(From the Adult Sunday School class, 9/25/16)
Proverbs 10:24 – “It is the fear of a wicked person that will come upon him, but the desire of the righteous will be granted.”
This proverb tells us that wicked people and righteous people will not share the same fate. Because of their wickedness, wicked people are destined for something fearful. On the other hand, righteous people can expect good things. This is not simply about karma, or some impersonal mechanic that is built into the cosmos. This is not saying, “What comes around goes around.” Proverbs has some points in contact with the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of karma, mainly that our actions are meaningful in determining our destiny. But for the Hebrews and for Christians, destiny is not something that structures our lives impersonally, like in a Greek tragedy. Nor is destiny something that we have the power to shape by our skill or virtue or work ethic. What did Proverbs 10:22 say? “It is the blessing of the LORD that makes one rich, and hard labor adds nothing to it.” Proverbs 16:9 likewise says, “A man’s heart plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” For the Hebrew and the Christian, destiny is something shaped above all by God.
While God is not explicitly depicted in action in this proverb, we can see hints of him in the language acting behind the scenes, especially in the last word of the verse. This word is yittēn, meaning “he will give.” But this verb is notably lacking an explicit subject. The second clause says literally, “but the desire of righteous people he (or it) will give.” Now, I don’t think the best way to translate this verb is to bring in a subject from outside the verse. We would have to go back two verses to find an explicit reference to the LORD, and I don’t think verses 22-24 form a unit of any kind.
This kind of thing, where you have a verb without a subject, is not unique to this verse. Hebrew does this from time to time, and often what it signifies is a kind of impersonal verb that we could translate “one will give”, which would sound better in French than in English. In English, we tend to use a plural for things like that. “They say that blood is thicker than water.” Who says? Well, people. No one specific. That’s how we do an impersonal verb. Or else we will use a passive voice. “It is said that blood is thicker than water.” So an idiomatic way to translate yittēn, which is literally “he will give” is rather “it will be given.” Now, yittēn is not a passive verb (which would have different vowels), but the way it is used, the closest idiomatic rendering in English probably is to use an English passive voice. So that’s what my translation does.
But while I’ve said that I would not approve of making “the LORD” the explicit subject of this verb, theologically, he actually is. See, what you often find in the Hebrew Bible is that when an impersonal verb is used, God is implied to be the one directing the course of events. Perhaps he is not envisioned as directly manipulating the fate of the individual, but he is pulling the strings of all the things and people around us to shape an individual’s fate kind of from a distance. So even though God is not mentioned in this proverb, this proverb is not saying that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people automatically. These things are attributed, by implication, to God.
Nor is this proverb primarily talking about individual fears and desires. For example, if a wicked person is afraid of clowns and zombies, it’s not saying that inevitably at some point they will be attacked by a monstrous army of clown zombies. Nor is it saying that if a righteous person happens to be craving a moon pie that there is some law built into the cosmos that makes it so that a moon pie will without fail appear on their kitchen counter. No, we are talking about bigger things than that.
The real question is: What is it that a wicked person fears because he or she is wicked? What does a righteous person desire by virtue of his or her righteousness. What kinds of fears does wickedness generate, and what kinds of desires does righteousness generate? In fact, the connection of “wickedness” with “fear” and “righteousness” with “desire” is itself a clue.
Why does the wicked person do wicked things? What is it their motivation? Just malevolence? Just straight badness? Kind of like a cartoon or comic book villain “I am evil, and I love doing evil things! Mwahahaha!” No, usually not. Wicked acts of all kinds are typically motivated by the urge for self-preservation. We saw this in our lessons on Genesis 3. Adam and Eve’s disobedience was motivated by their desire to look out for themselves without regard for God. They didn’t trust God completely. They suspected that he didn’t really have their best interests at heart. What is the basic emotion behind our urge for self-preservation? It’s fear. When you get right down to it, the motivation for a lot of wickedness, if not all of it, is fear: first of all fear of God, thinking that he isn’t really good, then fear of everything else when we realize that without God we’re on our own.
Our urge for self-preservation works itself out in numerous ways: aggression, greed, jealousy, hedonism or the pursuit of pleasure (which is really the willful perpetuation of an escapist stupor, an unwillingness to think about the hardness of life). But lurking behind all of this is fear, especially and most primally the fear of death. In other words, death itself is the thing that the wicked person is trying to avoid, the disaster that they fear, but it is also the thing that ultimately cannot be avoided. To prolong their life and keep death at a distance, the wicked person will steal, abuse, deceive, even kill. But in the end, all those people they steal from, all those people they abuse or deceive or kill … it is all for nothing. They try to avoid thinking about life and death by dulling their thoughts with drugs and alcohol or by defiantly ignoring those thoughts and justifying their self-indulgent escapades with the hollow warcry of “You only live once!” But the thing that they fear so much that they won’t even acknowledge it properly, it will come, and it will take everything from them. Ultimately, there is no avoiding it.
But does death not come also on the righteous person? Yes, what the wicked person fears will come upon them, but it will come upon righteous people, too, so doesn’t this empty this proverb of its significance, or at least call it into question? How do we reconcile the fact that tragedy comes on both the wicked and righteous, that they share a common fate in death? Hebrew wisdom literature is not ignorant of this problem. When Job says in Job 3:25, “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me”, what he is doing is using wisdom verbiage like what we have here in Proverbs 10:24 to call into question an easy association of bad behavior with bad effects and good behavior with good effects. I hold fast to my own innocence, Job says, but nevertheless I have experienced the fate of the wicked person. What I fear has come upon me.
Indeed, tragedy does come on the righteous as well as the wicked, but that’s why it does not say, “What the wicked person fears comes on the wicked person but not on the righteous person.” That’s not what the proverb says. The second clause is a non-identical complement to the first clause. It doesn’t say that what a righteous person fears will not come upon them, but that what a righteous person desires will.
So that means we have to ask yet another question. What is the hope and desire of the righteous person? A righteous person desires good things, both for themselves and for their family and friends. They desire happiness, a healthy prosperity, peace, and justice. Righteous people desire good things, work diligently for those good things, and ask God for those good things. God who is a good and gracious Father will give them those good things. This does include individual desires. God knows the righteous desires of your heart. He ought to. He made you and he put those things in there for you to desire them. He knows what kind of house you would like. He knows your dream job. Trust God and delight yourself in him, and as Psalm 37:4 says, he will give you the desires of your heart.
Notice this fundamental difference between wicked people and righteous people: whereas what a wicked person fears is what motivates their wickedness, what a righteous desires and hopes for is what motivates their righteousness. Righteous people are not fear-driven. They are hope-driven.
I think that is why “hope” occupies such a central place in the good news of Jesus. Ultimately, all the good things that righteous people desire, that are built into them by God as their Creator and by the Holy Spirit as the one conforms us to the image of Christ, all these things come together and find their culmination in the hope of everlasting life and of God’s righteous judgment reclaiming his world and making everything right again. This is the thing we long for, the reason we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Paul famously summarizes the Christian gospel in 1 Corinthians 13:13 – “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three.” Paul’s gospel consists of three themes, all of them important. Without each one, the other two fall apart. Faith is the glue that holds our relationship with God together. It is the basis of our right standing with God, the thing that reconciles us with God and God with us in Jesus. Love is the basis for all Christian ethics – if you don’t know what to do in a given situation, do what love says to do. Without love, nothing you do matters. With love, everything matters.
And hope. The Christian hope is what we believe about the future: that Jesus will return one day, that he will bring about a lasting peace and justice in all the earth, and that we will live with him forever enjoying that peace and justice. Without this hope element, the Christian gospel is directionless and depressed: we enjoy a measure of peace and justice in the present, but death, that ultimate injustice, still looms in front of us threatening to render all of our faith and love irrelevant as it is swallowed up in oblivion. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,” Paul says later on in 1 Corinthians, in 15:19. This is why the objection we brought up earlier to today’s proverb still holds some force. If we receive what we desire in this life only, but the fate of the wicked, death, is ultimately our fate as well, then the promise of the proverb is empty. But what the proverb really points to, whether the author of the proverb realized it or not, is God’s final victory over the common fate of humanity, the defeat and even redemption of death.
Redemption is a key word there. Our future hope isn’t simply one of escape from an irredeemable world. Rather it is that God will once and for all put the world right. He will redeem all that is wrong, most especially death itself. Through faith, the hope of Christianity turns human suffering around from an apparently pointless series of defeats and makes it a means of purifying us and building within us the immeasureable weight of glory. Death is the climactic instance of human suffering. So the hope of Christianity, then, makes it the ultimate purifying experience, the thing that finishes building within us the weight of glory. Death, that final enemy, becomes the final tool God uses to achieve his saving purpose in us. God doesn’t just get rid of death – he redeems it.
There is a kind of checkmate in chess called a smothered mate where through a queen sacrifice you manipulate your opponent’s own pieces to so restrict the enemy king’s movement that when you then put the king in check with your knight the king is unable to move and you win. Every potential space is occupied by the king’s own army. This is how the hope of Christianity envisions the victory of God over all his enemies. God doesn’t win by quitting the game. He wins by using the enemy’s own pieces against him for his own good purpose.
Today’s proverb tells us that while it is what the wicked person fears, not what they hope for, that will eventually happen to him, the desire of the righteous will be given. This does include, to a degree, the good things that we hope for here and now, in our present life, in the next six months, in the next week. Psalm 37:4 reaffirms this: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” This is not just because you earn brownie points with God by delighting yourself in him, but it is because as you delight yourself in the LORD, even what it is that you desire is transformed and matured, coming into alignment with the eternal plan of God. You will desire truly good things, and these are the things that God is happy to give you. But even more than this, all the good things that we can hope for are but foreshadowing of our future hope, a time of endless justice, peace, and joy. This is what it is that the righteous person desires – and we know without a doubt that we will receive it.
