We return this morning to our journey through the book of Proverbs. It's been a couple of weeks now and where we last left the book, Lady Wisdom had just prepared a palace and set a table, invited guests, whoever would come to feast. And so now the feast is beginning. Chapters 10 through the end of the book are the feast. It's time to dig in and enjoy the wise feast of doctrine. And reproof and instruction, correction, instruction in righteousness.
The feast begins at chapter 10, verse 1. So this morning we'll read the first 16 verses of Proverbs 10. Proverbs 10, verses 1 through 16.
Hear now the word of the Lord. righteousness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death. The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked.
A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame. Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence. The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot. The wise of heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin. Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his way crooked will be found out. Whoever winks the eye causes trouble, and a babbling fool will come to ruin. The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.
Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses. On the lips of him who has understanding, wisdom is found, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks sense. The wise lay up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool brings ruin near. A rich man's wealth is his strong city.
The poverty of the poor is their ruin. The wage of the righteous leads to life, the gain of the wicked to sin. Let's pray together. Lord, thank you that you have given us the truth so that we can know the truth. You've given us instructions so that we can behave in accordance with your truth. Father, we are standing at the head of a table of a sumptuous feast of wisdom, and we need your Spirit to enable us to understand this wisdom and to align our lives with this wisdom that you've set before us. So Holy Spirit, would you please open our eyes to see wonderful things in your Word that we might benefit fully from this meal. I pray in Jesus' name.
Amen. Well, chapter 10 begins a new section in the book of Proverbs, and we recognize it as the start of a new section. First of all, because it begins with an obvious heading, the Proverbs of Solomon, but also because the style suddenly and drastically changes. Up to this point, the early chapters of the book of Proverbs have been made up primarily of lengthy paragraphs with obviously thematically related content, but now all of a sudden we encounter these short bursts of wisdom that are presented, usually in the form of two parallel statements. We call them parallelisms. We're going to see a lot of these in the chapters ahead. The first statement of a parallelism makes a claim.
It asserts some truth, and then the second statement elaborates on that first statement by making some sort of complementary statement. These brief proverbial sentences will continue one after another after another for most of the remainder of the book. This means that our engagement with the Proverbs that follow is going to be a little different than it has been with the previous several chapters.
As we make our way through the remaining chapters, we're going to be forced to slow down. Slow down to a sentence's pace and think about what is being said and consider whether each Proverb stands alone or if it's part of maybe a larger sequence of related Proverbs. Sometimes there is an obvious theme that runs for several verses. Other times there seems to be no relationship between consecutive Proverbs. In today's text, I think there is a theme, a couple of themes in fact, that connect verses 1-16, but that won't always be the case, so we might have to change mental gears a lot as we make our way through.
But we ought to be okay with that because this is how God inspired this particular book in His Word. And if you think about it, this kind of proverbial style is how we do a lot of our thinking, don't we? Think about the way your mind works. On a 30 minute drive to work or to the grocery store, your mind may begin thinking about a particular topic, which then leads to another somewhat related or maybe totally unrelated topic.
By the time you get where you're going, you've mulled over everything from what you've had for breakfast to why Rome fell to the barbarians. The only common thread is that your musings came from your mind and relate to your life in some way. The unifying theme of Solomon's Proverbs is that they are God's musings given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to Solomon. And as such, they all relate to righteous, wise living as God would define it.
Wouldn't it be helpful to get to listen in on God's thoughts about how we ought to live? Well, that's exactly what we have before us in this machine gun spray of Proverbs. So we should dig into it with excitement and anticipation over all the marvelous counsel that this book offers. Now, I don't intend to preach through every Proverb in the book. There's a good bit of divine redundancy in what follows, and I think the best way for us to interact with that redundancy is by spending time just mulling over, meditating on these truths over the course of the days and the months and the years of our lives. They're the kind of thing that, like a good marinade, has to sink into our souls deeply over time.
It can't be rushed. It can't be crammed into a 30-minute sermon once a week. And so my goal for us in this time that we have together over the next several Lord's Days is to interact with enough of these sentences to first of all learn how to read the Proverbs. And my goal is also for us to take a large enough sampling of the Proverbs that we interact with the major themes that arise in the book. And finally, my goal is to highlight any significant structure or organization that might be present that adds meaning to the Proverbs themselves. For example, today's text deals primarily with two themes, wealth and words, and it's structured kind of like a sandwich. There's a section on words or speech in the middle of the text that's sandwiched on both sides, beginning and end, with sections on wealth. This arrangement would suggest that there's a relationship between how we view wealth and how we use words.
And so we want to kind of delve into that possible relationship a little bit. Well, then let's jump into Proverbs 10. The first proverb, the starting place we could say, is this, verse 1. A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother. We will discover that most of the Proverbs which follow draw a contrast between the wise and the fool, between the righteous person and the wicked person, and they relate that contrast to some moral situation or circumstance. The purpose, of course, is to show us how good things will be for the wise and how terrible things will be for the foolish.
Now, this seems like it would be obvious, right? Of course, if you do the right thing and think the right thing and be the person you ought to be, then things will go better for you than if you don't do and think and be what you ought. But that's the whole point. The wise course of action is not always obvious to us. The righteous course of action is not always desirable to us. And so we need instruction in the enigmas of life.
We need life's paradoxes explained to us. We even need incentive, motivation to even want to pursue what we ought to pursue. I knew a young boy whose mother was going to be gone for several days, so she gave him a list of chores to get done while she was away. Well, the young boy was not too motivated about the list of chores. That is until his older brother offered to pay him for each chore that he could check off the list. Suddenly this young boy went from being unmotivated to do any of the chores to being eager to do all of them by himself.
Why? Because there was incentive. There was a payoff.
There would be a reward. The Proverbs before us describe God's incentive, His reward. You see, church, God blesses faithfulness. God rewards righteousness. Now that may strike you as very meritorious, perhaps opposed to grace, but I'll tell you why it's not. God's reward for faithfulness is gracious because He not only gives the reward, He also makes us faithful. Paul says that God gives us both the desire and the ability to do His will.
Brothers and sisters, that's grace. And it is a lie of the enemy to think that a promised reward for being righteous and doing righteous things is too base or crass of a motivation. No, God gives these blessings and intends them to motivate and incentivize us towards good things. God gives the curses of unfaithfulness as motivation and incentive to steer clear of harmful things. If we are wise, we will take these warnings and promises to heart and not act like we are somehow above the need for divine blessings that motivate us to greater faithfulness. We have a sin nature. We have a natural bent toward desiring that which will destroy us and others. We are not, by default, wise and virtuous people.
We need help. We need motivation. So God in His grace has given us dozens and dozens of reassurances that if we are wise, we will be blessed. If we are fools, we will be brought low. We need to heed these motivations. And the first motivation that's given is that if we are wise, we will gain the approval, the smile of those who love us first and love us best, our parents. On the other hand, if we are fools, we will lose the approval, the affirmation, the trust, the joy of our parents. Now verse 1 is not implying that mothers are not made glad by wise sons or that fathers are not made sorrowful by foolish sons. We need to be careful not to read more into these sentences than is there. These proverbs are poetry.
They're not trying to say everything there is to say about a particular topic. In fact, other proverbs in the book make it clear that both parents are gladdened or saddened by the conduct of their children. And perhaps this first proverb reminds us of the fifth commandment.
Honor your father and your mother that it may go well with you. What the Ten Commandments exhort by a command, this first proverb exhorts by appealing to one's affection for one's family. If you don't love your parents, this proverb is not motivating to you. If you don't care about pleasing your parents, you lose the incentivizing strength of Proverbs 10.1.
Do you see then how dangerous rebellion against authority really is? If one of God's motivations to make us wise involves an appeal to our desire to please those in authority over us, but we don't care whether we please those in authority over us, we have forfeited an essential component in the development of wisdom. We've burned a bridge that God put there for our aid.
And we can take this a step further. Proverbs 1.7 is quite possibly the most well-known verse in Proverbs. It says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. If we don't fear God, we're going to not care about knowledge or wisdom or morality.
We've burned a bridge at the very beginning of the path, at the headwaters. Now the first motivation in this collection of Proverbs is grounded in having a right relationship with those in authority over you. Young people, don't take your relationship with your parents for granted. That relationship is a gracious and precious gift from God that ought to be guarded and cherished and preserved at all costs, because from that relationship flow unimaginable blessings from God.
Know your parents are not perfect, but that's not even the point. Your faithfulness to God runs through the path of honoring and respecting and obeying parental authority. If you forsake that principle or roll the eyes of your heart at it dismissively, you're stumbling at the very starting line of wisdom, and your world will soon begin smelling like death instead of life.
You really don't want to head down that path. Well next, verses 2 through 16 are all about wealth and speech, about how we view and use wealth and how we use our words. These two themes, wealth and words, are some of the most obvious and visible indicators of a person's relationship to wisdom. Money and speech reveal the heart like few things can. Now both the righteous and the wicked use wealth and words.
The question then is about how these things, which are neutral in and of themselves, how they are being used. Wealth and words are good testing grounds for whether a person is wise or foolish. And so in the verses that follow we are encouraged to evaluate the ways in which we view wealth and use words. Wealth is addressed in verses 2 through 5 and then again in verses 15 and 16. Look with me at verse 2.
Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death. Now notice that as most proverbs are, this proverb is composed of two parallel statements separated by a comma. These statements are said to be parallel because they relate to each other. The one informs the meaning of the other.
They could each stand alone, but they make more sense, they have more meaning when they stand together. A helpful way of reading a parallel is to pay close attention to the corresponding words. So for example in verse 2, treasures gained by wickedness do not profit. That's the first statement.
The second statement begins with a conjunction, but, which means whatever comes next is going to be contrasted with or opposed to the first statement. It says, but righteousness delivers from death. Now if we were to map these two parallel statements, the word wickedness from the first statement corresponds to the word righteousness from the second statement. Wickedness is being contrasted with righteousness.
And that's pretty obvious to us, right? We all know that wickedness and righteousness are opposites. But then notice the last word of the first statement, which is profit. It corresponds to the last word of the second statement, which is death.
Now that correlation is not so obvious, is it? We don't think of death as the opposite of profit. Perhaps we think of loss and profit as opposites, or we think of life and death as opposites, but not death and profit.
And that's just it. A parallelism adds information to the meaning by the way it sets up the parallels. In verse 2, profit and material loss are being compared to life and death.
We could paraphrase it like this. Treasures gained by wickedness do not bring life, but righteousness delivers from death. So the kind of low stakes of the first statement on its own, profit and loss, are raised to higher stakes by the second statement. It becomes a matter of life and death. This makes the proverb a matter of eternal consequence. Treasures gained by wicked means in this life do not profit in the next life. If we cheat to get rich now, it will come back to bite us after death.
It might appear like we got what we wanted in the here and now, but posthumously things will tell a different story. By the same token, it might appear that living a righteous life now doesn't pay very well, but it is actually the most profitable way to live one's life. It might appear that doing the right thing, being virtuous, morally upright, does not get a person much by way of material advantage, but it is the means of gaining everlasting advantage and profit. It brings eternal life.
So you see how parallelisms work. We read each statement on its own at face value, but then we take note of the relationships between the two statements and the meaning is deepened and expanded. Verse 3 continues this reflection on the relationship between wealth and character. Verse 3, the Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked. The underlying motive that drives the wicked man of verse 2 to gain wealth unrighteously is the lust or the craving for what he does not have. He wants stuff more than he wants virtue, and in the end God withholds both. And even the profit that the wicked man thinks he owned is repossessed by God at death. The fruit of righteousness, on the other hand, is unending profit.
Their hunger is satisfied. So verses 2 and 3 warn us not to live our lives as if the goal is to simply get rich with no regard for how we pursue profit or for what the eternal consequences of our actions will be. There's more at stake. The financial bottom line is not the most accurate measure of success. Invisible things like character matter, and they matter a great deal.
It's a matter of life and death. The question you should stop and ask yourself then is how do you pursue wealth? Are you okay with cheating your way to prosperity? Do you view your business endeavors as unrelated to the God who made you and unrelated to his ethical demands on your life? Do you understand that the same God who is Lord of Sunday is also Lord of Monday through Saturday? The Lord of the tithe is also Lord of the other 90 percent. The Lord of spiritual things is equally Lord of material things. And to the degree that we honor him in all of life, he will provide for us and preserve us. He will not let his righteous ones go hungry.
He will not let them eternally die. And so the most profitable thing you can do is live your life with an eye toward his pleasure, toward his favor. This is wisdom. Verse 4 says, A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. A slack hand is a lazy hand.
A diligent hand is a hard-working, decisive hand. The treasures gained by wickedness in verse 2 include treasures gained without diligence. Righteousness in regard to wealth gaining is not limited to some ethereal spiritual character quality.
A good attitude in the workplace, kindness towards your colleagues. No, righteousness is practical and visible. It works with diligence.
It gets the job done. If you are gaining wealth without diligence, you're not gaining wealth righteously. Verse 5 continues the description of diligence. He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame. Part of the righteous wealth gaining involves working in the right way, as verse 4 says, but it also involves, verse 5, working at the right time when it is prudent and profitable.
Knowing the right time to do something is part of doing the right thing. I wonder, is it beginning to feel like righteousness is a lot more concrete and visible than maybe you had bargained for? I think sometimes we have a tendency to measure our faithfulness to God in very abstract and achievable terms like love and affection, creed and knowledge, time spent praying, time spent thinking about scripture, and we overlook glaring blind spots in our actions. Righteousness, if it is true righteousness, works its way out into our lives in very practical, observable ways. It looks like diligence at work.
It looks like working when it's time to work and resting when it's time to rest. It's concrete and steady and diligent. The last two verses of our text, verses 15 and 16, conclude the comments on wealth by summarizing what was said in verse 2. A rich man's wealth is his strong city. Wealth is what we tend to look for for security. But verse 16, true wealth is the kind of riches that lead to life and away from death, which is to say true wealth lies in riches before God, being rich with God.
So what does your pursuit of wealth indicate about your view of what is truly important? Well, very quickly then, this brings us to the other measure of our commitment to wisdom, which is our speech, how we use our words. Verse 6, blessings or words of praise are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence. A person who lives righteously and with integrity is showered with words of praise and gratitude from the people who know him.
He's trusted and appreciated and therefore praised by others. The wicked person, on the other hand, spews words that secretly stir up trouble. His words may appear benign, but they're actually on the verge of just erupting into violence. For the sake of time, let me just briefly comment on some of the remaining verses. Verse 8, the wise of heart will receive commandments. An evidence of the presence of wisdom is a person's ability to be teachable. He doesn't know it all and he knows that he doesn't know it all.
He's teachable. Contrast that with this, but a babbling fool will come to ruin. The fool babbles. He talks a lot because he thinks he has a lot of profound things to say.
He's a know-it-all because he doesn't realize that he doesn't know it all. Verses 10 and 11 make similar points to what's already been made. Verse 12 then says, hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses. So a wicked mouth cannot leave well enough alone.
It's got to make an issue out of everything that crosses it. But on the other hand, the wise mouth, the righteous mouth, the loving mouth, has the capacity to cover and absorb offense. So the contrast is very striking in these verses. Fools keep all the wrong secrets.
They conceal violence and yet blab on and on about things which they don't even understand. While the wise person is just the opposite, he keeps all the right secrets, covering offenses, but speaks up when his words are needed and helpful. As a result, the fool's words leave destruction and ruin in their wake while the wise person's words restore and preserve and build.
Well, this brings us then to verse 13. It says, on the lips of him who has understanding, wisdom is found, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks sense. If a person is able to speak with wisdom, it is because they understand something that those who lack wisdom don't understand. The wise have attained a heavenly perspective of life and the world and reality precisely because they have submitted themselves to God's wisdom.
They've been teachable and consequently have learned what they need to know in order to rightly assess and evaluate and comment on how things are and why things are the way they are. These kinds of people are worth listening to because their lips have wisdom pouring out of them. The flip side of that is the fool, the person who lacks sense, it says.
He's not worth listening to. In fact, verse 13 says that he is only good for the rod. The rod refers to corporal punishment, physical punishment. They lack sense because they don't listen to words. Therefore, words, even the words of the wise, will not benefit the fool. One of the commentaries I've been reading in my study of the Proverbs was written by a former police detective and I was amused at his comments on verse 13. He tells of his days sitting in court listening to judges lecture people without sense, people that fall into this category, in the hopes that their words would be persuasive to them and turn their life around. Well, this detective turned theologian said, Each time I had to arrest the perpetrator again, the words of this proverb echoed in my mind.
They lack sense, they're beyond help, they're good only for the rod. Fools are never persuaded by mere words, only the rod will get their attention. The people who have been given understanding through the sovereign grace of God pay attention to how and why life works the way it does. And as a result, these people are worth listening to because their words, verse 13, pour out wisdom.
Well, let's conclude by looking at verse 14. Verse 14 combines both of these telltale signs of a person's wisdom or lack thereof, wealth and words. It says, The wise lay up or invest in knowledge, but the mouth of a fool brings ruin near. So wisdom is busy gaining knowledge, gaining understanding. He works hard at gaining real wealth by listening to God and by ordering his life according to what God says is profitable and valuable and life-giving. The fool just keeps talking because he thinks he knows everything that needs to be known.
But all the while, his mouth is paying dividends of destruction and loss and ruin. Church, the verses we've looked at this morning and the many proverbs that follow show us how things are in God's world. These sentences describe how life works because these sentences show us how God has ordered life to work.
If we're listening, we will take special care to ensure that our beliefs, our behavior conform to the way God says we ought to live. It doesn't really matter whether our intuition says differently or whether everyone around us is acting and thinking in contradiction to God's order. This is how life works. If we want life, this is how we get it.
There are no shortcuts or cheat codes or workarounds or exceptions. We've seen specifically that God's ordering of things holds true in how we go about attaining wealth and using that wealth. It's true in how we use our words. We'll discover through the rest of the book of Proverbs that God's ordering of life holds true in every arena, every relationship, every context. The question before us now is, are we going to walk according to God's wisdom or are we going to play the fool? Those are the two choices. We already know which choice is the right choice.
Which one ends with a happy ever after, but how do we make that choice? How do we persevere in the choice to follow wisdom? Let me just close by pointing us back to Proverbs 9-10, which says, The fear of the Lord, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You see, church, the first step towards all these incredible blessings of wisdom is not moral resolve.
Let me just try harder. It's not intelligence. It's not mustering up the courage to stand alone when nobody else will stand with you. Eventually it leads to all of those things. But the first step towards wisdom is fear. Do I fear that God is a God who keeps His promises? And I mean both His promise to bless and His promise to curse.
Do I believe that God is a God who keeps His promises? The fear of missing out on all the joys God offers to His children and the fear of having to endure all the misery and the loss and the regret of those who don't fear God. These realities, church, are intended to drive us, sometimes like a gentle shepherd's staff, sometimes like a violent cattle prod, towards wisdom and righteousness and joy. So choose you this day whom you will serve. Choose you this day whom you will fear.
Let's pray. Father, if we aren't fearing You like we think we are, would You please take the blinders off of our eyes? Would You please help us to repent? If we are satisfied with simply being more virtuous than the people around us, but really have no awareness of Your absolute infinite holiness and of how undone we truly are in the presence of that holiness on our own, please remove our self-deception and our arrogance. Lord, increase our fear of You that we might increase our knowledge of You and thereby increase our faithfulness to You and ultimately increase our joy in You. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
