Grace & Peace: Proverbs 15:24

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

“A wrathful man stirreth up strife: But he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife” (Proverbs 15:18).

“A wrathful man stirs up strife, But he who is slow to anger allays contention” (Proverbs 15:18)

We have in this proverb the gem of an insight when it comes to angry men. What should we mean when we say that someone is “an angry man?”

An easy mistake to make is to think that people are just regular people, and that an angry man is one who is unlucky enough to have a bunch of bad things come at him from the outside. Because of these unfortunate incidents, the aggrieved person finally gets upset about it, and vents his anger.

But this proverb gives us a different picture. Here the angry man has the anger already, and he goes out looking for an excuse to vent it. The contrast is with a man with a long, slow fuse. He has no internal need to be angry, and so when he is presented with occasions for strife, he does what he can to allay those irritations.

The angry man goes out to his car, filled with the ingredients of road rage already—before he pulls out of the driveway. He then navigates down the freeway, looking for idiots to annoy him further.

Imagine two men, side by side on a table, as empty glasses. Suppose further that we fill one of them up to the brim with anger and wrath, and we fill the other one up with kindness and patience, also to the brim. Now, we continue our thought experiment by jostling the table. What spills? The thing that spills out of each glass is what was in the glass already. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

And we can take this one step further. Imagine that the angry man has a line running to his heart from somewhere, and the line continually feeds new anger and angst into his heart. Because he is constantly filling up, he has a need to spill, and so he is constantly on the lookout for someone to jostle his table.

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

“Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom: But a man of understanding walketh uprightly” (Proverbs 15:21).

Freed from the constraints of both wisdom and common sense, there can be a certain exuberance in folly. The sky is blue, the future is bright, and the men who got me to invest in their robotics firm that will soon be harvesting unlimited solar energy from cucumbers had brochures that were bright and shiny. They promised that the money stream would be virtually endless.

I mean, who wouldn’t be joyful over a virtually endless money stream?

So one of the characteristics of a man without discernment is an irrational exuberance. It is true that the responsible Christian is commanded to rejoice, and to rejoice always (Phil 4:4; 1 These. 5:16). Joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5: 22). Joy is a good thing. So if a man is walking with God, he will be walking in joy. But we must be careful not to affirm the consequent, which would be a fallacy. If it is a dog it will have four legs, but not everything with four legs is a dog.

Put another way, sometimes joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and other times it is the fruit of being a moron.

In this proverb, the man without discernment is characterized by joy The man of understanding is characterized by his upright walk. In other words, this is a character issue. This is also the way to tell the difference between the spurious joy of the fool and the solid contentment of the man of integrity.

The fool has joy and will cut corners to keep it. The man of understanding will not cut corners, for whatever reason, and so he is established in his way.

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

“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith” (Proverbs 15:17).

With this proverb, I would like to do two things with it. One is to touch on the point that the proverb is intending to make, and then the other thing is to develop a point on the basis of something the proverb mentioned in passing.

The main point is one that is made repeatedly in Proverbs. It is better to sit around a table with thin commons, but with rich and thick fellowship, than to sit around an elegantly set table, with plenty of food on it, but where everybody despises everybody else. If you had to choose between meals of baby carrots, but with a wife who was both loving and lovely, on the one hand, or rich meals prepared by your personal Michelin-trained chef, serving both you and your harridan wife, then by all means go with the former.

And also remember there are two other options. Some are greatly blessed with wonderful family and great cooking. That’s one of them. But the other, increasingly common in these sad times, is a scenario when a harridan wife makes her husband eat his carrots. So that is one point. Keep your table priorities in proper order. You should care much more about how it is with those sitting around the table with you than how it is with the platters on the table.

So what about the comment in passing? This comes in the realm of application, and I need to explain something first. When Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and frequent ailments, it was no part of his intention to help us refute tea-totalers. I am pretty confident that this thought never crossed his mind. Nevertheless it is appropriate to use the verse that way. It does help to refute tea-totalers. Not only so, but it also gives you something to try if your stomach is giving you a bit of trouble.

This proverb mentions as a delicacy the meat that came from a “stalled ox.” This is the same concept that can be seen with the “fatted calf” in the prodigal son story (Luke 15:23). Meat from a calf is veal, and it used to be the practice to keep calves in crates or stalls for their entire lives in order to keep the meat really tender. In Western countries that practice is now largely illegal, but this provides us with a good example of how not to let our modern sensibilities be the sole arbiter of what constitutes animal abuse. A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast (Prov. 12:10), but we should also remember that the father in the prodigal son parable was a righteous man.

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

“Correction is grievous unto him that forsaketh the way: And he that hateth reproof shall die” (Proverbs 15:10).

When both halves of this proverb are placed together, the result is a rudimentary argument. The first premise is that correction is a grief to the one who forsakes the way. The second premise is that a person who hates reproof—which is synonymous with correction being a grief—is a person who is going to die.

We can then produce the conclusion on our own. When correction is grievous, that man shall die.

The person who forsakes the way did so for a reason, and that reason, boiled down, amounted to that’s what he wanted. It might have been gold, or glory, or girls, but there was something that was off the straight and narrow path, and it was something that he wanted. Because he wanted it, he departed from the way. When someone corrects a man in such a moment, what he is doing is crossing that man’s desires. And who likes being crossed?

The same is true with reproof. It is easy to hate the feeling that happens when someone else thinks he is better than you, and comes to you with a reproof. But the end thereof is death.

There are different ways to be inhospitable to correction or reproof. One is to erupt at the person who dared confront you. This is the method of making a scene. Another technique is to go cold on them . . . cut them off, having nothing to do with them. It is the opposite of making a scene. The temperature of the relationship approaches what you might find in a produce cooler. But a real mastery in this sin is to exude an attitude of unapproachability on any topic that is likely to be touchy. Such a person gives off the vibe of a granite wall, but can also honestly say that “no, nobody ever talked to me about that.”

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