A man of crooked heart does not discover good, and one with a dishonest tongue falls into calamity.
Liars prosper. This is an everyday experience, for those who look, and the constant state of politics at least. More, lies seem eminently useful to us at every turn- to smooth over a situation, to make ourselves look better, to hustle uncomfortable details off into the darkness. We like to give the truth big concrete boots and drop it off the pier, in some part of us, and we often see all sorts of reasons to justify the practice. God points us instead to the true fruits of a ‘dishonest tongue’ and a ‘crooked heart.’
That a dishonest tongue brings calamity in the eternal sense we should already recognize. Sin will get its reward (Rom. 6:23). God’s justice is ineluctable, and only God can avert His wrath- by bearing it Himself (Is. 53:12). The nearer end of liars is a little less certain, though; Proverbs in this sense describes a pattern, not an invariant rule (except in the sense that to lie is to inflict a ‘calamity’ on oneself through the desecration of God’s image). A man who lies on his deathbed has little need to worry about earthly retribution for his sin (though much to worry about eternity), and in history there are men aplenty who did much evil and died in apparent prosperity, Genghis Khan, for instance, or Alexander the Great (as long as we don’t count their respective causes of death- also Attila).
These exceptions, though, are in part exceptions, in part illusions. The illusion is this: that calamity need not be in worldly terms. A man may be wealthy, healthy, and in full command of his faculties, but that does not guarantee him happiness or joy by any means. As Psalm 37:16 puts it, “Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked.” Wickedness torments a man within, you see. We are all by God’s grace given sufficient apprehension of His nature to know His law (Rom. 1:19-21, 7:1-8). This is the foundation of our consciences, and to sear that faculty to insensibility, to layer lies between us and that knowledge until we cannot see it, is a great sin. That seared conscience is, I warrant, a wound perpetually within the man, a deadness of spirit which taints his life. Nor can its searing be complete on this earth, while man is not entirely depraved; men therefore know their own guilt. They seek to harm themselves, in atonement, to harm others, in propitiation (another way of atonement). Thus they buy themselves only more guilt.
The wicked man can have no true contentment. This world has many pleasures, bodily and mental, but none have the verity and fullness of relationship with God. Every wife, every son, every daughter, every friend, every lust, every taste, every sound, every thought, all of these added together is not the equal to God- and man knows that he lacks God. He knows, and every day it torments him. Each thing which is not God can bring him only momentary relief (even those things which, to the Christian who knows God, are true blessings).
We see a manifestation of the unease of the wicked in the first half of this verse. Crooked hearts see wicked deeds everywhere. One appearance of this in the world today is the ‘law of projection’- when dealing with an unreliable accuser, the accusations they make against their enemies, unless independently substantiated, can reliably be taken as indicators that the accusers are doing roughly what they accuse their foe of doing. Big government advocates like to accuse their enemies of attacking freedom, and slanderers are forever accusing others of slander. Sin sees sin everywhere it goes because it knows only itself and wants to drag all else down to its level; thus the sinner can never be easy, even if he lives amongst the purest of saints.
Notably, not the action but the motive is picked out in this Proverb. It is not the lie which the author here chooses as his target, nor is it the vileness the crooked heart perpetrates. The second refraining could be taken as allowing convenient generalization; the first should not be. What God aims towards here is the violation of His law from the heart. The sin of the lie rests in its willing transgression of His law, as consciously known and as unconsciously apprehended in the conscience (Rom. 7:7). Thus, though many in history have debated this point, I hold that His condemnation is not against deception entirely, that while deception in general is wrong, He commands it at times, even to the point of direct lies. Thus He commends Rahab’s deception (Jam. 2:25 (‘justified’ here refers to evidential vindication, not salvific justification)). This verse, while it by no means decides the matter, at any rate speaks only to the element both theories (no justified lies vs some justified lies) agree on, the sinfulness of the heart.
Lies and sin prosper, we see, only in appearance, only for a time, only because we do not know them as God does, only because we do not see them with eternal eyes. To us, this can be a comfort, as for David in Psalm 73, as Isaiah 13:16 would be to the writer of Psalm 137, but it should not only be a comfort. While the child of God can rest in safety from the eternal danger of sin, while he can rest in the knowledge that his sin is forgiven him, that does not make his sin any less evil. Indeed, the greater blessing makes his sin all the worse. Thus, for me, this must be a reminder and a chastening to righteousness, an impulse to straighten my heart against the standard of His law, to keep my tongue lashed tight to honesty.
God bless.
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
