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

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; And lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own eyes: Fear the Lord, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.

Proverbs 3:5–8

This is a passage that fits nicely on posters and plaques, and which marks the pious home. And on the face of it, the exhortation seems straightforward. Trust the Lord, people, all the way down to the ground.

But there are additional riches if we look at it more closely. Trusting the Lord with all your heart means more than gritting your teeth and trusting hard. It is contrasted with something, and that something is leaning on your own understanding. Another way this is stated is in the parallel phrase, “be not wise in thine own eyes.”

On the one hand is not leaning on your own smarts, not being wise according to yourself, and not indulging in evil. On the other is trusting in the Lord with all that you have, and fearing the Lord in a way that causes you to shun evil.

We sometimes feel like we need to be figuring out the world when we actually need to be figuring out God’s law. Knowledge of the law is the key to understanding the world. Knowledge of the world, if you begin there, is the key to apostasy and ruin.

The thing that is promised us is that God will direct our paths. In all our ways, we are to acknowledge Him, which means submitting to His revealed Word. We don’t have to figure out what is going to happen in the middle of next week before we decide what to do. We have to acknowledge God’s authority over us in the Word He has given us.

Prosperity—health to the navel and marrow in the bones—is a gift of God. He is the one who gives it. If we honor His law, then He will direct our paths. As He directs our paths, He is taking care of all the variables that we do not know. Not only do we not know them, it is not possible for us to know them. But it is possible for us to know what God has told us to do, and what He has told us to avoid.

Keep it simple. Trusting in the Lord with all your hearts means simply this. Entrust what will happen to you next year to the safekeeping of what you are reading in the Word this morning.

Read Full Article

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

Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.

Proverbs 3:9–10

One of the very practical theological problems that Christians frequently have concerns the issue of God’s temporal blessings. A very common framework is to relegate temporal blessings to the Old Testament and spiritual blessings to the new. Not only is this too facile, but it leaves modern Christians without any real direction on what to do with their (very real) wealth.

If our temporal blessings are from God, then we are responsible to God (and to His Word) for how we serve as stewards of what He has given. But if our wealth is entirely “accidental,” and not connected in any way to how we are living before Him, then we don’t have to answer for what we do—only provided we don’t actively sin with it.

But it is my conviction that Christians are supposed to live before God in such a way as to enjoy what we might call the Deuteronomic blessings—“blessed shall be thy basket and thy store” (Deut. 28:5). How we live our lives generally, and how we honor God with the first fruits of our labors (as in this passage from Proverbs), has a financial impact on our lives. And that impact is generally one of palpable blessing.

Of course there are temporal exceptions in the Christian era, but there were also exceptions in the Old Testament. And when those exceptions occur (poverty and a hard life instead of tangible blessings), there were compensatory spiritual blessings. Some Old Testament saints wandered in deserts, mountains, dens and caves (Heb. 11:38), despite it being all in the Old Testament.

There were temporal blessings back then, but there were also spiritual blessings. Between the covenants, no principle has changed. What has changed, however, is the practical amount of enormous wealth that we enjoy. When Paul told Timothy to instruct the “rich in this present world” in a particular way (1 Tim. 6:17), he was telling him how to instruct a tiny percentage of the church. Today, at least in the West, it is a large majority in the church.

That is no reason for the instruction to change. In fact, it is all the more reason for us to emphasize the teaching of Scripture on this subject—including Deuteronomy and Proverbs.

Read Full Article

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

The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: But the wicked regardeth not to know it.

Proverbs 29:7

The causes of poverty are various and complicated. It is the task of the righteous and the wise to seek them out, and to ponder and evaluate the cause of the poor. The wicked, however, cannot be bothered. When the righteous seek out the causes of poverty, they do so in such a way as to enable them to take up the cause of the poor—to take the case, in other words.

At the same time, at least in our era, the wicked have used the poor very effectively in their sloganeering. For the one who “regards not to know it,” it is very easy to proceed straight to the speech in which you cry up as a solution another elephant dose of the problem. And when the righteous seeks out the causes of poverty, and takes up the cause of the poor, his righteousness is evident—but it is not evident to the wicked, who readily accuse him of being heartless and cold.

Examples can be readily multiplied, but let’s take the simple one of wage and price fixing. If the poor people have a hard time buying things, then why don’t we just institute price controls to keep prices from rising too high, and why don’t we establish minimum wage laws to keep wages from falling too low, and presto! Haven’t we fixed the problem? The poor now have a job that pays well, and the prices have thoughtfully remained low for them. Well, we have fixed the problem for all those who “regard not to know it.” But for the man who “considereth” what is going on, we have done nothing of the kind.

Why were we so stingy in our solution? In our price controls, why didn’t we cut the price of everything in half? And why didn’t we triple the minimum wage? The reason we did not do that is that it would have revealed how this entire scam is being run by charlatans. If we cut the prices in half, we could afford to buy absolutely anything we found on the empty shelves. And if we tripled the minimum wage, we would be receiving a very fine wage if we had a job anymore, which we don’t. In the name of fighting poverty, we have transformed poverty into grinding poverty.

The righteous thinks about it. The wicked can’t be bothered.

Read Full Article

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

When the wicked rise, men hide themselves: But when they perish, the righteous increase.

Proverbs 28:28

The wicked and the righteous cannot occupy the same space. They are incompossible. One of the first things that God did after the Fall was to establish this as the foundational antithesis—the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent were not going to be able to “just get along” (Gen. 3:15). The history of the world is bound up with the history of this long war.

In this proverb, we see that when the wicked are in the ascendancy, other men need to take shelter. This is a natural consequence of the wicked exhibiting either their cruelty or their vainglory. When they are being cruel, they destroy the lives of others on purpose (Ps. 71:4). The impulses of malice provide their own justification. But when they want to be known as “benefactors” (Luke 22:25), they do all their damage by means of blundering and incompetence. In either case, reasonable men must take measures to protect themselves. Gideon has to thresh wheat in the wine vat (Judg. 6:11), hiding from the Midianite IRS.

The alternative is not found when the righteous and unrighteous work out a deal. The alternative is found when the wicked perish. And when the wicked perish, often done in by their very own bad ideas, the righteous are able to flourish and increase.

And this is what our basic prayer should be, that God give His people room to grow. But this is not going to happen apart from the wicked being removed—either by removal, or by conversion.

“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1–4).

Read Full Article

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

He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: But he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.

Proverbs 28:19

There are some things we shouldn’t have to be told, but because we are a sinful race, we do have to be told them, and repeatedly. Notice the upshot of this particular proverb. If you work hard and intelligently in the field, you will have plenty of food. But if, instead of this, you chase after the fellow promising rainbows for everybody, you are going to have plenty of something else, and that something else is poverty. Some people are grain farmers and other people are poverty farmers. In either case, you will always get plenty of whatever you are growing.

There are two applications of this that we should make. The first is to remember that we are dealing with proverbs about real life, not axioms in geometry. “All hard workers have plenty of bread” is certainly true, but it is not true the same way that “all triangle have three sides” is true. There are exceptions, but there are not so many exceptions that it should in any way alter the way you live. Working hard is the right thing to do, period, and it usually pays off. But even when it does not “pay off,” it was still the right thing. Hard work and diligence are valued by all of God’s true disciples, as they are found in every nation.

But the second application is that in our day there are certain liars (the same kind of vain persons that our proverb mentions) who are maintaining that things like industry, hard work, showing up on time, diligence, and so on, are “white” values, and that to live in this way is to perpetuate white supremacy. If you are struggling to understand how anybody could argue for anything so stupid, that probably means that you were educated in white supremacist categories, and are still trapped in them.

But God’s Word is always sure, even if Solomon was white, and people who pursue vanities like this are pursuing poverty. They will find it, and if they don’t repent, their only consolation in that poverty will be that they successfully stuck it to the Man. Showed him.

Read Full Article