Proverbs 15:28 ESV
The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+15%3A28&version=ESV]
The fruit of a man is his insignia, his flag. Just as a pirate sloop is known by its skull-and-crossbones, just as a British ship-of-the-line is known by its Union Jack, just as an American frigate is known by its Stars and Bars, so we are known by what we do. Among all our doing, though, our speech is intensely prominent. Words are the first moral attribute we learn about most people, after how they smile or frown. They’re how we understand people, and they’re how we get people to understand us. The distinction between the words of the righteous and those of the wicked, then, matters.
Wickedness breeds wickedness, and so the words of the evil man have an evil character. He speaks with malice, sometimes; at others, he merely disregards others, prioritizing himself to the exclusion of others. Anything is made his priority, so long as it is not God. This evil, we must remember, needs not be a one-note solo. The wicked man will speak from ‘principles’, from ‘concern for victims’ (who, in the modern mind, are by their victimhood rendered incapable of wrongdoing), from sentimentality.
We must be wary of these evil things not just when we hear them in other’s words but when we think upon our own affairs. When we consider what we think and say, do we set God’s glory and our love for Him above all else? Let’s be honest, the answer is very often ‘No.’ We must guard ourselves, first, that we do not found our arguments and speech upon unconsidered emotion. Emotions themselves are a beautiful thing; we are to love Him, to love our families, to love our nations, to love our homes. We are to hate sin (Ps. 11:5). Our hearts, though, must be lashed not to their own will but to the guidance of His word, to love what He would have us love, to hate what He would have us hate. Moreover, our emotions must be guided so that they motivate righteous deeds. Mere human intuition will quickly fail us.
So much for the words of the wicked, but that’s only half of the equation. What does today’s proverb say concerning these?
To re-order the statement into a direction , it indicates that if we would be righteous, we should seek to ‘ponder how to answer.’ The righteous, it seems, are not hasty to speak. The righteous man considers- and he considers carefully. Where the wicked merely lets his passion and desire pour forth, lets the bile of his heart, whether saccharine or sour or burning acid, spill out, the righteous holds his peace till he knows what he should say.
This command raises the question of a standard. In order to know what to say, the righteous must have two things: first, a standard for what circumstance merits what response; second, an understanding of the circumstance. Let us take the second first, as being more immediate if less fundamental.
At risk of insulting your intelligence, we must understand what’s happening before we can deal with it rightly. If I get into a fight with my sister, simply shoving forward and ignoring her side of the affair isn’t going to help. Worse, I likely don’t quite understand my own position; if I’m in a fight, emotions have started to run high, obscuring my own heart from my sight and muddling my arguments. The first step in speaking the words of the righteous, therefore, must be to set aside my anger or my fear, to evaluate all which I know, and to figure out not only what I know but how it fits together. It will help, too, to check what I don’t know that I need to know.
Once we understand the circumstances we’re speaking into- more difficult the more important the situation, generally- we can then apply the standard. What standard? A good question.
The standard, as it turns out, is found in the Word of God, Jesus Christ His Son (John 1:1; 1 Cor. 1:11). Further, it is communicated to us in His verbal revelation, the Scriptures, all sixty-six books (2 Tim. 3:16). This, more than any other, is the righteous word. God has spoken, and our pondering therefore must be turn to understanding His words. What is more, our will must be bent to apply His word in our lives. His word and the imitation of His Son (His Word) is the single standard given to us for all our speech.
We take this Divinely-given knowledge, then, and we apply it to the circumstance, and thereby we find what to say. Unfortunately for our peace of mind, the equation isn’t precise; we have no formal set of variables to plug in for a result. No, the application of the standard to circumstance is a matter of wisdom, the wisdom given of God (James 1:5). We on earth are going to mess up. Our sin will intrude; our hearts will falter in righteousness; our assessment will miss something important. Sometimes we just won’t know. Often this will hurt. In all our failure and fault, though, we must keep in mind our true and final comfort: “In [God], we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace” (Eph. 1:7).
God bless.
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.
