Grace & Peace

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

The lip of truth shall be established for ever: But a lying tongue is but for a moment

Proverbs 12:19

In this proverb we learn that truth is reckoned among the permanent things, while falsehood is transitory, evanescent, ephemeral, fading more and more as the list goes on. Truthful lips endure. Lying mouths are just around for the moment.

This sentiment being true, we should conclude in the first instance that it applies to our circumstances as much as it did when it was written three thousand years ago. How many lies have come and gone during that time? And consider how God’s people are still able to reflect on this truth, and establish their lives in terms of it.

Christians worship and serve the one who identified Himself as the Truth. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). And Pilate, lost as he was, wondered aloud what the truth even was, and he did this when the incarnation of truth was standing just in front of him (John 18:38). We know that the lake of fire is reserved for “all liars” (Rev. 21:8), and we who have put on the new nature found in Christ must be equally careful to cease lying to one another (Col. 3:9). Lying is the native language of the devil, and we are seeking hard to forget that we ever even knew that language (John 8:44). We are called as Christians to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). We worship the Word who is the Truth, and so the words we speak should be words of truth.

We might want to distinguish truths that matter (Jesus rose from the dead) from truths that don’t seem to us to matter that much (whether we left home when we told our boss that we did). We wouldn’t lie about the big stuff, we say, but where is the harm in greasing the skids with what are euphemistically called “white lies”? But our proverb is not talking about the abstract truths lasting forever, such that the archives of Heaven will have a file cabinet somewhere that houses the truth that you left for work at 7:45. It is the lips that last forever. It is the mouth that is transitory.

All day long, as we speak, we are in the process of becoming someone. As we speak the truth, and the more diligent we are to speak the truth precisely, we are being established as those who will in fact live forever. We are growing up into Christ. The permanent things, like truth, belong to the permanent ones.

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

Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge: But he that hateth reproof is brutish.
Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid (ESV).

Proverbs 12:1

A characteristic feature of Hebrew wisdom literature is its parallelism. A theme is stated, and then it is stated over again, this time slightly differently. At other times, the second half of the parallel is a sharp contrast. But in both cases, the meaning of the second half amplifies or refines the meaning of the first half.

In this proverb, the framework is that of a contrast. The one who loves instruction is contrasted with the one who hates reproof, and the one who loves knowledge is contrasted with the one who is brutish. How does this help amplify the first part?

Well, clearly the love of instruction needs to include in it a love of reproof. Someone who wants to learn a ton without ever being corrected is someone who doesn’t really want to learn. Learning entails discipline, and discipline entails more than a few instances of “no, not that way.”

The acquisition of knowledge is not a frictionless enterprise. Not only so, but to overlook this truth is to betray yourself as being a brute and a blockhead. The word (baar) denotes someone who is senseless, one who is really thick. This means that the love of correction and discipline in the pursuit of knowledge is not a matter of nuance. This is not a dance of subtleties.

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

“As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion”

Proverbs 11:22

We come here to a characteristic way of reasoning in the biblical wisdom literature. It is the technique of treating four variables by means of handling two of them. In this case the four variables are beauty and lack of it, and discretion and lack of it. There are two negatives traits and two positive traits, and we are taught wisdom by being instructed to choose one positive trait over the other negative one. It is better to be honest and poor than to be dishonest and rich, it is better to have good fellowship over lousy food than to have squabbling over gourmet food, and so on.

In this proverb, women are instructed to prefer discretion over beauty, and the point is made by noticing the radical nature of the juxtaposition when the choice has been made the wrong way. Suppose a woman chooses foolishly. Suppose she preferred her looks to discretion? The result is a total incongruity, like lipstick on a camel, or hoop earrings on a chimp, or a nose ring on a pig.

And we can see that we are being instructed by wisdom literature, and not by legalists or rule-mongers, in that the woman of sense is one who has “discretion.” Not a handbook of rules, not a list of ‘thou shalt nots,” but rather discretion. The word involved (taam) means taste, feeling or discernment. This does not mean that she gets to dub herself as being in that category, and therefore she must have the right to strut her stuff (via ostentatious make-up, leggings, bikinis, and so on). No, it means that she is a woman of good sense, and avoids all that kind of thing without having to be told. A woman who does have to have it explained to her, or worse, kicks at any such explanations, is a woman without discernment.

And so, the more successful she is in polishing that gold ring of “hotness,” the fatter and more bristly the pig.

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

“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, And let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, And he turn away his wrath from him” (Prov. 24:17–18).

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the New Testament introduces a radically new ethic for the people of God—as though the Sermon on the Mount were to be thought of as some kind of grand innovation. But loving your enemies is to be found in both testaments. “If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again” (Ex. 23:4). Love is to be defined as treating someone lawfully, and doing so from the heart. It is most certainly not defined by the feelings we may or may not be entertaining at the time. Our feelings should not be entrusted with anything, and most certainly not with the task of defining our most fundamental duties.

There was no greater act of love ever performed in this sorry world of ours than the death of Jesus Christ for your sins and mine. But Jesus did not go to the cross on an emotional high. The night of His arrest He tried to get out of it repeatedly, but all while entirely submitted to His Father. Many of us, when we attempt to love others, are attempting to do it even better than Jesus did, and this accounts for our failures and frustrations.

So there is such a thing as judgment from God in both testaments

“And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, If I be a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.” (2 Kings 1:10).

And when Jesus and His disciples were denied lodging in a Samaritan village, the disciplines responded biblically, or so they thought.

“And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village” (Luke 9:54–56).

But it would be false to conclude from this that judgment is found in the Old Testament and mercy in the new. Both are found in both.

In this passage of Proverbs, the reason given for not gloating when your enemy stumbles and falls is that you don’t want God to let up. You want the judgment to continue, and so you take care to keep your own corrupted motives out of it.

In Romans 12, we are told to “give place” to wrath. We are not to take vengeance ourselves (Rom. 12:19), but this is not because vengeance is wrong. Vengeance is not wrong—rather, vengeance is the Lord’s. So we treat our enemies with grace, and this is leaving room for God’s wrath—and just a few verses down we see that the cops are God’s deacons of wrath (Rom. 13:4). It is the responsibility for Christians to step aside in order to let the blow fall. If the blow is one of judgment, we can say amen. If the blow is of the kind that transforms enemies into friends, we can rejoice in that. God is dealing with it all, and we are to show the kind of grace that heaps coals of fire on the head.

This is why imprecatory psalms are so important. In imprecatory psalms, we are turning the whole thing over to God. Psalms of imprecation are not a biblical version of sticking pins into voodoo dolls. We don’t use biblical passages as our way of cursing our personal enemies. We are confessing that we are not usually up to the task of cursing anyone, and so we transfer the whole matter to God. And if we see that God has arisen, and is answering the prayer, we should remember this passage, which amounts to remembering to stay out of it.

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

“My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: When thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off” (Prov. 24:13–14).

The pleasures of the physical world—and there are myriads of them; they are countless—are given to us as training wheels so that we might learn how to enjoy the pleasures of the spiritual world.

In this passage a father is teaching his son to pursue pleasure. Who, we might wonder, needs to be taught that? The answer to that question includes, unfortunately, many Christians who have come to believe that there is something suspicious about physical pleasure. The taste of honey is decidedly not a spiritual thing, right? Well, yes and no.

It is not spiritual in the sense that it is a material pleasure. But there is another sense of the word spiritual found in Scripture. A spiritual man is not an ethereal man, but rather an obedient man. A spiritual man is one who is walking in step with the Spirit, who is doing what the Spirit wants him to do because the Spirit wants him to do it. And so, if the Spirit is leading you to mix honey with butter in order to put it on your dinner roll, then a spiritual man will do exactly that. It is a spiritual activity.

And so rightly understood physical pleasures are the kindergarten of the soul. We are to begin there, thanking God for every upward step. Now if we get stuck in kindergarten, then something is seriously wrong. We have ceased to regard the myriad pleasures around us as a discipleship course, and have been distracted by them. We are looking at them, instead of looking through them. When we look through them, we see the higher pleasures, and when we look through them, we come to God Himself. He is the God of all pleasure; He is the God of infinite delight.

We start this process with the honey and the honeycomb. The God who made the honey made sure to make it good. The God who made the honeycomb made sure to make it sweet. And this same God is the one who summons us to the “knowledge of wisdom.” When we find the knowledge of wisdom, we discover that God always buries a reward in the finding. The knowledge of wisdom, just a drop of it, is sweet just like the honey is. But then, as you investigate further, you discover a honeycomb of knowledge and wisdom, and whatever your expectation is, it will not be cut off.

So set your expectation high. The honey of God’s knowledge and wisdom comes from a planet the size of Jupiter, covered entirely over with clover, and with bees the size of Volkswagens. The honeycombs are a quarter of an acre, and while we sometimes feel a shortage in this world, this is not because there is any real shortage. Wisdom comes to those who pursue it, and the process begins with your honey toast tomorrow morning.   

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