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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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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