(From the Adult Sunday School class, 10/2/16)
Proverbs 10:25 – “When the storm wind has passed, a wicked man is no more; but a righteous man is an everlasting foundation.”
A recurring theme not only in Proverbs but throughout the Bible is the endurance of the righteous and transience of the wicked. Psalm 1, for example, likens the righteous to a tree planted by a flowing river which always bears fruit and never withers, whereas the wicked are chaff driven by the wind. The primary contrast is duration, but there is also a contrast of usefulness: the righteous man who is like a tree not only endures in a single spot and continues to live, but he produces good fruit – he has an enduring positive effect on those around him. The wicked man, however, is likened to the waste product of the grain harvest. Not only does it blow away in the wind and cease to have substance, but it is the part of the plant that really did not have any use, anyway.
Psalm 1 and numerous sayings in Proverbs, just in chapter 10, show us that there is an inherent connectedness between durability and usefulness. Proverbs 10:7 says, “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the reputation of the wicked will rot.” The righteous will be remembered, and that memory is a blessing to their community. The wicked, on the other hand, will be forgotten, and everyone is pretty much glad to see them go. 10:14 says, “The wise, they store up knowledge, but the mouth of the fool is imminent destruction.” The wise create storehouses for a rainy day, not of money or food but of knowledge. Someday, this knowledge will come in handy. The fool, on the other hand, stores nothing up, utters everything he knows, and is just waiting to be found useless. We can see this same dynamic interplay between durability and usefulness at work in Proverbs 10:25, as well, especially when we deal playfully with the text and consider possible alternative translations of its first clause.
The Meaning of the Best Translation
First, let’s look at the typical translation of this proverb, which, I should at the outset, is probably the best translation. It certainly is the one that is the simplest explanation of the verse’s grammatical features, and, as a rule, the simplest explanation is usually the best one. This translation takes the first clause as “When the storm wind has passed” or “As soon as the storm wind passes, then the wicked one is no more.” Taken with the second clause “But the righteous one is an everlasting foundation”, what this saying tells us is that the storm wind comes on both the wicked and righteous, but its effects on the two are vastly different. This “storm wind” we are talking about seems, from its usage and etymology, to be a sudden and terrifying storm wind, something that typically brings destruction, perhaps a cyclone or a Mediterranean hurricane. In Proverbs 10:25, the word is probably used metaphorically. It is talking about disaster: natural disaster, military invasion, famine, or economic collapse.
When disaster comes, this proverb says that the wicked do not endure it. They are swept away by disaster along with any trace of them or their work. Like last week’s proverb, this is a perhaps more of a faith statement than an objective statistical record. I’m sure that many a wicked person has endured economic hardship with the help of ill-gotten gain, using money or resources they unethically acquired from others less powerful or less well connected. But they do tend, in the end, to be found out, or else their ill gotten wealth destroys them in some other way. One of the main reasons for this is that a life built on wickedness tends to be this gigantic balancing act of lies and deceptions and manipulations. While things built honestly stand on their own, something built dishonestly requires continual maintenance to keep up the appearance of everything being okay. This is hard enough to do when circumstances are congenial. When disaster comes, it becomes impossible.
The example above all that comes to mind is Bernie Madoff. He spent decades using money from new investors to pay off returns to old investors in what appears to be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, if you don’t count Social Security. But running any kind of Ponzi scheme requires every part of the scheme to be running well and on time, something that gets more difficult the bigger the Ponzi scheme, and with Madoff we’re talking about a scheme that was in the billions of dollars with a “b”. As the 2008 financial crisis had its full effect, Madoff became more and more incapable of keeping up with it. Disaster came upon him like a sudden and dramatic storm wind. He admitted the true nature of his business to his sons, who turned him in to federal authorities.
Now, in the aftermath, his entire life has been taken from him. He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison. His brother is also in prison. He left his wife the merest fraction of his former fortune. Most of his family has been sued for negligence, and one of his sons has committed suicide. His reputation is completely destroyed. Whereas he had been the people’s hero, giving consistent, reliable returns to average people looking for a safe investment, now his name is synonymous with fraudster and criminal. He lost 65 billion dollars of other people’s money. For many of those people, these losses were devastating. When the financial crisis of 2008 had passed, Bernie Madoff was no more. Not only was his personal future gone, but his legacy, his continued usefulness in society, was also gone.
On the other hand, the second clause of Proverbs 10:25 tells us that once the storm wind has passed, the righteous person remains an everlasting foundation. Disaster hits everyone. Everyone suffered from the financial crisis of 2008. When a hurricane hits, the righteous and the wicked experience it alike. But the righteous endure it and remain just as useful after it as before it. Why? Because their lives are built honestly rather than on lies and manipulation. The life built righteously may suffer some loss during disaster, but it is not swept away. The foundation remains.
If this is the case, why do people choose to build their lives unrighteously? In short, because doing things honestly is harder and takes longer. We are tantalized by quick returns and get-rich-quick schemes. We want to find the short cut to wealth and security. In the business world, it often seems more expedient just to manipulate and bully your employees or coworkers rather than treat them humanely and righteously. When selling to customers, it’s certainly easier to sell an item or service if you strategically keep vital information away from the customer and present a one-sided picture. We might even justify this kind of deception with the mantra “buyer beware” – it’s the customer’s responsibility to search out all the details. But a business built on these kinds of practices will collapse, and it will do so suddenly like a house of cards, because you don’t generally get the benefit of seeing disaster come in advance.
A business built righteously works hard and carefully at every step to make sure all parties are being treated fairly and honestly. In fact, it pays to go above and beyond in being honest and fair. Be more fair than is expected. Be more honest than is expected. Be completely transparent and self-sacrificingly generous. While this effort seems to put you at a disadvantage in the short term, this is actually the wise thing to do in the long term, because the business is capable of enduring difficult times and remaining useful afterwards. Because what is a business, and what is a successful life? It is not the material things. It is not inventory or assets or a building. Rather it is people. It is the community of people who trust and rely upon you to be an everlasting foundation. A disaster will take away assets, but it won’t take away a community. So here’s a key difference between the righteous and the wicked life: wicked people focus on things, while righteous people focus on people. Even where wicked people seem to focus on people, they generally regard people as things that can be used, manipulated, acquired, and discarded. This is a point worth repeating: wicked people focus on things; righteous people focus on people.
Now there is no avoiding the storm wind. It will come, regardless of what you do. But as in the case of Bernie Madoff, what we see is that disaster actually can have a positive effect: it reveals truth and fraud. Those who are frauds are revealed and swept away, while those who are righteous are revealed to be the ones who can really be relied upon. A financial crisis like 2008 is actually kind of a needed pruning. After the financial crisis, you could see which companies were the well founded ones and which ones were not. You knew Apple and Google would continue to be a safe investment, because whatever you might think about these companies, they were not taking other people’s money and using it to run a Ponzi scheme. They endured the storm wind and remained a strong foundation.
You can see this truth-revealing facet of storms on a personal level, too. You know your true friends by who remain your friends when storm winds hit. You know who is really reliable in a storm, because those who are all talk won’t return your phone call when things are tough. Perhaps most importantly, you know yourself by how you react in a storm and by the effect a storm has on you. Do you buckle down and turn your gaze more fully toward Jesus, or are you blown about by the wind and eventually scattered like chaff? See, there is a reason God allows us to endure hardship. Storms purify and reveal. The sun comes out and reveals those who are planted in good soil. Those who are seed sown on rocky or thorny soil won’t last when the sun starts scorching them. And what does a seed planted on good soil, eventually do? It grows and bears good fruit. So you see, endurance and usefulness are inherently tied together. The truly useful are the ones who endure, and the ones who endure are the ones who are truly useful. This is an ideal for us to strive for, to be steadfast, reliable, and fruit-bearing. This is the direction, I believe, toward which God is developing us. Heavenly Father, let us be righteous people who stay firm and reliable during the storm and who are proven thereby to be useful to you.
A Second Translation Option
Now while that is an exploration of what I consider the most likely translation of this verse into English, there is an alternative, and that is to take the first clause not as a temporal but as a comparative clause. Taken this way, the first clause reads, “Like a passing storm wind, the wicked man is no more.” In my technical notes on this proverb, which you will be able to see at my personal blog at bitesizedexegesis.com, I write that I begrudgingly accept the first reading as the best translation. Why begrudgingly? Because I feel that there is all sorts of cool theological potential for this second reading, too.
Taking the first clause as a comparative, the wicked man is not being destroyed by a storm wind, he is a storm wind. Here the wicked person is the one that brings destruction. This translation views the wicked person as an oppressor, someone in a position of authority who bullies and manipulates. As much as I would like to just avoid dealing with wicked people completely, life inevitably brings us into contact with them. We have to endure them. While he is active, a wicked person is loud and destructive, impossible to ignore, and threatening.
The promise of this proverb, however, is that wicked people only have a short time to be destructive and threatening. Their wickedness is self-destructive. Why does a thunderstorm stop rather than just keep going? A thunderstorm is a system of tensions and imbalances, and the actual occurrence of the storm is simply the working out of those imbalances. In other words, a thunderstorm is actually the storm system exhausting and destroying itself. The active period of the wicked is like this. Remember that a life built on wickedness is this elaborate balancing act. The more a wicked person acts wickedly, the more elaborate and unbalanced this balancing act becomes. At some point, it becomes unmaintainable and exhausts itself. The life built on wickedness suddenly comes crashing down and brings destruction with it. But in the end, the wicked person is no more. The life they built on lies is gone.
If the public effect of the wicked person is destruction both in their active and self-destructive states, the public effect of the righteous person is construction. The righteous person is a cornerstone for a community, someone that can be relied upon, someone who helps others build their lives. And their work in building a community is not taken away when they move on or die because they have invested in people rather than in things, and in others rather than in themselves. They are an everlasting foundation both in life and in death.
Jesus’ Teaching About the Wise and Foolish Men
One last transmogrification of this proverb would appear to be found in Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:24-27. At the very least, Jesus’ teaching and Proverbs 10:25 have a lot of points of contact, namely the two kinds of people, the storm, and the foundation, so it is good to explore Jesus’ version of this as well.
In Matthew 7:24-27, at the very end of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”, Jesus says:
(24) “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. (25) The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, but it did not collapse because its foundation had been laid on rock. (26) Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. (27) The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, and it collapsed – it was utterly destroyed!” (NET)
In comparison with Proverbs 10:25, what can we observe about Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish men. First, Jesus talks about the wise man first then the foolish man, rather than the wicked man first. Second, he talks about wise and foolish rather than righteous and unrighteous. Third, the wise individual is someone who builds on a good foundation rather than is a good foundation.
The first difference, I think, is largely aesthetic or maybe rhetorical. The parable certainly ends more dramatically and pulls the hearer to a moment of decision more effectively by focusing on the disastrous fate of the foolish man.
The second and third differences are related to the effects that Christian theology had on the nature of theological language in the Bible. The Old Testament has no qualms about saying that some people are righteous and others are wicked. Christian theology is always a little uneasy with this kind of language because of how foundational for the gospel is the admission that all humans are unrighteous before God. Not that there is really any contradiction or even conflict. In this respect, I feel that Old Testament language and New Testament language are perfectly compatible. The unrighteousness attributed to all humanity by Christian theology is (1) somewhat more corporate in focus than individual (though individual sinfulness is certainly important, and (2) specifically unrighteousness before God. The righteousness of Proverbs is specifically righteousness in human society, not some kind of righteousness before God where he is put into our debt or has to accept us because he could not find any fault if he wanted to. Hebrew Wisdom literature is very ready to admit the basic sinfulness of even the most righteous individuals in comparison with God (see especially, Job 14:1-6, where Job’s argument is not that he is perfectly pure before God, but specifically that no man is completely pure before God – this is obvious – so why would God unfairly get so picky with Job?). When Wisdom literature talks about a righteous man, it means above all someone who fears God and, because of this, treats his fellow humans fairly and honestly.
In the New Testament, it was important that the basic unrighteousness of humanity, even Jewish humanity, be re-emphasized because the time had come for God to open the doors for the Gentiles to enter, en masse, into the ranks of the covenant people. But rather than introducing new theological distinctions and concepts, rather what Christian theology did was recover the Old Testament concept that righteousness and wisdom in humanity, even in Jewish humanity, was derived from God himself. Righteous is a good foundation for living because it is built on wisdom, and wisdom is wise because it reflects the righteousness of God.
The innovation of Christianity was to locate the source of that divine derivation in Jesus himself. Jesus and his teachings were true wisdom and the true righteousness. In fact, when Jesus talks about “those who hear my words and do them” versus “those who hear my words and don’t do them”, Jesus is essentially taking on the role of personified wisdom in Proverbs 1:20-33. What this means is that only when built on his solid foundation would one’s life actually have the everlasting durability Proverbs 10:25 associates with righteous living. Without Christ, it is impossible to live a completely and coherently righteous life. But by imitating Christ and his righteousness, by accepting his version of reality and being born again into it, the life that you build is of eternal durability and of everlasting value to those around us. By living in Christ, our lives truly become an everlasting foundation that far outlasts any mere storm wind.
