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

Excellent speech becometh not a fool: Much less do lying lips a prince.

Proverbs 17:7

It is difficult to read this proverb about high flown speech in the mouth of a fool without thinking of Shakespeare’s Dogberry. “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly; they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.”

The thing that strikes us as so funny about this kind of speech is the incongruity. The tone is so elevated, the words whistle clean past their targets, the sense of the thing taken as a whole teeters on the lip of nonsense. 

And Solomon tells us that a much greater incongruity is found when princes lie. Thrones are established by righteousness (Prov. 16:12; 25:5; 29:14), and righteousness obviously must include a loyalty to truth. 

If we remove the obvious exceptions (remembering that deception is a legitimate tool in a ruler’s war chest, as we see with Joshua at the second battle of Ai), then we realize that a ruler must speak the truth to his friends—to his counselors, to his cabinet, to his family, to his people. A prince must keep his word. A prince must not lie in order to keep himself out of trouble. 

In our modern secular world, however, we find our rulers and princes are lying to us all the time. They call it “spin,” and they say they are doing it “for the kids,” and they plant stories in the media, and they accuse people falsely. They say that the Constitution means things that it manifestly does not mean. 

The next time you see one of our important solons on the television being interviewed, and you know he is lying—his lips are moving—you need to remember that, according to Scripture, you are living in a unique form of government, one that we might call dogberry democracy.  

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

He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: But he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.

Proverbs 14:29

The Scriptures do not treat anger itself as a sin. The problem appears to be carnal anger, or thoughtless anger—what might be called passion. The virtue commended in this proverb is that of being slow to anger, not incapable of anger. A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger (Prov. 19:11). The same virtue is enjoined by the Lord’s brother, James.

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19).

When we learn how to be slow in anger, we are becoming more like God. There are numerous passages where God is described in just this way (Ps. 103:8; Ex. 34:6; Ps. 145:8; and quite a few more).

The contrast in the proverb is with the man who is “hasty of spirit.” This would be the man who, in the words of James, was not “slow to speak.” As soon as the thought is in his mind, it is immediately in his mouth. The problem is that of an emotional outburst, an emotional reaction.

Now we know that anger can be a sin because Paul tells us:

“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice” (Eph. 4:31).

But just a few verses before this, Paul commands us to be angry, but to do so without sinning.

“Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Eph. 4:26).

Putting all this together, we can see that righteous anger is an act of obedience. When Jesus looked around the synagogue in anger (Mark 3:5), the end result of His anger was that the man with a withered hand was healed. His anger was obedient and constructive. In contrast, the wrath of man does not work the righteousness of God (Jas. 1:20). 

The takeaway for us in the process of our sanctification is that we need to mortify our temper, and activate our zeal for righteousness.

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

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: But fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 1:7

True knowledge has prerequisites, and the foundational prerequisite for that true knowledge is the fear of the Lord. The contrast that is set up here is between the wise man, who begins in the fear of the Lord, and takes the first initial steps toward knowledge, on the one hand, and the fool, on the other, who despises wisdom and instruction. 

The fool starts from what he believes is a blank slate. It is not blank, really, but he tries to pretend that it is. He thinks he can begin by assuming nothing, and reason his way to some kind of autonomous knowledge. But this is like stepping into a bucket in order to carry yourself upstairs.

We are finite beings, and this means that—of necessity—we have to assume certain things in order to be instructed, in order to attain to knowledge, in order to gain wisdom. The central thing we have to assume is not a something, but rather a someone. We must begin with the Lord, and we must begin with a certain disposition toward Him—that disposition being one of fear.

In short, we are not supposed to reason our way to God. We reason from God. Without God, we could not think at all. One of the evidences of being unable to think clearly without God is the fact that people assume that they know how to think clearly without God. How much plainer can it get?

We must start with God in order to get to God, and this is not begging the question. A finite creature cannot reason about ultimate things at all without assuming an axiomatic starting point. If a man wants knowledge, it would be good to begin here.

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

When a wicked man dieth, his expectation shall perish: And the hope of unjust men perisheth.

Proverbs 11:7

The Scriptures teach us that for the wicked, this life is the best that he will ever experience. For the righteous, it is the opposite—this life contains the worst things that will ever happen to him. For the godless, all his gold will turn to lead, and for the godly, all his lead will become gold.

A wicked man can labor, and hope and strive, but at the very end of the process, like an angry exclamation point, death awaits. And when he dies, his expectation (of whatever it is) perishes with him. The hope of unjust men, just like the unjust men themselves, dies.

There is no more maneuvering room. There is no time for adjustments, and nothing can be renegotiated. Another way of putting this is that God has seen to it that this world operates with a hard deadline. There is, literally, a drop dead deadline. When our time is up, that’s it. 

Kirkegaard once said that when a tyrant dies, his rule ends. When a martyr dies, his rule begins. This points toward this same truth. Godliness is something that outlasts this life. Wickedness does not. The penalty must be paid for that wickedness, but the work of the ungodly man comes apart in his hands. Nothing lasts, nothing endures.

This is why Paul teaches us that fire will judge the quality of each man’s work (1 Cor. 3:11-15). In that place he is talking about the work of ministry, which is why he says that the slipshod minister will be saved “yet so as by fire.”

The metric of Heaven doesn’t work the way we tend to think. God has a different way of evaluating things. The Temple scales register things that we don’t notice at all, and we think things are weighty indeed and God considers them to be so much cotton candy. Not only so, but the temptation to reverse things like this can operate in very conservative theological circles, as it did with the Pharisees.

“And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” (Luke 16:15). 

It would be bad to be a wicked man, and have all your expectations come to nothing. But it would be far, far worse to be a religious wicked man, and to have those expectations artificially inflated, and to have them come to nothing.

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

Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain.

Proverbs 25:14

There are those who want the credit of having given without the burden of having actually done so. Notice in this proverb that the point of it is to enable or equip the boast.

This is the sin that caused Ananias and Sapphira to be struck down. They did in fact give a gift, but they wanted to have the credit for having given a much larger one. This is why Peter rebuked them for lying to God. They were like clouds and winds without rain.

When people give ostentatiously (Mark 12:41), the point is to be seen. And that is just a small step away from being willing to be seen as giving, when you didn’t really give. You get the reputation for generosity, and you don’t have to pay the price of generosity. David had the opposite impulse. He refused to sacrifice that which cost him nothing (2 Sam. 24:24). But hypocrites, when they come to give alms, want to announce that fact with trumpets (Matt. 6:2). The point is to be seen as generous, and in the world of the hypocrite, the ideal solution is to be seen as generous without actually having to be generous. Ordinary people look for the rain; the hypocrites are content with the clouds and the wind.

One time I was speaking at a conference being held at a church in a distant state, and before one of the events I was wandering around in a narthex section of the church, and I stopped to read a bronze plaque on one of the pillars. The plaque said something like “this wing of the church was made possible through the generosity of Mr. & Mrs. VanderHoot.” As I was reading this plaque, saying nothing about it to anybody, the pastor of the church came up behind me and said, “Yeah, I know Jesus said not to do that.”

But some need their reward now.

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