Grace & Peace: Proverbs 13:11

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

A fool’s wrath is presently known: But a prudent man covereth shame.

Proverbs 12:16 (KJV)

The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult.

Proverbs 12:16 (ESV)

Fools respond to the bumps and jostling of daily life with immediate irritation. The quick-tempered man is not just someone who lets fly at a moment’s notice. This proverb is not just addressing the matter of timing. We are talking about the quality of the anger, not just the timing of the anger. When the anger of a fool is “known at once,” it is the anger of a fool being revealed. 

A righteous man can get angry, but a righteous man does not snap.

We are told that the Lord got angry with the incident of the man with a withered hand (Mark 3:5). We are commanded to get angry in Ephesians, but to make sure to do it without sin (Eph. 4:26). In addition, we are told not to let the sun go down on it, which means it ought to evaporate quickly. We are not told that the Lord was angry when He cleansed the Temple, but the odds are in favor of it. He was consumed or eaten up with zeal for His Father’s house (John 2:17), and He did make a whip (John 2:15), and in addition to that He also made a scene.

But when the Lord got angry, the end result was not broken dishes, or holes in the sheetrock. Rather, the end of the story was that a man with a withered hand was healed, and a corrupted Temple was cleansed. So the anger of a righteous man does not arrive like a thunderclap on a bright blue day. Where did that come from?

Return to the proverb. Because we live in a fallen world, occasions for anger will not be lacking. When it says that a prudent man overlooks an insult, it assumes that the insults to be overlooked are actually there. Our daily lives are filled with occasions for noticing slights. We already knew that it was a sin to give unneeded offense—let your speech be gracious, Paul says (Col. 4:6). But not everyone listens to that, and from this proverb we learn that it is frequently a sin to take offense.

Our generation needs to hear this, because we specialize in being offended, and we actually think that we are being virtuous when we are in fact displaying the irritation of a fool.

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

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; And lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own eyes: Fear the Lord, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.

Proverbs 3:5–8

This is a passage that fits nicely on posters and plaques, and which marks the pious home. And on the face of it, the exhortation seems straightforward. Trust the Lord, people, all the way down to the ground.

But there are additional riches if we look at it more closely. Trusting the Lord with all your heart means more than gritting your teeth and trusting hard. It is contrasted with something, and that something is leaning on your own understanding. Another way this is stated is in the parallel phrase, “be not wise in thine own eyes.”

On the one hand is not leaning on your own smarts, not being wise according to yourself, and not indulging in evil. On the other is trusting in the Lord with all that you have, and fearing the Lord in a way that causes you to shun evil.

We sometimes feel like we need to be figuring out the world when we actually need to be figuring out God’s law. Knowledge of the law is the key to understanding the world. Knowledge of the world, if you begin there, is the key to apostasy and ruin.

The thing that is promised us is that God will direct our paths. In all our ways, we are to acknowledge Him, which means submitting to His revealed Word. We don’t have to figure out what is going to happen in the middle of next week before we decide what to do. We have to acknowledge God’s authority over us in the Word He has given us.

Prosperity—health to the navel and marrow in the bones—is a gift of God. He is the one who gives it. If we honor His law, then He will direct our paths. As He directs our paths, He is taking care of all the variables that we do not know. Not only do we not know them, it is not possible for us to know them. But it is possible for us to know what God has told us to do, and what He has told us to avoid.

Keep it simple. Trusting in the Lord with all your hearts means simply this. Entrust what will happen to you next year to the safekeeping of what you are reading in the Word this morning.

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

Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.

Proverbs 3:9–10

One of the very practical theological problems that Christians frequently have concerns the issue of God’s temporal blessings. A very common framework is to relegate temporal blessings to the Old Testament and spiritual blessings to the new. Not only is this too facile, but it leaves modern Christians without any real direction on what to do with their (very real) wealth.

If our temporal blessings are from God, then we are responsible to God (and to His Word) for how we serve as stewards of what He has given. But if our wealth is entirely “accidental,” and not connected in any way to how we are living before Him, then we don’t have to answer for what we do—only provided we don’t actively sin with it.

But it is my conviction that Christians are supposed to live before God in such a way as to enjoy what we might call the Deuteronomic blessings—“blessed shall be thy basket and thy store” (Deut. 28:5). How we live our lives generally, and how we honor God with the first fruits of our labors (as in this passage from Proverbs), has a financial impact on our lives. And that impact is generally one of palpable blessing.

Of course there are temporal exceptions in the Christian era, but there were also exceptions in the Old Testament. And when those exceptions occur (poverty and a hard life instead of tangible blessings), there were compensatory spiritual blessings. Some Old Testament saints wandered in deserts, mountains, dens and caves (Heb. 11:38), despite it being all in the Old Testament.

There were temporal blessings back then, but there were also spiritual blessings. Between the covenants, no principle has changed. What has changed, however, is the practical amount of enormous wealth that we enjoy. When Paul told Timothy to instruct the “rich in this present world” in a particular way (1 Tim. 6:17), he was telling him how to instruct a tiny percentage of the church. Today, at least in the West, it is a large majority in the church.

That is no reason for the instruction to change. In fact, it is all the more reason for us to emphasize the teaching of Scripture on this subject—including Deuteronomy and Proverbs.

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

The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: But the wicked regardeth not to know it.

Proverbs 29:7

The causes of poverty are various and complicated. It is the task of the righteous and the wise to seek them out, and to ponder and evaluate the cause of the poor. The wicked, however, cannot be bothered. When the righteous seek out the causes of poverty, they do so in such a way as to enable them to take up the cause of the poor—to take the case, in other words.

At the same time, at least in our era, the wicked have used the poor very effectively in their sloganeering. For the one who “regards not to know it,” it is very easy to proceed straight to the speech in which you cry up as a solution another elephant dose of the problem. And when the righteous seeks out the causes of poverty, and takes up the cause of the poor, his righteousness is evident—but it is not evident to the wicked, who readily accuse him of being heartless and cold.

Examples can be readily multiplied, but let’s take the simple one of wage and price fixing. If the poor people have a hard time buying things, then why don’t we just institute price controls to keep prices from rising too high, and why don’t we establish minimum wage laws to keep wages from falling too low, and presto! Haven’t we fixed the problem? The poor now have a job that pays well, and the prices have thoughtfully remained low for them. Well, we have fixed the problem for all those who “regard not to know it.” But for the man who “considereth” what is going on, we have done nothing of the kind.

Why were we so stingy in our solution? In our price controls, why didn’t we cut the price of everything in half? And why didn’t we triple the minimum wage? The reason we did not do that is that it would have revealed how this entire scam is being run by charlatans. If we cut the prices in half, we could afford to buy absolutely anything we found on the empty shelves. And if we tripled the minimum wage, we would be receiving a very fine wage if we had a job anymore, which we don’t. In the name of fighting poverty, we have transformed poverty into grinding poverty.

The righteous thinks about it. The wicked can’t be bothered.

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