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

A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring.

Proverbs 25:26

The thing rejected here is the spectacle of a righteous man giving way before wicked men. The righteous ought not to be flexible in that way. When it comes to compromise with evil, they should be as rigid and unyielding as Daniel’s three friends refusing to bow before Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, or Mordecai refusing obeisance before Haman. When it comes to deference, the righteous must notdefer to those who are evil.

But what is the consequence if they do? This proverb compares it to two things. The first word indicates the source or the headwaters of a stream. When the righteous give way to the wicked, that action fouls the water at the source. When the righteous give way to the wicked, that sin corrupts the spring.

When you combine fresh water and polluted water, what you get is not half and half. What you get is still polluted water. What James tells us about our individual behavior applies to the corporate societal level as well.

“Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?” (James 3:10–11).

Water does not work that way. And notice that what causes this corruption in public discourse is the righteous surrendering or giving way to the wicked, letting them do it their way. And this in our day is one of our besetting sins—righteous individuals in positions of influence refusing to use that influence to resist those who would corrupt everything.

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

The north wind driveth away rain:
So doth an angry countenance a backbiting tongue.

Proverbs 25:23

As a general rule, forbearance is a good thing. As a general rule, long-suffering is a virtue, one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). “With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love” (Eph. 4:2). Of course. Yes, and amen. “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Prov. 19:11, ESV). It is good to be slow to anger.

But our virtues and graces are not built out of blocks of wood. Ecclesiastes teaches us that there is a time for very different responses—including a time to kill, and a time to heal (Ecc. 3:3). We are dealing with people, and relationships between people cannot be managed with a one-size-fits-all approach. If we respond to every single thing with an identical response, then the chances are good that we are not responding in wisdom.

This means that there are times when a backbiter needs to really catch it. The same way that the north wind drives off the rain, so also an angry countenance drives off a backbiting tongue. Put another way, there are times when slanderers and gunk-mongers need to deal directly with the consequences of their behavior.

So is it a sin to get angry? No. Jesus got angry with those who wanted to catch Him out that time when He healed the man with the withered hand (Mark 3:5). But when Jesus got angry, the result was a man with a healed hand. When we give way to carnal anger (Jas. 1:20), the results are not in line with God’s righteousness. The contrast is between a healed hand and a hand with bruised knuckles from punching the sheetrock—a healed hand or a broken one.

It is therefore a sin to get angry in ways that are contrary to the Scriptures, but anger per se is not a sin. In Ephesians, we are told to “be angry” (and it is an imperative, a command), and “sin not.” The way we would sin is by letting the sun go down on our anger, letting it fester (Eph. 4:26). Righteous anger is like manna in jars—it goes bad overnight. So just a few verses later (v. 31), we are told to “put away” all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and evil speaking.

So a backbiting tongue is an example of evil speaking, and the implication is that one of the ways for putting it away in ourselves is by getting (righteously) angry with the backbiter. But be careful. The edges of this knife are sharp, and a lot of people have cut themselves.

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

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing:
But the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

Proverbs 25:2

The work of growing up into a godly maturity is actually a cosmic game of hide the button. The task of dominion actually consists of men finding out things that God has hidden.

God hides things, and we are to find them. Not only so, but it says that it is the glory of God to hide things. The word for glory there is kabod, which also has the connotation of weight. In English, the word associated with the kings is different, but in Hebrew it is also the same word kabod. It is a kingly glory to seek, just as it is a divine glory to hide. It look a number of centuries, for example, but God hid silicon in the sand, and eventually we found iPhones there.

God hides, and kings find. This means that the pursuit of dominion through a wise investigation of the world God made is actually to aspire to royalty.

So how are we to aspire to this wisdom? Do we go into a corner in order to try to think innovative thoughts? No. It is not a coincidence that this saying is found in the book of Proverbs. The Hebrew word mashal means to “speak a proverb.” But the Hebrew word mashal also means “to reign as king.” The wisdom literature is literature that trains us up into God’s idea of royal wisdom, and this is particularly the case with the book of Proverbs.

And this seems odd to us because the book of Proverbs often seems somewhat straightforward and pedestrian to us. “Don’t cosign a note. Rotate your tires. Change your oil every three thousand miles. Give the hoochy-mamas a wide berth.” We want royal wisdom to be more sophisticated than that. We want royal wisdom to be in alignment with us and our contemporary street smarts.

But the street smart generation that doesn’t want to dabble in such pedestrian wisdom, remember, is a generation that is deep sixed under an oceanic amount of red ink—trillions of buckets of red ink.

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

Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field;
and afterwards build thine house

Proverbs 24:27

This is a proverb that teaches us a crucial principle of business—first things first.

So the immediate application is this. If you buy a fertile piece of ground, you should prepare it, work it, and plant your crop. After that, you should feel free to go ahead and build your house. In other words, the idea is to make the piece of ground productive before you start drawing your new resource down. Grow the celery before you eat the salary.

Our natural tendency is to want to enjoy the benefits prematurely. One illustration of this bad mistake is what happens to a number of entrepreneurs. I should correct that. It doesn’t happen to entrepreneurs the way the flu might happen to them. Rather, it is something they decide to do.

They get an investment for their hot idea, and let us grant for the sake of discussion that it is in fact a hot idea. But instead of putting the bulk of the investment into the hot idea so that it might start paying off sooner, instead they start paying full salaries to the start-up team, as though the hot idea was already paying off. But—it isn’t. However hot the idea is, it cannot pay off before it is birthed. The harvest cannot be enjoyed while the sacks are still full of the seed.

And this proverb hits on something we see in a number of other proverbs. It is the contrast between short-term thinkers and long-term thinkers. The wise investor, developer, or entrepreneur seeks to defer taking his cut while the foolish one assumes that his cut is what he has coming to him as some sort of birthright. To not take his cut would not be “realistic.” His wife thinks the same.

The lack of wisdom in this can be seen in this. The person has removed a particular kind of immediate pressure from himself, meaning that he will not be as motivated as he might otherwise be to get his hot idea to market. He is able to pay his monthly bills right now, and that is not going to run out until next year sometime. For a short-term thinker, next year is on the other side of forever. And so it is that the following year he has to go back to the investor looking for a second infusion of cash. Or an extension. Or a time of awkward conversation. Or something.

The wise man is hustling from the get-go because every day matters every day. He gets after it today because something needs to break loose today. “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (Prov. 16:26, ESV).

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

The mouth of strange women is a deep pit:
He that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein

Proverbs 22:14

The beating heart of the essential sinful attitude is the conviction that somehow, some way, God is not in charge. The standard and natural assumption does try to give God His due, and acknowledges that there is this thing called the Last Judgment. Okay, we say, at the end of the whole program God will come in, break out His grade book and tell everybody how they did. He is in control at the very last, when He tells us how sinful we were being. In short, we think we control events by sinning, and then God seizes control at the very last moment by judging us for that sinning.

But there is another sense in which God’s control is much more profound than this. For example, in Romans 1, homosexual deviance is not simply a sin for which God will execute wrath. Paul goes even farther and says that the sinning itself, the rebellion itself, is an instance of the wrath of God. Because men did not honor God as God, and because they would not give Him thanks, therefore God has given them up to disgraceful passions (Rom. 1:24). This judicial action of giving them up to their passions is described as the wrath of God (Rom. 1:18). Homosexual behavior will certainly incur the wrath of God, but it must also be seen as the wrath of God.

We find something very similar here—a heterosexual version of the same thing. The mouth of a seductive woman is a deep pit, it says. But notice that it does not say that if someone falls into it, then as a consequence God will abhor them. Rather it says that if God abhors them, then as a consequence they will fall into that deep pit. An adulterer ought certainly to be concerned about the judgment God will bring down upon the adultery. People who live in that way will not inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9; Gal. 5:19-21). But it is also important for someone who has fallen into that pit to examine himself to determine what sins he was committing beforehand that brought about the judgment of adultery.  

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