Grace & Peace: Proverbs 25:26

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

The north wind driveth away rain:
So doth an angry countenance a backbiting tongue.

Proverbs 25:23

As a general rule, forbearance is a good thing. As a general rule, long-suffering is a virtue, one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). “With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love” (Eph. 4:2). Of course. Yes, and amen. “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Prov. 19:11, ESV). It is good to be slow to anger.

But our virtues and graces are not built out of blocks of wood. Ecclesiastes teaches us that there is a time for very different responses—including a time to kill, and a time to heal (Ecc. 3:3). We are dealing with people, and relationships between people cannot be managed with a one-size-fits-all approach. If we respond to every single thing with an identical response, then the chances are good that we are not responding in wisdom.

This means that there are times when a backbiter needs to really catch it. The same way that the north wind drives off the rain, so also an angry countenance drives off a backbiting tongue. Put another way, there are times when slanderers and gunk-mongers need to deal directly with the consequences of their behavior.

So is it a sin to get angry? No. Jesus got angry with those who wanted to catch Him out that time when He healed the man with the withered hand (Mark 3:5). But when Jesus got angry, the result was a man with a healed hand. When we give way to carnal anger (Jas. 1:20), the results are not in line with God’s righteousness. The contrast is between a healed hand and a hand with bruised knuckles from punching the sheetrock—a healed hand or a broken one.

It is therefore a sin to get angry in ways that are contrary to the Scriptures, but anger per se is not a sin. In Ephesians, we are told to “be angry” (and it is an imperative, a command), and “sin not.” The way we would sin is by letting the sun go down on our anger, letting it fester (Eph. 4:26). Righteous anger is like manna in jars—it goes bad overnight. So just a few verses later (v. 31), we are told to “put away” all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and evil speaking.

So a backbiting tongue is an example of evil speaking, and the implication is that one of the ways for putting it away in ourselves is by getting (righteously) angry with the backbiter. But be careful. The edges of this knife are sharp, and a lot of people have cut themselves.

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

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing:
But the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

Proverbs 25:2

The work of growing up into a godly maturity is actually a cosmic game of hide the button. The task of dominion actually consists of men finding out things that God has hidden.

God hides things, and we are to find them. Not only so, but it says that it is the glory of God to hide things. The word for glory there is kabod, which also has the connotation of weight. In English, the word associated with the kings is different, but in Hebrew it is also the same word kabod. It is a kingly glory to seek, just as it is a divine glory to hide. It look a number of centuries, for example, but God hid silicon in the sand, and eventually we found iPhones there.

God hides, and kings find. This means that the pursuit of dominion through a wise investigation of the world God made is actually to aspire to royalty.

So how are we to aspire to this wisdom? Do we go into a corner in order to try to think innovative thoughts? No. It is not a coincidence that this saying is found in the book of Proverbs. The Hebrew word mashal means to “speak a proverb.” But the Hebrew word mashal also means “to reign as king.” The wisdom literature is literature that trains us up into God’s idea of royal wisdom, and this is particularly the case with the book of Proverbs.

And this seems odd to us because the book of Proverbs often seems somewhat straightforward and pedestrian to us. “Don’t cosign a note. Rotate your tires. Change your oil every three thousand miles. Give the hoochy-mamas a wide berth.” We want royal wisdom to be more sophisticated than that. We want royal wisdom to be in alignment with us and our contemporary street smarts.

But the street smart generation that doesn’t want to dabble in such pedestrian wisdom, remember, is a generation that is deep sixed under an oceanic amount of red ink—trillions of buckets of red ink.

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

Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field;
and afterwards build thine house

Proverbs 24:27

This is a proverb that teaches us a crucial principle of business—first things first.

So the immediate application is this. If you buy a fertile piece of ground, you should prepare it, work it, and plant your crop. After that, you should feel free to go ahead and build your house. In other words, the idea is to make the piece of ground productive before you start drawing your new resource down. Grow the celery before you eat the salary.

Our natural tendency is to want to enjoy the benefits prematurely. One illustration of this bad mistake is what happens to a number of entrepreneurs. I should correct that. It doesn’t happen to entrepreneurs the way the flu might happen to them. Rather, it is something they decide to do.

They get an investment for their hot idea, and let us grant for the sake of discussion that it is in fact a hot idea. But instead of putting the bulk of the investment into the hot idea so that it might start paying off sooner, instead they start paying full salaries to the start-up team, as though the hot idea was already paying off. But—it isn’t. However hot the idea is, it cannot pay off before it is birthed. The harvest cannot be enjoyed while the sacks are still full of the seed.

And this proverb hits on something we see in a number of other proverbs. It is the contrast between short-term thinkers and long-term thinkers. The wise investor, developer, or entrepreneur seeks to defer taking his cut while the foolish one assumes that his cut is what he has coming to him as some sort of birthright. To not take his cut would not be “realistic.” His wife thinks the same.

The lack of wisdom in this can be seen in this. The person has removed a particular kind of immediate pressure from himself, meaning that he will not be as motivated as he might otherwise be to get his hot idea to market. He is able to pay his monthly bills right now, and that is not going to run out until next year sometime. For a short-term thinker, next year is on the other side of forever. And so it is that the following year he has to go back to the investor looking for a second infusion of cash. Or an extension. Or a time of awkward conversation. Or something.

The wise man is hustling from the get-go because every day matters every day. He gets after it today because something needs to break loose today. “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (Prov. 16:26, ESV).

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