Clough Proverbs Lesson 49

DI #1: Human Responsibility (volition): The Law of Temporal Effect

Some questions that have been handed in on past teaching; the first one has to do with something that we’ve gone over and over and over again in recent weeks and that has to do with the doctrine of justification, and that has to do with the question of the law of double jeopardy. I made the statement what when justification is a court declaration by God the Father toward the believer on the basis of what has been credited to the believer’s account. You have two doctrines that are very close here; one is imputation, the other is justification. And nine out of ten Christians don’t even know what you’re talking about when you use the word justification, they come with something like just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned or something. Now that is a partially true statement but now a wholly true statement; justification is not just meaning just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned. The doctrine of justification is this: that God the Son has secured historically real righteousness, it’s not a fiction, it is not a legal fiction, it is historically real. And that historically real righteousness has been credited to the believer’s account at the point of salvation. When the historically real righteousness is imputed to the believer’s account, God the Father passes sentence upon the believer saying that that believer shares historically real righteousness with Jesus Christ. That is a court order and cannot be countermanded.

And if people would understand justification there would be no problem about losing your salvation for the reason of the law of double jeopardy. You cannot be hauled into court twice for the same crime; once the court has passed, that is the judgment. Therefore, if God the Father has decreed that you as a believer share historically real righteousness, that is a question that is no longer under discussion. And the person who denies eternal security is a person who must destroy the doctrine of justification. You cannot hold to the loss of salvation and also at the same time believe in justification. You’ve got to take your pick. Either you have got to say that justification is a valid biblical doctrine or you have to say that there is no security for the believer. There are no other positions.

Well in the course of the discussion I used the law of double jeopardy and so someone raised the question: Does the law of double jeopardy originate from the Bible? Yes it does, Deuteronomy 25:1; [“If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked.”] The law of double jeopardy is this, that when the court finishes its judgment it cannot be repeated. The word of the court is final and under the judicial system of the Old Testament there was no court of appeal. No one could be hauled into the court for the same crime twice, so the law of double jeopardy is inherent in the word justice.

Another question: Since Adam in innocence did not have absolute righteousness, would Christ have had to die for the unfallen man to impute him with absolute righteousness or would a live lived in obedience have produced absolute righteousness? Let’s look at this for a moment. We have Adam before the fall; he is innocent. During that status of innocence Adam did not have the imputed righteousness of Christ. He only had it when it was given to him when he believed. When God said your wife is going to be the bearer of salvation he said all right, I’m going to name her Evah from the Hebrew word (?) which means life and when he did that he recognized Christ as his savior and Adam was a believer from that point forward. Now at that point he shared Christ’s righteousness. Before that point he did not have Christ’s righteousness. Even though you can say wasn’t Adam obedient, obedient, obedient up until the act of disobedience, yes he was but absolute righteousness is secured over a period of historical testing. It is not just point obedience, it is cumulative and this is why no man can have it. It must be a passing of a test over a time period in space/time history. That being the case, Adam did not have absolute righteousness until he would have either flunked or passed the test, and Adam flunked, but had he passed the test, which is a what if, we are not told in God’s Word what would have happened. The best speculation is that he would have been translated like we are at the rapture.

But Adam, in his innocence, did not have absolute righteousness. This is why it’s wrong to say justification is just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned. In one way that is a correct statement but in one way it is incomplete because if you never sinned, to use an illustration out of accounting, if you never sinned you’d have zero credit on your account. When we sin we have negative, liability; we have liabilities on our credit. Now if God just forgives us then we reduce the account back to zero; we are rid of the liabilities, but we have no assets. Now the doctrine of justification does not bring the account back to zero; the doctrine of justification adds positive assets. So we have a positive set of assets given and it’s not just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned. What it is saying is just as if I had been perfectly obedient. It’s an astounding thing to have this kind of real righteousness credited to your account, and this is why there couldn’t be, strictly speaking, any imputation until Christ had actually lived His life; it would have been a legal fiction. So Jesus Christ secures absolute righteousness for us. And you must see this, if you don’t you’re going to be very weak on this loss of salvation thing. People who say you can lose our salvation are people who have never, never, understood justification. They should go back to the Reformation and study history all over.

In the morning service you intimated that Adam did not possess absolute righteousness, that he was only sinless. If you meant by absolute righteousness, God’s righteousness, I understand since we are but creatures and not the Creator. But didn’t Adam, in fact, possess righteousness since it states in Ephesians 4:24 that Christ came to restore us to true righteousness and holiness. It would seem impossible to think of man having been credited only sinless and not righteous, since every act of man would from the very first have to be a moral act, an act of choice for or against God. Could you please explain further, which I’ve just done? In Hebrews 2 you have the same thing; Jesus Christ had to learn obedience, and until He learned obedience there was not historically available righteousness. Jesus Christ as a young boy had righteousness because He was God. In His deity He had absolute righteousness all the time. In His humanity He secured it by a perfect life. So Jesus Christ’s life is very important. This is why we have four books of the Bible that talk about His life, so we understand what historical righteousness is all about. And by the way, which should show you something that I have harped on again and again here, that you cannot… cannot take just the ideas of the Bible without the history of the Bible. If you do not have a literally valid historical Bible, forget it, go to the nearest garbage can and dump all your copies in there because they are worse than scrap paper. If the Bible is not historically valid just forget it.

Isn’t historic revelation by God indicated in 1 Corinthians 13:10 in the use of “that which is perfect is come?” If God is giving us pieces of His revelation, will not we see more of Him at the Second Advent, “then that which is in part shall be done away with.” I can tell the person that raised this question hasn’t been here too long or hasn’t been listening, but 1 Corinthians 13 speaks of the “in part” and “that which is perfect.” If you want further discussion I refer you to George Meisinger’s book, The Doctrine of Spiritual Gifts; it’s in the library. The “in part” prophesy, prophesying and the “in part” work Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 13 refers to the pieces of revelation that the Holy Spirit was giving the Church on down through about the year 100 AD. It was “in part” because you had something going on over in Corinth, you had something going on in Ephesus, you had something going on in Jerusalem and so on. So it was an “in part” revelation.

But then, “that which is perfect” which is teleios, and teleios, teleion really, is a neuter noun and it cannot refer to the Church, the Church is feminine, ekklesia, and it not the rapture of the Church, it is the finishing of the canon of Scripture. And “when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” Now the thing usually Christians say is “that which is perfect” must be the rapture because then we will know as we are known and so on. Listen, the Creator/creature difference is never erased. You don’t become omniscient at the rapture; “that which is perfect” can’t refer to total knowledge, so get that out of your mind. “That which is perfect” is not omniscience because if we become omniscient in heaven then we have become gods and you’re back to pantheism. Christianity always presents a difference between the Creator on the one hand who is infinite and the creature who is finite. So therefore, even in heaven we are not omniscient; we do not have perfect knowledge in the sense of total knowledge, and never will. Therefore “that which is perfect” can’t refer to total knowledge; if it does then we can also just chuck the New Testament because its pantheism. So “that which is perfect” cannot be omniscience. Therefore it has to refer to something else and that which it refers to is the canon of Scripture. And that’s the passage that proves that tongues is not for the church age. It is a temporary gift and manifestations today are counterfeit. So that’s 1 Corinthians 13:8 and 10.

Now let’s turn to Proverbs 10 and we will deal with the proverbs section of Proverbs. Up to now we haven’t touched Proverbs as such. The whole discourse of the first 9 chapters has been exhortation and beginning this Sunday we begin a new section, in Proverbs 10:1 to chapter 22:16. If you look at 10:1 it tells you what it is, “The proverbs of Solomon.” And this is the first collection of Solomon’s proverbs. Up to this point we have just been reading the editor, whoever it was, the editor who finally collected the book of Proverbs and he’s exhorting us to get into the book. And it’s a long exhortation with some content of chokmah in it, but now we come to the proverbs section.

Now there’s always the problem with teaching this book as to how you’re going to teach it, whether you do it verse by verse or whether you do it by theme, and I am not going to do it verse by verse, I am going to do it thematically for two reasons. Number one, I think it will be more useful for you in that you will be able to take notes by subject content and therefore be able to retrieve them better for application. The second reason why I’m doing it this way is for myself for counseling; at the same time we are formulating a catalogue of these things to be used for counseling situations. So we will progress through Proverbs thematically and I’ll give you various themes and we’ll trace those themes down.

Remember as we go to the book of Proverbs it presupposes this. God, man, nature; I draw a triangle because this is the relationship that you have to see; if this relationship is not true Proverbs can be thrown in the ashcan also. God is a literal Creator, and God has made nature. Nature, the universe, was an idea in the mind of God that could be described by language and mathematics in His mind. So God has an idea and that idea includes language, including the language of math. And since God had this language and God operated this way and built the universe this way, then the universe we know can be described by language and math. Now for some of you this is irrelevant but there are those here in the congregation this morning for which this is a very major issue.

Some of you men are studying to be engineers, and some of you men are in the sciences. You’d better pay attention to this because the next time you hear something about the Bible versus science you just go back to this. Apart from God’s Word, now listen to me carefully, apart from God’s Word you have no basis for any engineering or any science. Do you know why? Because engineering and science deals with the language of mathematics. And if God has not literally created the universe the way the Bible says, you have no confidence that what you’re doing in your study of working with math and language actually is worthwhile, that you’re actually describing anything except yourself; whether it’s just a chaos out there and you’re projecting your own intentions out on the chaos, and really all you’re doing is looking in a mirror and studying your own thoughts. This is a tremendous danger that all people who deny a literal Genesis never seem to see, that they have no evidence that all their math, all their science is nothing but a mirror which projects what’s going on in the circuits of their brain out. And so really all they’re look is themselves; their thought projected out onto the universe. But if we believe in a literal Genesis then the universe is described by math, by language and math and therefore we can know it.

Furthermore, in this book of Proverbs, since man is made in God’s image man shares language and math with God and therefore man can know nature. So this book of Proverbs is now assuming this triangle; that’s the assumption behind the book. So don’t, when you see something you come across in the book of Proverbs now that may offend you, may drive you up the wall or something, which I hope a few of them do, when you see this just remember that the assumption of the triangle underlies this. You’ve got to deal with that.

One more thing; the reason why we stress this is because Proverbs deals with the principle of analogy, that nature is made to function in similar ways in similar areas. So a proverb is an observation about some little thing down here, such as, for example we’re going to see the thorns and the thistles rise up from the ground. All right, that is a principle, an observation from the area of agriculture but the proverb was never meant to teach just agriculture; by the law of analogy the rest of the creation is made to function like the thorns and the thistles so that I can enlarge that proverb and I can apply it to the area of spiritual truth. So the things in the spiritual realm are analogous to the things in the physical realm.

Suppose this were not the case; let’s have a little mental exercise here for a moment. Suppose the law of analogy did not hold. Now suppose that nothing in the spiritual realm, nothing in the realm of your relationship with God and Christ ever paralleled in any way, shape or form the physical creation as you know it. Question: how would you ever talk about it or discuss it? Think of the parables of Jesus Christ. Christ would never have been able to make a parable because nothing in the spiritual realm would ever correspond with what’s down here, where we can see. If nothing in this unseen realm corresponds to what we can see we’re dead… we’re dead, we can’t talk about it, we can’t say anything about it. Again, we might as well close the church, throw the Bible in the basket and go on to something else. So the law of analogy is very important; it’s a principle of creation that in the unseen realm things operate like they do in the seen realm.

Now we come to how we’re going to approach the book of Proverbs, the categories that we’re going to use to discern this thing. We’re going to do it by divine institutions; I’m going to divide it up by six large categories and as we study verse chains from chapter 10 to chapter 22 we’re going to take first verse chains in the first divine institution. Then we’re going to take verse chains in the second one. Then in the third one; then in the fourth one, in the fifth one, and then finally in areas that have to do with worship. We won’t get into the Church because the Church wasn’t in existence in the Old Testament. So in place of the Church we’ll have to deal with man’s grace founded relationship with God through Christ known in the Old Testament under the Old Testament dispensation.

Today we are going to begin with the first divine institution, human responsibility, and there are a number of subcategories under the first divine institution. To make it easier for you we’re going to refer to these truths as classes of laws, so the first categories of laws under the first divine institution will be what we’ll call the general laws of responsible action, volition in other words, how volition operates, the general laws of responsible action built into the creation. Please remember as we begin this is a divine institution and therefore both believer AND unbeliever must obey these laws. These are not optional; these laws are seen in all the world, not just the believing part of the world, but all the world. It’s a very valuable book; you will understand the unbeliever and understand many things about God’s creation.

The first general law of responsible action we’ll talk about this morning is the law of temporal effect. This law states that God is righteous, He is just and He is sovereign, so that history constantly reveals His moral character. God is righteous, He is just, He is sovereign, therefore history constantly reveals some, not all, some of His moral character. History constantly reveals some of His moral character, including your own personal history, things that happen to you over which you have no control whatever, if you understand the law of temporal effect you can turn back and see, why of course things have worked out this way in my life because of the law of temporal effect; it’s got to work that way. Basically stated this means that negative volition tends to cursing, positive volition tends to blessing in time, not in eternity, in time. Positive volition tends to blessing, negative volition tends to cursing. I say “tends” because sometimes this law of temporal effect is restrained by the grace principle. Grace sometimes nulls the law of temporal effect.

Let’s think of an illustration. The United States of America, by the law of temporal effect, if this law had been allowed by God to operate in full the United States of America today would not be existing; the law of temporal effect would say we have so much negative volition that the United States would fall under cursing. So if the law of temporal effect operated strictly today, we would not be here. So we can thank grace that God has withheld the law of temporal effect from operating partially, not wholly but partially. So the law of temporal affect is not an absolute law, it’s subject to moment by moment sovereign control of a personal God. God is not jammed in a machine, God is ruling. When I say “law,” this is a law God doesn’t obey. This is a law of how God works; He’s not bound to this law, this is a description of how He works in history. So when I say “law” I mean it only in the human sense. It is a law that describes generally how God works; just like a physical law, the law of gravity and so forth, that’s what we’re talking about. So please don’t think that God is jammed and has to operate this way. This is generally how He operates.

Now for those of you taking notes I am going to give you a list of verse that describe the law of temporal effect. This morning we will deal only with some representatives of this chain, and each Sunday this is the way we’ll do it. I’ll dictate to you a list of verses and these verses all describe the law of temporal effect but since each Sunday we have limited time we’ll only take some of these verses to talk about. So here is the complete list. Proverbs 10:16; Proverbs 11:8; 11:17; 11:31; Proverbs 13:16; 21; Proverbs 14:18; Proverbs 19:23; Proverbs 21:12; 18, 21, and finally Proverbs 22:5.

[Proverbs 10:16, “The labor of the righteous tends to life; the fruit of the wicked to sin.”

Proverbs 11:8, “The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked comes in his stead.”

Proverbs 11:17, “The merciful man does good to his own soul, but he that is cruel troubles his own flesh.”

Proverbs 11:31, “Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth; much more, the wicked and the sinner.”

Proverbs 13:16, “Every prudent man deals with knowledge, but a fool lays open his folly.”

Proverbs 13:21, “Evil pursues sinners; but, to the righteous, good shall be repaid.”

Proverbs 14:18, “The simple inherit folly, but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.”

Proverbs 19:23, “The fear of the LORD tends to life, and he who has it shall abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.”

Proverbs 21:12, “The righteous man wisely considers the house of the wicked; but God overthrows the wicked and their wickedness.”

Proverbs 21:18, “The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous, and the transgressor for the upright.”

Proverbs 21:21, “He that follows after righteousness and mercy finds life; righteousness, and honor.”

Proverbs 22:5, “Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse; he that does keep his soul shall be far from them.”]

We’ll begin with Proverbs 11:8, that’s the first of the chain of verses that has to do with the law or temporal effect. “The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked comes in his stead.” That is a statement of the law of temporal effect; this is not something to do with eternity; this is something to do with time, something to do with normal history. This is a general principle of life.

Let’s go through this carefully; Proverbs have got things packed into them. You have to have great concentration to understand Proverbs. Proverbs is the kind of thing you can memorize one verse and meditate on it for a week. There’s tremendous content in Proverbs, it’s deliberately written this way. The first word, “the righteous,” in the Hebrew it looks like this, zadek, t or ts or z, whichever way you want to sound it, a-d-e-k, long e, zadek is the Hebrew word for righteousness or the righteous one, and the righteous one is one who conforms to a standard. That is the picture of this word. Wrapped up in the word is the concept of a standard; one who is conforming to a standard. The zadek is a man who conforms to a standard. He has a norm for his life, and regardless of what comes, regardless of what the pressure is, this man conforms to the standard and the standard is God’s character, God’s perfect righteousness. So the zadek is one who conforms to God’s perfect righteousness.

Now, every person has sinned and therefore according to Romans 3:23 every person does not conform, is not a zadek, so how can this verse work. If every person has sinned and come short of the glory of God, therefore every person does not conform to God’s standard. This is resolved by the doctrine of imputation; doctrine of imputation, doctrine of justification. At the time I receive Christ God the Holy Spirit puts me in union with Christ. One of the things I share with Christ is righteousness. So God the Son secures for me His absolute righteousness. That’s the work of the Son. God the Father then passes sentence by justification and says yes, I legally recognize credited to your account is Christ’s historical righteousness, not a legal fiction, historical righteousness is credited to my account and I have this.

Therefore regardless of what you are doing in experience, by position you share Christ’s historic righteousness. And it’s Christ’s historic righteousness that allows you to have your priestly privileges in prayer, allows you to claim the promises of God and so on. It even allows you to deny that you share Christ’s righteousness, and we have boobs in the Christian camp that trot all over the place in campaigns and so on that deny absolute righteousness, or say if you’re not a good a Christian if you smoke and if you drink and if you do these things, you can’t be a believer. Come tonight, you’ll see what David; it’ll knock you over when you see what he does as a believer. David does all sorts of things as a believer; it’s one of the greatest series in the Old Testament, the book of Samuel, because it teaches the believer to relax. You can’t do anything else but relax when you meet a guy like David. It’s a beautiful character study of Saul and David. Saul is an uptight, self-righteousness, human good operator, and he gets up tight at everything; he’s going to get so uptight tonight you can’t believe and David is going to sit there and he’s going to count 200 foreskins, one by one right in front of Saul’s nose. And this just is going to flip Saul, but that’s the way he’s going to do it because David is a relaxed believer.

The point is, that David is a believer that operates on grace, and if Saul is going to get up tight about it, let him get up tight about it; he’s relaxed. The Lord gave him victory and these are the tokens of victory, so he’s proud of it, just like he was proud of carrying Goliath’s head around, blood and all, showed it to everybody. He put it in his (?), he slept with it, she my head, I’ve got it right here in my bag. And David carried this all over the place, he said look it, I cut Goliath’s head off, how do you like that, see all that blood. Now that’s what David did, he was a relaxed believer. Yet if David did that kind of thing today people would just flip all over the place. No church would have David—you mean to tell me he did this kind of thing. If you want to see something David did you ought to read 2 Samuel 1; when he died he had two virgins in bed with him, figure that one out. This is the life of David. And it’s a life of one of the great grace believers of all time. And we have believers all over the place that can’t stand that.

Now we’re not condoning all this activity but we’re just simply saying the (?) of a clod believer is that they always take some area of strength, here’s their bottom circle and their bottom circle may look like this, it comes out in an area here where maybe they’re very effective in the second divine institution, and their marriage may be one on solidly biblical grounds, and they’re very good in this area. And then they get very proud because they meet some other believer over here who may be a soldier and he’s very good in war; he loves to kill, and therefore he makes an excellent soldier. And his job is to kill the enemy, ala Genesis 9, Romans 13. He sees the truth that the Christian’s job in war is to kill the enemy, period. So he is an excellent soldier. Well, they come together in a local church some day and here’s believe A, he has a fantastic marriage, but he’s one of these whiny people that write for Christian magazines, why do we have Christians in the service, and so on, and here is Christian B and he’s just got back from Vietnam and killing a whole bunch of VC and he’s really excited about how he machined a group of them and dropped napalm on some others and so on, and he’s having a good time about this because he did that as unto the Lord.

Now, believer A gets in church and starts looking down their nose, why believer B is sinning; believer doesn’t have a good marriage; believer B is fouled up in all these areas where his faith isn’t strong. And so believer A gets on his high horse and he starts looking down and running down and maligning believer B. But look, believer A over here is completely out of it scripturally on war; he’s one of these pacifists, conscientious objector type, and he’s completely anti-biblical on this point and so while he’s looking down his long nose at believer B, believer Be actually should be looking down his long nose at believer A but isn’t usually, he feels very out of it and displaced and finally gets discouraged and leave the local congregation because he can’t stand the self-righteousness of believers like A.

Now that’s what I’m trying to show you, that if you don’t master the concept of grace you’re never going to be relaxed as believers. You can’t believe what believers do. I as pastor know most of the things that go on in this congregation and you’d be surprised what believers do. So how do you relax with them? Grace; and you have to learn to relax and get off the self-righteousness. In this part of the country I have never seen the self-righteousness that I have in this part of the country. Where I came from you could go into a party and have wine and relax and nobody would say anything. Around here, my goodness, you take liquor out of a glass and you’d think you’d gone the first step to hell or something. And it’s just the morals of this region. Like somebody said, it must be the water around here or something.

But the point is that every region has its legalism. In the north the women don’t wear lipstick, that’s the sign of spirituality. You ladies wee makeup and put lipstick on and oh, you’re a woman of the streets or something like that. And it’s a sign of spirituality to comb your hair with a fan and this is a great sign. Well, it’s the old story of legalism and that, friends, is exactly what is making Christianity abhorrent in the eyes of people. We have something fantastic, something tremendous in the person of Jesus Christ and yet we’re always substituting some cloddy group of standards that are not biblical. And some standards which are biblical, you can relax about. You let the Holy Spirit deal with the believer and never mind butting in and trying to straighten them out. The Holy Spirit is in the straightening out business, just leave it to Him.

All right, so then the zadek in Proverbs 10:8 is not the self-righteous person. The zadek, first of all, is the one who shares Christ’s righteousness, Christ’s perfect obedience. You see, the tendency always is for a believer to get this concept: here’s Christ’s righteousness, and he’ll say yeah, I know all about that, but my standing with God is due to my 436 good works that I have done in the last two years for Christ. And the tendency is always to think, why today, it’s going to be 437, I’m going to shake somebody’s hand and smile at them because they came to church this Sunday or something. Or, I’m going to go to one of the local civic clubs and promote a campaign to get everybody in church on Sunday or some other thing, and these are my good works. So my standing with God depends not on Christ’s righteousness, it depends on mine, and that’s exactly where you’re off base. Your righteousness and my righteousness has nothing to do with our relationship to God in the legal sense. It’s Christ’s righteousness all the way. So the zadek is a man who recognizes first his standing with God is due to Christ’s righteousness.

Then after that, because he can relax… the first thing you have to do is relax and just say look, I don’t have what it takes. There’s not one of you, no matter how many good works you think you have done, not one of you that ever can have what it takes to live the Christian life, it’s all by the Holy Spirit. And once you relax and get the big issue straightened so you can get rid of all this guilt that comes; oh, I still feel guilty about this, why you don’t know the sins that I’ve done. Name one that’s not in the Scripture, I dare you. They’re all in the Scripture. Do you think God doesn’t know? God knows. Do you think Christ doesn’t know? Christ felt every one of them; when he died on the cross He came into personal contact with every kind of sin you can imagine. The things that you call gross, the social sins, and the things that God calls gross, the mental attitude sin, and Christ had to touch and walk through every single one of them. He knows all about it, so don’t come to Him and say oh, I feel guilty about this. That’s an insult to Him; it’s an insult for a believer to feel guilty about past sins that have been confessed, past sins that you’ve done before you’ve become a Christian. That undermines the work of Christ.

All right, that’s the first thing about a zadek; he relaxes completely in the finished work of Christ. So basically at the depth of his heart he’s a relaxed individual. The second thing about the zadek, because he is relaxed he can trust the Lord to work real righteousness in his life now; now he’s not uptight, now the righteousness he does is because he is responding to God’s love toward him and now he is producing divine good instead of human good; you don’t want that filthy rags of human good, all our righteousness are as filthy rags. He gets rid of all that stuff and now divine good; he does it and many times the characteristic of divine good is you’re not even conscious you’re doing it. That is one of the great characteristics to know or recognize divine good. You will often times perform an act towards some other believer, toward an unbeliever, maybe you sit down with an unbeliever, get them in a conversation, talk about Christ and never consciously realize that that’s what you’re doing, you’re into it immediately. And if you’re in that situation you can see that’s the divine good coming out, you’re doing it freely as unto the Lord, not because you’re an employee of some organization that you have to send a report in at the end of the week, I talked to so many people about Christ, I talked to so many people about dedicating their lives, about doing this, doing that and everything else. You don’t fill our reports. If a believer knew what they were doing they ought to tear up those reports, forget about it, it’s none of their business. The job is whether you’re producing divine good. All right, that’s the zadek.

“The zadek is delivered out of trouble,” “is delivered” is niphal perfect, this means it is passive voice; he does not do the delivering himself, he receives the delivering; passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb, therefore the word “deliver” which means to pluck out, the subject, the zadek is the one who is delivered. Now who’s the agent? This is a passive voice in the verb. Who’s the agent that’s doing the delivering? The Lord is doing the delivering, just like David is delivered from Goliath; just like the great believers of the Old Testament were delivered. This is the voice of grace. The passive voice, by grace the righteous or the zadek are delivered and it is niphal perfect and the niphal perfect means they are habitually, over and over and over and over and over are delivered out of trouble, and the word for “trouble” is tzarah, and the Hebrew word is a picturesque word for trouble. And tzarah comes from a Hebrew word which means to clamp and to bind. Actually this should be translated… the way we usually refer to it in our vernacular: he’s in a bind. That is a literal rendition of tzarah. “The righteous are habitually delivered from the bind,” when they’re cramped in by something, when there’s some pressure, there’s some problem that’s frustrating you in your life, that’s a tzarah, it’s binding you in, you don’t feel freedom to move, you’re just clamped in like this; that is tzarah. And the righteous is passive voice, by grace delivered out of tzarah; he’s delivered out from the trouble.

“…and the wicked,” now this is the irony of how God works. Proverbs 11:8 is the law of temporal effect, remember, it is… by learning Proverbs one of the great things you’ll learn is that you’ll get to know your God better because you’ll see how He habitually operates in history, and God has a wonderful sense of humor, as we have discovered in the book of Samuel. God has a fantastic sense of humor, and when you can see God’s sense of humor you’ve got to know Him that much better. When you can sit down and actually laugh in a sanctified way, you can actually laugh with God at yourself; it’s a most marvelous feeling. You can look back on certain things that you’ve done in your life and say boy, God must have thought I was the biggest clod and I think so too now. And you can relax about it and laugh at it. All right, that’s sharing God’s sense of humor. And this laugh of verse is part of God’s sense of humor. “The wicked,” the word wicked is rashah and we want to learn some of these Hebrew words because they are going to alternate on us, this is rashah, the Hebrew word rashah when it’s used for wicked emphasizes the chaos of evil. All of these Hebrew nouns emphasize some phase of evil. This, rashah, emphasizes a restlessness. Remember that passage in Isaiah, “the wicked are as the troubled sea that casts up mire and dirt.” That casting up of the mire and the dirt is the chaos of evil and that’s rashah.

So the picture of the rashah in verse 8 is a picture of a person unstable in life, a picture of a person who never gets his bearings; he has not standard because he’s violated the standards and it has left him high and dry with no standards. And so he becomes susceptible, he’s rejected absolutes and now becomes a victim of propaganda. This is what’s happened in our country, socially speaking, politically speaking, the electorate, by and large, in the United States of America, has become highly susceptible to propaganda, and the reason they have become highly susceptible to propaganda is because we have dropped out of a set of absolutes, therefore when a person hears an idea they have no standards to judge it. And so they say gee, that idea feels good. And so when you lose your absolute standards what happens? The rashah is a person who…

[Tape turns] … or judges by his emotions and we have a maximum number of people in our nation who respond to ideas at the emotional level, but they don’t ever think them through. We’ve seen that in elections in this city, where the people of Lubbock have responded to certain propaganda and certain lines, sheerly at the emotional level because they have no absolute standards on which to judge the issues.

So the rashah is the person who is wicked but the emphasis is here on rashah is the one who is wicked in the sense of being unstable. And he “comes,” now is this active or passive voice? It’s active voice and here’s God’s humor, he “comes,” by himself, active voice, he’s the one that does the coming. If it were passive it says the rashah would be brought, and then it would mean that God is working behind the scenes to bring him to, but it’s not passive, it is active, he does it by himself. The rashah goes “in his stead,” now what does that mean; “his stead” is a place where the righteous one was in the tzarah. Here’s the righteous one; the righteous person is cramped in by some sort of a problem, pressure. Here’s a pressure situation; that’s the tzarah, pressure. And so the righteous one is delivered, grace. Grace removes the zadek from the pressure situation and then what does God do? He usually works it out so that dumbbell who is the rashah, dumbbell walks right into it on his own, right smack into the problem that the believer was rescued from.

Historical example: what did Pharaoh do? Remember the situation, militarily Pharaoh had the Jews, so God opens the waters, the Jews go through, Pharaoh goes through, and then someone turns on the water, he walked into it. Was Pharaoh compelled to go into the Red Sea? No. His avarice, his (?), he wanted to get them, and his own sin drove him into the middle of the situation and he lost an army. Think of Daniel; when the soldiers got Daniel in the furnace, what happened to the soldiers? Daniel was fine, he has his heat shield on, the soldiers didn’t; they died. So the furnace that was intended to kill Daniel did what? Daniel was delivered out of the furnace and the soldiers who were supposed to put him in the furnace, they are the ones that got blasted. So this is the irony of how God works, Proverbs 11:8, the law of temporal effect. The rashah is so stupid he walks right into it every time.

Let’s look at another verse that would illustrate the same principle. Turn to Proverbs 13:21. “Evil pursues sinners, but to the righteous, good shall be repaid.” “Evil pursues,” the word “evil” is another Hebrew word, now normally speaking you don’t have to worry about these nuances on Hebrew nouns except in Proverbs, the proverb itself is played off on these nuances so you should know them; ra‘rah, it’s a hard “h” and this word emphasizes the evil deed with it’s consequences. I prefer to translate this particular word by the word “harm” because to me in English harm conveys the results of evil. So this word emphasizes the act plus the results; ra‘rah emphasizes the deed. Okay.

So it’s the harm that constantly pursues the sinners, “Harm constantly pursues the sinner,” now the word “sinner” is another Hebrew word for sin, it’s chatta and this means miss the mark. It was used in archery and it meant that you aimed at a target and missed it. So the chattaim, the sinners in verse 21, are people who have missed God’s standard. This emphasizes the missing whereas the other word that we studied before emphasizes the chaos, the result. This word centers… emphasizes what they have done; by volition, negative volition, they have rejected God’s grace and therefore come short of His standard. And what pursues these people? Harm pursues these people. Should this be unexpected; should this really be unexpected, should this be some miraculous thing? Gee, I didn’t know that. If God is who the Bible says He is and He has created the universe, and God is sovereign then why should we be surprised that these rules operate? “Evil pursues sinners, but to the zadek,” there’s your same word again, “the zadek,” the man who adheres to God’s standards, “he shall be repaid with good,” or “good shall repay him,” tob, good or prosperity. All right, that’s a general statement of the law.

We have another verse, Proverbs 19:23, same law of temporal effect. The blessing for positive volition, obedience, tends to blessing; negative volition tends to cursing, in history, in time. Proverbs 19:23, “The fear of the LORD tends to life; and he that has it shall abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.” Now that’s a pretty fair translation except again the nuance is lost. Verse 23, “The fear of the LORD,” as we have emphasized in the book of Proverbs means respect for his authority, and any generation that does not respect authority will be a generation of sloppy believers, because where you have people who disrespect authority basically what they’re doing is disrespecting God’s authority.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to agree with everyone who’s an authority but it does mean we must respect the structure of authority, that we are under authority and whether you like it or not has no bearing on the point. We are under authority and this is where you parents, it’s the third divine institution where you children are going to learn your view about authority and if you have a lousy view toward authority your kids are going to pick it up from you like measles. It’s caught. And they can tell it when daddy gets a ticket and he goes down and hires a lawyer to get him off, what’s that? Disrespect for authority, undermining the authority of the cop, that’s what it is, and your kids are going to watch it and they’re going to see it and then later on you’re going to be bellyaching because your kids, oh, he got arrested, oh, he’s on pot, and the cops just caught him with pot in the car. Too bad, where’d he learn the disrespect for authority? He picked it up from you. Don’t blame the cop.

I’ve been told by the people down at the police office, policemen go arrest young people in this town and the parents come down and chew out the policemen for arresting their children, and usually right in front of the child. If you’re going to have a disagreement at least send the kid out of the room. What’s the kid going to do? He sits there and watches mom and dad chew out the policeman for enforcing the law. That really trains them real good. The same kind of parents that don’t have time to spend an hour or two a week with their children in the Word, they’re too busy watching the boob tube or something else. But they’ve got time to trot down to the police station and give their kids a royal lesson on disobeying authority. And that kind of a lesson will last months and years in the teenager’s life. And then usually the officers in the service have to wind up getting all the hard luck stories of the brats that come into the service that haven’t learned authority. Now fortunately the volunteer service we get a minimum of brats and they just go raise Cain in the civilian sector instead of letting the military worry about it.

But “the fear of the LORD” is the key. The fear of the Lord means respect for His authority and that is the basis for the first divine institution. It’s learned in the third divine institution; it’s learned in the family but it is operational in the first divine institution. You cannot lead a responsible life before God unless you respect His authority. And do you know what a test of whether you have the fear of the Lord is? Your response to His Word. See, if you’re one of these Christians that is always going around looking for some feeling, do you know what you’re doing? You’re disrespecting the authority of the Word.

Can you imagine a situation where a boss sends you a memorandum that says this is your job, I want you to do this, this, this, this, this and there it is, in writing. You have it on your desk. So you don’t read the boss’s memorandum, instead of doing that you go out and say gee, how do I feel about doing this job? I don’t feel right doing this job, and then looking around for some big feeling, when your boss just outlined the job in the memorandum. Now the Bible is God’s memorandum and that’s the job that we have outlined for us. And never mind going around seeking for feeling. If you’re filled with the Holy Spirit you will get the experience of peace, you don’t have to worry about it.

“The fear of the LORD, therefore, leads to life,” and the word for life is the Hebrew word, it’s a plural noun, chyyim, and the Hebrew word in the plural abstract refers to the points in time of life; it refers to decision, decision, decision, decision, experience, decision, in other words, you have some event, you have some choice, some choice, some event, some choice, some choice, some event, some event, and so on, all of those dots locked in one ball of wax is chyyim, and that is the Hebrew word for life; it is a temporal abstract noun. It leads to life; it leads to life in many, many ways. First, it leads to physical life. Respect of the Lord means you respect the way you are built, which means you will eat properly, you will exercise properly, you will take care of your body and you won’t act as a jerk in areas of obvious lack of safety physically. So it tends to life first in a purely physical way. Respect for the Lord means respect for how He’s built us. But I don’t like the way God built me; what are you going to do about it? You just give thanks and move on.

The second level of life in the Bible besides just physical life is conscience and mental stability. This applies, by the way, to non-Christians as well as Christians. Respect for the authority of the Lord can be manifested in non-Christians, believe it or not. A non-Christian can see that the structure out there, and that to be successful he must conform to that structure, and he will have chokmah. You will meet men who are successful in various areas of life who are unbelievers and you wonder how can they be so successful? It’s because they basically have divine viewpoint in some areas, even though they’re unregenerate, by living in God’s world they have learned genuine things about living and they just simply submit to that order they find and they’re successful. So the second level of life means just success in the area of mental attitude and so on.

The third area is regeneration, when you have respect for the Lord’s authority then you will respect the one means of salvation through Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ died on the cross He made obsolete all other systems of salvation. There is no other way anyone can ever be saved apart from that bloody sacrifice outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem, 19 centuries ago, period over and out. No other way! And when you say oh, I don’t know, I think there are many ways to God, and blah, blah, blah, God doesn’t care what you think. He doesn’t care about what you think. Do you think because you think that there’s some other way of salvation that all of a sudden God says oh, gee, look at Joe Doe down there, he thinks there might be another way, I’d better make another way of salvation, because they think there might be another way I’d better make one. Now do you really honestly think that God is going to be impressed with your genius? God isn’t going to be impressed with your genius; God has made one way of salvation; it’s the cross of Christ. If you respect His authority you will believe in Jesus Christ. If you disrespect God’s authority, reject Him, see where it goes.

The fourth area of life is the filling of the Holy Spirit. And the fourth area is showing respect to God is respect the means of living the Christian life. If you disrespect God you’re going to come up with some goofy system of feeling, or some goofy system of emotions to get you across. I don’t think a week passes that I don’t have some literature cross my desk on the charismatic movement or some little service group for clergymen: come to us, we have the latest gimmicks in the 20^th century and so forth. And it goes right in the basket because God has given me my operating manual, period. That’s the Word, and I have all that I can do to carve out enough hours of the week to give it proper study, leave alone worrying about somebody’s new secret some place. There’s no secret, it’s right there open in God’s Word. It’s a revelation. So the fourth level of showing respect for the Lord’s authority is the filling of the Holy Spirit. I respect the way God has designed my life to operate as a believer and I submit to it. That is showing respect to God, and there’s only one way and that’s be filled with the Spirit, walk by the Spirit. So I recognize His authority when I reject all the other gimmicks.

The final and fifth point about this chyyim or life applied to the believer is the maturity, Christ in the heart as we have said here, but general maturity. If I respect the Lord then I’m going to respect His will for my life and I’m going to prepare myself as a believer to the maximum. Some of you believers who are considering (quote) “full time” (end quote) Christian service, actually all believers are in full time Christian service but you know what I mean, the area of full time service or opportunities to minister your spiritual gift won’t come because you conduct a public relations campaign to find out how many doors you can put your foot into. Don’t you worry about where you’re going to minister. You only have one worry and that is prepare yourself to the maximum, wherever you will be ultimately called there you will be ready. But right now God’s will for you is not worrying about where you’re going to be two or three years from now; it is to worry about what you are doing now to prepare yourself. And we have unprepared believers all over the place. It’s ridiculous the kind of stuff… all you have to do is read Christian magazines and you can tell how prepared the authors are. It’s awful, just absolutely awful; they have no theological insight whatever. So we have a tremendous lack or preparation.

All right, that’s chyyim then, the fifth area of maturity. Now let’s see what is said about the fear of the Lord, chyyim, one example of this. The rest of verse 23 is an example of chyyim. “…he that has it shall abide satisfied, and he shall not be visited with evil.” Now the verb to abide or stay is a habitual imperfect in the Hebrew and it looks like this; it’s one of those words in the Hebrew that’s easy to remember, it’s liyn and it’s easy to remember because the verb means to abide in a shelter by night, stop at a motel on the highway. I always think of dropping in on a lean-to which looks like some motels and that’s a good way of remembering what this Hebrew word, liyn means; it means to lodge for the night.

Now let’s see if we can put Proverbs 19:23 a little bit more clearly. “He shall abide during the night satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.” Now in the ancient times during the night they didn’t have Best Western motels or whatever it is, and they didn’t have Quality Courts, and all they had was these inns during the night, and this is the place where you could get robbed of everything you had. And the evil that would come, remember Proverbs, the law of analogy, it’s going us an observation in one area of life that’s going to multiply all over the place, all right, let’s get the specific point of the proverb first. Then after we get the specific point let’s apply it.

The specific point is describing a traveler going along the road, he stops and he lodges at night. The word to satisfy means to satisfy abundantly, and would refer to three things, his food, his shelter, and protection from criminals. So he has three needs in his life and the word “satisfy” means he will be abundantly satisfied at that lodging during the night. Now what is the night? The night is a time of danger for the traveler in the ancient east. And so obviously of the three needs, food, shelter and protection, which would be most on his mind? Protection; he can get his food and he could perhaps get his lodging but he wasn’t always sure of protection. So protection is foremost in his mind and that’s why the last clause of verse 23 says, “he shall not be visited with evil.” All right, that’s the picture; a traveler in time of danger is secure.

Now how do you apply that; that’s the proverb, but the proverb was meant to apply to other areas of life by analogy. So can you apply that? Just think a moment; what is the comparison of night in Scripture often times? Time of trouble, a particular kind of trouble where you can’t see the end of it. You’ve had those kind of problems, you wonder what is happening, I don’t get any clear sense of where God is leading me, I’m jammed in, there’s darkness, I don’t see where I’m going. So night often in Scripture refers to a kind of evil that will come into your life in a frustrating way that will keep you from seeing where God’s taking you; you won’t be able to get any bearing.

All right, so we have night as a time of evil, and that obviously means that the believer will be protected, he will be abundantly provided for in every trial of life. This is just 1 Corinthians 10:13, “There has no testing taken you but such as is common to man.”

One final quick reference to Proverbs 22:5, we won’t have time to exegete this but the symbology is rich and so I want to point this out to you, make sure you read it at least. “Thorns and snares are in the way of the froward,” this word means twisted one, one who has known the truth and turned away from the truth. You could better translate it as apostate, one who is rebellious against known truth. “Thorns and snares are in the way of the rebel, and he that keeps his soul shall be far from them.” The thorns and the snares are a picture of the cursed creation and it’s a picture of the curse that God has placed on the earth since Adam’s day. Remember He said, I will curse the ground, it shall bring up thorns and thistles? The believer, under the law of temporal effect has some protection by grace from the effect of the curse.

In other words, God suppresses or restrains the outworking of the full curse. You may think you have problems as a believer; listen, if God removed His grace from you right now, you would have so many problems, you would have the Encyclopedia Britannica full of them. It’d be fantastic to behold the number of problems that would just come up immediately to you, if grace were removed; but grace suppresses the thorns and snares somewhat, and what this verse is saying is that the rebel, who is an apostate, who has rejected God’s grace, God says all right, I’m a gentleman, if you don’t want to submit to me, fine, don’t, I’ll just pull back my grace and let the weeds grow. Just (?) you have a farmer not tending his field; you don’t want me to tend the field, you don’t want me to take of it, fine, I won’t. Let the weeds come up, go ahead, let them all come up, they will. And so the thorns are the picture of the apostate believer.

Again, by way of review the law of temporal effect is under the first divine institution, in that our responsible choices bring out some of God’s righteousness and justice since He is sovereign. God is righteous, He is just, He is sovereign, therefore history is going to show some of this and the law of temporal effect is recognition of this.

Next week we’ll deal with the law of ultimate effect.