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

A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment: For if thou deliver him, yet thou must do it again.

Proverbs 19:19

We have two important principles established in this brief proverb.

The first principle is that you cannot have sin without consequences, and you cannot have great sin without great consequences. If a man is a volcano, it is useless for him to complain about all the cooled lava down the sides.

And the problem with angry men is that they focus on all the irritations that others provide for them. That is their default drive. And then, when they suffer the consequences of their own anger, they tend to attribute this to others as well. The recoil of their own actions is taken by them as some random third party slapping them in the face. They think the lava must have come from some other volcano.

This relates to the second principle taught here. If you help such a man, if you bail him out, if you help him pick up the pieces, he will almost certainly not take away the right message. The helper is thinking “I hope he sees how much I care, how much I am helping him. I trust that this will be the last time he will do that.” At the same time, the man with the temper is concluding that everyone seems to be taking things in stride, and that it must not be that serious. The person who delivers him from the consequences of his own folly is going to be called upon to do it again.

So the principle is this. You get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you penalize. In this case, the penalty can simply be allowing the angry man who pay the fines that he inflicted on himself. He will be tempted to blame others for these fines, for that is what angry people do, and the person who helps him pay those fines is reinforcing the misinterpretation.

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

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it,
it is folly and shame unto him

Proverbs 18:13

This verse is found in the same chapter as Prov. 18:17, and is a close brother to it. When you hear one person present his case, everything seems compelling and reasonable—up until the cross-examination starts. At that point, you discover that there was quite a bit more to the story.

The sin of jumping to conclusions is addressed in a different way in this verse, but it is in effect the same sin. A person who answers too quickly, or too abruptly, is a person who is answering before he actually knows what the question is.

Too often we try to mortify the sinful reactions of our flesh when what we really need to do is mortify the wrong-headed analysisdone by our flesh. Suppose there is someone whose default settings cause them to “find fault” with someone else whenever something goes wrong. That someone is usually in the immediate proximity, and so the instant “analysis” is that they did something wrong that “caused this unfortunate event.” And then, supposing the person with these negative settings to be a sincere Christian who wants to do right, he spends all his spiritual energy trying to mortify those feelings of resentment over the wrong-doing of others.

To take an absurd example, he wakes up one morning to find his dog dead in the neighbor’s driveway. He assumes immediately (and erroneously) that his neighbor ran over his dog, and so he spends a great deal of time mortifying the sin of resenting his neighbor. But he is mortifying the wrong sin. He actually needs to be mortifying the sin of jumping to conclusions. He needs to inculcate the virtue of withholding judgment.

Before we can learn how to appropriately respond to any situation, we have to understand what that situation actually is. If we do not do this, then we are answering before the question is even out. Because this kind of analysis is frequently so quick, it is easy to mistake it for insight or wisdom. But this proverb says that this is not quick-witted, but rather hasty-minded. And to be hasty in this way is folly and shame.

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

He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster.

Proverbs 18:9

Modern businessmen talk about opportunity cost, which is when you pay for the privilege of going right by foregoing whatever you would have gained by going left. We all have to make these sorts of decisions all the time—it is part of what it means to be finite. We don’t know what the future holds when we go right, and we certainly don’t know the contingent future of what would have happened if we had gone left. In other words, opportunity costs are difficult to calculate.

But there is another kind of opportunity cost, one far more severe, and therefore easier to see. On top of that, Scripture even tells us about it in blunt and unvarnished terms—as in this proverb. It is what we see when we choose to work hard instead of being slothful.

Now of course we cannot see the future perfectly here either. It is possible that the hard-working man will get hit by a bus on the way home, and his lazy bum of a co-worker will pop into a 7-11 to buy a winning lottery ticket. Worse things have happened.

But as Scripture notes, perhaps sardonically, that doesn’t usually happen. What usually happens is that the hard worker accumulates wealth, and with a pretty good idea of how it is all coming to pass, and poverty comes on the sluggard like a thief with a gun, and how this is all happening remains a grand mystery to the baffled victim.

Time is an essential resource on all labor, and a lazy worker is throwing it into the dumpster in the back alley. It has a financial cost for the business as much as if that worker were throwing away perfectly good lumber, metal, paper, or glass. The man who burns the wood that was going to be used to make the cabinets is a true brother to the one who burns the daylight that was going to be used to make the cabinets.

And so it is that many Christians need to learn repentance here. If they are going on a bathroom break at work, they would not dream of taking a ream of paper with them and throwing it in the trash bin on the way. That would be destruction of someone else’s property, that would be stealing, that would be wrong. But they think nothing of spending twenty minutes in the john, scrolling through items of interest on their phone.

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

A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth:
And a word spoken in due season, how good is it!

Proverbs 15:23

Hebraic parallelisms take different forms. Sometimes it is a simple parallel, stated in different words, with each clause informing the other. Other times it is a contrast, setting forth opposites. In this case, the repetition takes the first thought as expressed, and rolls it out a little bit further.

The way this is stated, we do not know exactly where the joy of the apt answer lands. Is it something that brings joy to the one whogives the apt answer, or to the one who receives it? Or perhaps both?

In either case, the additional information that comes to us in this second phrase is found in the words in due season. We are talking about the aptness of a timely word. As one of our sages has expressed it, the only difference between salad and garbage is timing.

Whoever finds this joy, whoever experiences the goodness of a good answer, the goodness is to be found in the fact that it was a word in due season, the right word for the right moment. Someone who spouts falsehoods is never a blessing. But someone who offers truisms at all the wrong moments is like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Some are so distracted by the truth of what they are saying that they never notice how their timing makes the truth into an odd sort of lie.

So when we have done something that is verbally maladroit, we cannot excuse our poor timing by retreating to the dictionary in order to plead for our lexicographical justifications. But I was blessing him. “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, It shall be counted a curse to him” (Proverbs 27:14).

We must not take our words as though they were an odd collection of silver links of chain and small pearls, tucked into a little box, and pronounced to be a necklace. No. The setting matters (Prov. 25:11), and an important part of the setting is the timing.

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

The hand of the diligent shall bear rule:
But the slothful shall be under tribute.

Proverbs 15:3

The doctrine of God’s omniscience is not a dry theological abstraction. Rightly understood, the doctrine is a consuming fire. As many acknowledge, the God of Calvinistic theology is an “in-your-face” kind of God, but what many do not acknowledge is that this is also true of every form of Christian orthodoxy—provided we think about it for more than a moment. No orthodox understanding of God can be fitted into a box.

God’s omniscience, His knowledge of all things, is not mediated knowledge. He doesn’t find out things because angels tell Him, but before that “He didn’t know.” He doesn’t discover things, as though He were a learner. No, the knowledge that God has of all things in heaven and on earth, and of all things past, present, and future, is a knowledge that He simply possesses immediately.

And we have to be careful that we don’t think of the omni-doctrines in pie dough terms—as though the farther we spread God’s knowledge, the thinner it gets. No, as all of God is present anywhere that God is present, and as God’s knowledge of what we are doing this moment is not a fraction of His knowledge, it follows that God is in no way distant from us. God knows all, and all of God knows all.

This is something we ought to think about more with regard to what we are doing when we sin. Our proverb says that the eyes of the Lord are in “every place,” and that those eyes behold “the evil and the good.” In order to sin at all, we must actively suppress our knowledge that God is in the room with us, that God is not sleeping, that God is considering every one of the back-and-forth thoughts we entertain in the course of temptation, and that He knows absolutely everything about it.

Further, this knowledge that God has is not that of a passive spectator.

“Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13).

The Word of Scripture cuts us up as though we were a sacrificial animal being arranged on an altar of fire (Heb. 4:11-12). And when it says in v. 13 that we are “opened” unto the eyes of God, the verb used is trachelizo—meaning “laid bare.” It is related to the word for neck or throat, and creates the image of an animal’s throat being pulled back just before it is slit. God’s knowledge is not distant and removed. We are not Deists, serving a god who resides on the other side of the galaxies, and who can only dimly make out what we are doing.

No. The eyes of the Lord are everywhere present. The eyes of the Lord behold all the evil, and all of the good.   

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