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

“A soft answer turneth away wrath: But grievous words stir up anger” (Proverbs 15:1).

This proverb teaches us that the tongue has the capacity to avert quarrels, and to start them up.

The first half of the proverb has to do with the averting. In this situation, the wrath is incoming, but it is already there. Someone is angry with you about something, and when the conversation starts, they are coming in hot. Perhaps it was something you said or did, or also perhaps it was something that they thought you said or did. Let’s take the latter scenario, as it illustrates nicely the principle taught by the proverb.

Let us say that a well-meaning friend told this person that you had said xy and z, when you had not said that. You had said the opposite, and your well-meaning friend sometimes gets things garbled. But the person he told it to doesn’t know that, assumed it to be true, and it made him angry. This is why he comes after you, already angry. Now it is quite true that he should have remembered Proverbs 18:17, and if he had done, he would have come with questions instead of accusations. But alas, he is already angry when he arrives. If this sin of his makes you angry, and you respond in kind, then what you will have at the end of the day is a completely unnecessary fight. If you answer the initial charge softly, you have an opportunity to deescalate the situation, after which your angry friend apologizes. Well, sometimes he apologizes.

The second half of the proverbs tells us that grievous words also have the capacity to stir up anger. This would be the situation where you are the one who might be the instigator. So avoid overstating. Avoid hyperbole. Avoid words like always and never. Avoid grievous words. One of the reasons why people get defensive is that they see no other way to survive it. The cutting words they are hearing leave absolutely no slack.

So soft words have the ability to deescalate. And grievous words have the ability to escalate, and to do so from a standing stop.

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

“A wholesome tongue is a tree of life: But perverseness therein is a breach in the spirit” (Proverbs 15:4).

We can see at a glance that a wholesome tongue is a good thing, and that a perverse tongue is a bad thing. That much is plain and simple.

But what kind of a good thing, and what kind of a bad thing?

It is quite striking that a wholesome tongue is described as a “tree of life.” The tree of life is what our first parents were shut away from when they were exiled from Eden (Gen. 3:22-24). If Adam and Eve had eaten from that tree in the condition there were in, that would have sealed their lost and rebellious condition. God banished them from the Garden as an act of kindness, leaving room for gospel mercy. In the last book of the Bible, the tree of life is promised to those who overcome through the gospel (Rev. 2:7; 22:2).

But in the book of Proverbs, the tree of life is associated with a number of things. Wisdom is a tree of life (Prov. 3:18). The fruit of righteousness is a tree of life (Prov. 11:30). Hope and desire fulfilled is a tree of life (Prov. 13:12).

The opposite of a wholesome tongue is a perverse tongue. What this does is create a breach in the spirit. What is a breach? It is a hole or an opening, through which unwanted things can come. Like a breach in a dam, and flood waters destroy the town, or a breach in a city wall, through which the enemy troops can pour. The wholesome tongue is life, growing on a tree of life. The perverse tongue is death, ministered in any number of different ways.

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

“He that despiseth his neighbour sinneth: But he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he” (Proverbs 14:21).

The message of this proverb is that it is quite possible to sin close to home, and it is also quite possible to be gracious and merciful far away from home.

And of course, there are always ways to distort this. One distortion occurs when the people who live close to you (family and neighbors) are in a position to know what you are really like, while the folks at church see the smiling and very Christian version of you. The name for this particular pattern is hypocrisy.

Another way to violate the wisdom of this proverb would be by shutting yourself up in a tight little circle, family and friends only, and to forget those who have any needs far away from you—the “poor.” Then there is the reverse of this, where someone spends so much time down at the soup kitchen that they neglect their own family and friends. Remember that the apostle teaches us that someone who neglects their family is worse than an infidel (1 Tim. 5:18).

That said, we should make sure that we do not neglect the straightforward teaching of the proverb. Close acquaintance with anyone reveals faults, and when this happens, it is easy to drift into an attitude of contempt or despising. However justified you might feel in having that contempt, it is nevertheless tagged as sinning by Scripture. And the person who extends himself to have mercy on the poor is also doing something for himself as it turns out. “Happy is he,” the passage says. Of course that should not be his primary motive, but the Scriptures do clearly teach this principle. The man who loves his wife loves himself, the apostle says, and this means that it must not be wrong to have this in your mind somewhere. Self-interest is not the same thing as self-centeredness.

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

“The evil bow before the good; And the wicked at the gates of the righteous” (Proverbs 14:19).

As we consider this portion of the Word of God, we need to remember that it is a proverb, and not an axiom out of Euclid. There is never a possible instance of a triangle having less or more than three sides. When your geometry teachers asks you if a triangle can ever have four sides, the answer cannot be sometimes.

And so when we look at what this proverb says, which is that the evil bow down to the good, and the wicked bow before the gates of the righteous, counter-examples crowd into our minds. In our unbelief, we always tend to focus on Haman building the gallows for Mordecai, and never the spectacle of Haman hanging from those same gallows.

This is the kind of proverb that we should evaluate by the video, and never by the snapshot. The contest between good and evil is a story, and it happens over time, and—as it happens—it may be that God has written a pot boiler. Perhaps you have had the experience of reading a thriller, and right when it gets really intense, you are tempted to flip to the back pages to see if the main character is still alive. Because at the moment it didn’t look like he could be.

God certainly loves cliffhangers. If the evil bowed before the good constantly, in some non-stop fashion, there would be no room for faith. The good guys win, Scripture tells us, but there are many chapters when this does not seem to be the case. David has to run from Saul for years. Abraham wandered in tents, not inheriting anything. The early Christians scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen.

We must remember to let God tell us what kind of story we are in. We are in the kind where the good guys win.

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

“The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way: But the folly of fools is deceit” (Proverbs 14:8).

“The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way, But the folly of fools is deceit” (Prov. 14:8, NKJV).

This is a proverb where the standard form of parallelism helps us to understand the full import of the proverb. The first half helps us grasp what is being said in the second portion.

A prudent man is wise, and why is he wise? It is in the very nature of his wisdom to “understand his way.” He sees and understands what is going on around him. He watches his step. He knows what his intentions actually are when it comes to the path he has chosen. To use the language that the apostle John uses in the New Testament, he is walking in the light.

But in the second half of the proverb, what does it mean when it says that the “folly of fools is deceit?” Deceit? Deceit for whom? I take it that the parallel structure leads us to believe that the principal problem here is one of self-deception. The wise and prudent man understands his way, and the foolish man does not. The reason why the foolish man does not comprehend is because of this thing called “deceit.”

The folly of fools is driven onward because a fool is one who lies to himself, and then there is a second fool who believes it. And when the story is over, we discover that the two fools are one and the same. A lying heart spins a yarn that he wants to hear, and having heard, decides that it is entirely plausible.

In certain respects, self-deception is a true mystery. But we know from Scripture that it is a real problem. A man who hears the Word without doing it deceives himself (Jas. 1:22). A man who puffs himself up in conceit deceives himself (Gal. 6:3). Someone who does not bridle is own tongue deceives himself (Jas. 1:26). The thing happens.

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