limited, and who are usually not in a position to refute the excuse, whatever it is.

Someone asks, “who left this mess here?” The excuse leaps easily to the lips. “I didn’t know anything about it.” Or, in the words of this proverb, “I knew it not.”

The difficulty is that this is not just said to your teacher, or your supervisor, or your father. It is also said coram Deo, before the face of God. This proverb is therefore an exhortation, every time you think an excuse is in order, to remember that God is the possessor of all the omnis. He is everywhere present, and He knows all things.

Because He is everywhere present, He was there in the room when you left the mess for someone else to clean up. Because He is omniscient, all-knowing, He knows everything about it. 

This proverb pushes this truth down into all the corners. This is saying much more than that God knows the state of the room. He knows the state of your heart when you are telling yourself all those lies. The Lord weighs the hearts. The Lord keeps the soul. And when He renders to all according to their deeds, He is going to go on the basis of what He says, and not on the basis of the excuses we may have offered.

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

“Buy the truth, and sell it not; Also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.”

Proverbs 23:23

Truth matters, and it matters big time. 

This proverb starts there. Buy the truth, and once you have bought it, hang on to it. Don’t even think about selling. When you have bought the truth, you need to have done so in order to acquire a permanent possession.

What this means is that subjectivism, which amounts to sentimentalism, is prohibited to the person who would walk in biblical wisdom. Truth is objective. It is independent of our feelings, and does not require our affirmation in order to remain what it is.  

And so we are justified in believing that this proverb teaches us that truth is very, very important. Relativism is false. It is not possible to serve God honestly and rightly apart from the truth. Truth matters. 

But it is not the only thing that matters, and many truth-oriented churches get stuck here. The proverb goes on. Also, it says. Three additional things are mentioned, things which need to be used to supplement our possession of the truth. These three things are wisdom, instruction, and understanding. And although I used the word supplement, it is much more than supplemental. Without these things that arrive with the also, truth is not going to remain truth for very long. 

Wisdom is the crown of all learning. It is not just knowledge, and not just understanding. It is the grace to know how all of it should be expressed, how it should all be lived out. What is the incarnational form of the truth? Instruction means that the one who possesses truth does not possess all truth, and must always be willing to learn more. The one who believes in absolute truth is not precluded from being someone who is always learning. And understanding means knowing how it is all to be assembled—how all the pieces go together.

Churches which cling to a set of naked truths do collide with our relativistic age, but they do so ineffectively. They have a clunkity clunkity approach to truth, which is not up to the challenge posed by the deep fog of relativism. 

Truth matters, and has pulled into your driveway. Receive the truth of God into your homes . . . provided it is traveling in company. Are wisdom, instruction, and understanding in the back seat?

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

“Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; But the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.”

Proverbs 22:15

Men and women who grew up in abusive homes can sometimes have a hard time believing what Scripture teaches about corporal punishment. They have allowed their bad experience with something color what they believe about a good and proper use of it. 

The proverb begins with the cold, hard fact that nobody needs to teach your child how to sin. When they come home from the hospital, they are—as my father affectionately used to say—“little bundles of sin.” They are, by nature, objects of wrath. 

This doesn’t seem fair to us, but the reason it doesn’t seem fair is because we too are affected (and infected) by sin. Is a child in a crib a walker? No, in the sense that he has not taken his first step yet. But he belongs to a race of walkers, and it is in his nature to walk. Is he a talker? Well, no, in the sense that he has not spoken his first word yet. But he belongs to a race of talkers, and it is in his nature to talk. Is this child a sinner? The child has not committed an individual sin yet, but he belongs to a race of sinners, and it is just a matter of time. All he lacks is the mental capacity and the requisite muscle strength. 

So folly is bound up in the heart of the child. This is a given. There is no child—apart from the Christ child given two thousand years ago—of whom this was not true. The good news for parents here is that there is something that can be done about it. The rod of discipline, correctly and judiciously applied, will drive that folly far away. 

An important distinction for parents to remember is that this is discipline, not punishment. Discipline is corrective, and need only go so far as is necessary to accomplish the correction. Punishment is meted out in the interests of strict justice, as when the state executes a murderer. The point is not to make the murderer better, but rather to administer justice. Discipline in the home is not to be like that. 

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

“By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life.”

Proverbs 22:4

However easy it is to dunk on health and wealth preachers, and it is easy, and however necessary it is to dunk on them, and it is necessary, we still need to confess, at the end of the day, that they do have a lot of verses. This is one of them.

One of the consequences of living in humility and in the fear of the Lord is what? Riches would be one thing. Honor is another. The third is life. This is clearly and plainly the way to go. This is not a vending machine promise, where you put your quarters in and always get your product. Rather it is a proverb, and this means we are talking about something that is generally true.  

Answering the h&w line must not consist of simply ignoring the existence of such passages, or by ignoring the prima facie meaning. We must rather take them at face value and place them in the context of other passages that contradict the simplistic and absolutist approach of the health and wealth guys. In other words, to take one example, we do know that Paul had the gift of healing (Acts 28:8), but he left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Tim. 4:20). As Paul was going out the door, can’t you just imagine Trophimus yelling after him, “Hey!”?

A good balance on this entire subject is struck by the great Puritan writer, Richard Sibbes. 

“We must know it is not simply the world that draws our hearts from God, but the love of the world. Worldly things are good in themselves and are given by God to sweeten our passage to heaven. It is your falseness that makes them hurtful, in loving them too much. Use the world as a servant and not as a master, and you will have comfort in this life. It is not the world properly used that hurts us, but our setting our hearts upon it. When God should be in our thoughts, our spirits are drunk with the cares below. Thorns will not prick by themselves, but when they are grasped in a man’s hand they prick deep. So this world and the things of the world are all good, and were all made by God for the benefit of his people” 

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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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