Zach’s Theological Musings

  How can Proverbs 12:21 (NASB) say:

No harm befalls the righteous,
         But the wicked are filled with trouble.

Perhaps it is not so hard to accept that the wicked are filled with trouble (though there is some tension to be resolved even there, such as that faced by Asaph in Psalm 73). But doesn’t experience and Scripture itself show that the righteous are too? What about Job? What about Jesus — a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief!?!

  Well, a few things can be said. One is the nature of proverbs and wisdom literature. Proverbs generally don’t give “hard and fast rules or laws” that are never broken without exception. Rigid, logic, math-oriented people like me have to be careful no to let the phraseology fool us. Throughout the Bible, just because qualifiers are not stated within a sentence or paragraph doesn’t mean that there aren’t any intended. This is especially true of Proverbs. Indeed, with proverbs the “qualifiers” often come in the form of other proverbs! The classic example is Proverbs 26 verse 4 and then 5:

4 Answer not a fool according to his folly,
   lest you be like him yourself.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
   lest he be wise in his own eyes.

(Although don’t expect the qualifying proverb to always be so close by!)

  Often the role of wisdom sayings is to create and sustain “categories of thought” in our mind. They “pave useful neural pathways” in our brain, if you will. That doesn’t mean that such a pathway paved is always the best one to go down, but it is important to have it there available and be aware of it. Yet another analogy would be that of tools. A proverb gives you a hammer and teaches you how to use it, but it is not always the right tool for the job. Indeed, part of wisdom itself is knowing how to use, or not use, a saying appropriately:

Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless,
   is a proverb in the mouth of fools. - Prov 26:7

  So as to our original proverb, there is truth and wisdom in observing that as a general trend, because of God’s design of this world, a righteous way of living in line with His character does result in favorable consequences and a wicked way of living does result in harmful consequences. Engage in sexual immorality, for example, and you open yourself up to contract diseases which you wouldn’t have if you had abstained. Be a person of generosity rather than selfish stinginess, and when you yourself have needs it is more likely that others will be eager to help you.

  Second, there is also something to be said for these things being ultimately true. As the Psalmist discovered, the wicked may prosper greatly for a time (e.g. greedy, selfish, cutthroat businessmen) but the moment when their foot slips and they lose everything is awaiting, it’s just a matter of time. Likewise the righteous may suffer, but all their sorrows will most certainly turn to joy.

  But there is one more way that I think this saying can be understood which just occurred to me in my latest reading of it. That is, there is a huge difference between the righteous and the wicked on the matter of perspective, not just eternal perspective but even their perspective on the here and now (though the eternal perspective is certainly a key ingredient to fueling a godly perspective on the here and now). What one interprets as vexing, irritating, unbearable trouble and harm, the other can view as an opportunity for sanctification/refinement, as nothing worse than what he is in fact due, indeed as a form of blessing. The righteous “know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28, emphasis added).

  Take Job for example, Job in his better days that is, especially before his discouraging “friends” got to him. When he lost his beloved children and all his possessions in this world he said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” - Job 1:21

He had lost nothing that was really “his” to begin with. He was born naked and crying into this world. He had to right no claim anything whatsoever as his own, including “his own” body! Anything he had was truly God’s possession, temporarily entrusted to Job’s stewardship. If the Lord would choose to take it back He had every right to do so.

  Paul pleaded with the Lord to remove the thorn in his flesh. But when the Lord replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weaknesses,” Paul submitted to seeing Christ honored in whatever ills might befall him as a greater worth and a more satisfying treasure than his own temporary earthly comfort:

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. - 2 Cor 12:9b-10

  And oh the testimonies of those who have been tortured, imprisoned, and beaten for Christ and found joy in that very thing (not merely despite it!)! See, for example Josef Tson’s testimony of joy through harsh interogation, “Thank you for the beating” (freely available from the Romanian Missionary Society). In doing so they simply fulfill the words of the Master:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. - Matthew 5:11-12

  If we are to rejoice at persecution from the hands of our “enemies” (the command, “love your enemies,” shows that Christians do have enemies but with a very different perspective from how the world views enemies), how then can the righteous grumble and complain over the trials, no matter how grievious, that even the pagans share with us, much less the common minor inconveniences of life? I dare say they can’t; at least, they can’t continue in such a path without facing stern warning and discipline from the Lord:

Nor grumble, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall. - 1 Cor 10:10-12

  Do I mean that Christians can never sorrow? That they are always literally bouncing with happiness and gushing over how much “joy in the Lord” they have? No. Jesus wept. But harm and troubles are never the controlling or dominate theme. There is no evil that comes upon us to which we cannot say, “God is working this very thing for my good.” It is not that the good gifts from God outweigh the bad, it is that there is good for us even in the very things that appear bad to the flesh. If we go and learn what this means,

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.” (2 Cor 4:7-12),

then we can truly say in all circumstances, “No harm has befallen me.”

  I thought this was interesting in light of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46):

He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker,
         But he who is gracious to the needy honors Him. - Proverbs 14:31 (NASB)

  On a related note, when reading the Old Testament, I so often hear echoes of things Jesus said, even in bits and pieces of “obscure” (i.e. not well known or recognized today) phrases from the Prophets, the Writings, or sections of the Law. Specifically, much of the wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount can be found in Proverbs. I realize more and more how His speech is saturated with the Jewish Scriptures, whether in the form of direct quotes, paraphrases, or simply continuity with its imagery and ideas. Indeed, I have a suspicion that a person could do a careful study and find Old Testament roots for every word recorded from our Savior in the gospels. Perhaps someone has. (Tell me if you know of such a work!) I’m not saying that Jesus incarnate didn’t say or add anything new (though perhaps in some limited sense you could say that). He definely is the fullness and completion of God’s revelation. But I am saying that you could find at least clear seeds for everything that came from His mouth.

  Scripture, hands down!

  As an illustration, consider that most of the Bible’s explicit teaching on marriage, at least in the New Testament, comes from single men: Jesus and Paul. OK, Jesus is the perfectly wise, all-knowing Logos of God through whom everything was created, so of course He has full authority on every subject. So consider Paul with me for a moment.

  There is general consensus from passages such as 1 Cor 9 that the apostle Paul never married. This is the same Paul who wrote such passages as the cornerstone of a Biblical perspective on marriage: Ephesians 5:22-33. If perhaps Paul was married earlier in life, lost his wife to death, and was a widower during his Christian and apostolic years, I’ll still stand by my point. Paul’s teaching on marriage is an illustration of my point, not the proof of it.

  Regardless of personal experience, Paul knew his Lord intimately, he knew the Jewish Scriptures, and he knew the fulfillment of those Scriptures in Christ. Boom, that’s a recipe for being an expert on marriage in my book. Say on the other hand we have a couple that have been married for 80 years, have stayed together, and would even claim a mostly “happy marriage”, but they don’t have a clue what their marriage has to do with Christ. Well, there may be a thing or two worth hearing and considering from their experience, but I’d rather listen to the single guy who knows his Bible deeply any day.

  Experiencial wisdom is valuable if our experiences have forced us to dig harder and deeper into God’s word for answers and direction and understanding on issues we are confronting. But years of experience gained through a pagan, secular, humanistic, godless lens either needs to be redeemed by filtering all of it back through the grid of Scripture, or else thrown out in the rubbish bin.

  The area of application which has prompted me to write this post is that of evangelism and discipleship strategies targeting specific sub-cultures. In particular, I’ve been compiling some articles for missionaries to Muslims lately, and certain ideas and issues repeatedly come up. Now, let me first say that any talk about “targeting” certain groups, about “strategy“, and about “effectiveness” makes me feel edgy at the outset. That aside, the question relevant to us now is: should ministry approaches be guided by insider believers within the “target” sub-culture or by outsiders who have crossed cultural boundaries to reach out to them?

  Well, first I would want to stake a claim that insiders and outsiders both have unique advantages when it comes to understanding a cultural group and their needs. Insiders of course have years of experience, understanding on a deep level many nuances of their culture that outsiders will never fully appreciate. However, what is less often noted is that outsiders bring some crucial advantages of their own. In particular, they see the new culture with fresh eyes and probably in many ways without certain biases that insiders have. Just as each one of us individually finds it easier to see others’ sins while downplaying our own, cultural insiders often have blind spots to their own group’s weakness and faults (or conversely can even be overly critical and not aware of their own strengths).

  On that note, let me mention that I promote much more intercultural accountability in the church. We need not just white evangelical American men holding white evangelical American men accountable to God’s word, and not just mainland Han Chinese holding mainland Han Chinese accountable, etc., etc., but we need Christ’s church in Korea to keep the American church in check, the Americans to keep the Nepalese in check, the Nepalese believers to keep the Syrian church in check, and the church of Syria to hold the Ugandan saints accountable, and the church of Uganda to expose the oversights of the Koreans.

  For example, by and large I’ve seen that most American Christians don’t feel a sense of utter shock and horror to hear about a congregation spending millions of dollars to add an extension on to their already overly spacious under-used building structure, but bring in a visiting pastor from a poor African country where there is one Bible per congregation and people struggle to have enough to eat and the abomination of it all is unmistakable. Or again, by and large I’ve found that ethnic Chinese Singaporean and Malaysian Christians don’t find it utterly unthinkable to hear that a church would actually prohibit distribution of Bibles in the Malay language for fear of being known as a church that is trying to reach Muslims, whereas any outsider can clearly see the appalling hypocrisy.

  So then, if insiders and outsiders both have advantages, who is ultimately more qualified to judge what a people group or sub-culture needs and what is best for them? I would argue that, on any particular given issue, it is the one — insider or out — who has the most Biblically-saturated perspective on that particular issue. The crucial qualifiers here are that it can vary on a case-by-case basis for different issues. An insider can have profound Biblical insight into his own culture in one area and glaring worldly blindspots in another area. An outsider can have penetrating Biblical exhortations for a foreign culture in one area, and shallow, naive, humanistic wisdom in other areas.

  Who’s to decide which is what? In the end we must each make a choice as to what we believe to be right and act on it, and let others do the same. Each one to his own master must stand or fall (Rom 14:4). In the process, at least as for me I will continue to judge the validity of ideas not on the experiences of the one promoting them, but ruthlessly and solely based on fidelity to Scripture. When I’m 80 years old and have been married for 50 of those years (God willing) and a single 20-year old young man comes to me and says, “I’ve got something I think you need to see about marriage from the Bible,” O Lord that I would listen to him carefully. When an Asian believer comes to me and says, “Can I talk to you from the perspective of God’s word about some blindspots in the culture you spent your entire life growing up in?”, I hope that I would genuinely say, “Please do!” And I pray my brothers and sisters would do the same.