Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

It is a fitting providence that we have songs very appropriate in our worship service to the events of this past week in our particular part of the world. The songs that were focused upon repentance as we opened worship and calling for God to arise and to save his people. Recounting through Psalm 78 how God had planted a vine, but then the walls were breached. Wild boars entered in. The Lord God planted a nation here.

No doubt it was originally formed by a man of solid Christian conviction, though uncertain and flawed in many ways. And this vineyard is now being trampled upon. The song we just sang is about God judging amongst the gods. The gods in the Psalms are those who rule in civil authority. And the Lord God has chastisement of his church, I’m sure, raised up foolish men. Our call today is to call all of us to seek the manifestation of Christ’s reign.

Not just in our home, not just in the church, not just in vocation, but also in the civil arena, as the text from Proverbs will show us today. Let’s turn to Proverbs 22. We come now to the very center of the book of Proverbs. I believe this is the center of the book. It has a great deal of significance always, but particularly today in the providence of God, I think, for what is going on in the civil affairs of our country.

What I’m going to do is begin reading at Proverbs 22:17. This is the beginning of this section, the middle section. Remember I told you that the chapter breaks are not inspired, of course. And here we see just a horrendous chapter break. But Proverbs 22:17 is definitely the beginning of a new section in Proverbs, known as the words or sayings of the wise. So I’m going to read the first few verses that are kind of an introduction to this section, going through verse 21, and then I’m going to have us read for the sermon text the last few verses of the sayings of the wise, which begin in verse 30 of the text.

So this will be Proverbs 22:17-21 and then Proverbs 24:30-34. We’ll be reading here as setting up this sermon the beginning and end of the sayings of the wise. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

So first, beginning at Proverbs 22, verse 17: Pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise. Apply your heart to what I teach, for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart, and have all of them ready on your lips, so that your trust may be in the Lord.

I teach you today, even you. Have I not written 30 sayings for you, sayings of counsel and knowledge, teaching you true and reliable words, so that you can give sound answers to him who sent you? And now dropping down to chapter 24, beginning at verse 30:

I went by the field of the lazy man and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding. And there it was all overgrown with thorns. Its surface was covered with nettles. Its stone wall was broken down. When I saw it, I considered it well. I looked on it and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. So shall your poverty come like a prowler and your need like an armed man.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, in your providence, the armed man has entered your vineyard, and our civil statutes slide increasingly away from manifesting the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord God, you have not moved us down the path of a slippery slope. You have taken us to the cliff. Lord God, we acknowledge this is the fault of your church. We know that judgment begins at the house of God. We ask your forgiveness, Father, for being slothful as a people. Help us, Lord God, to see indeed that if the wall is broken and if men who have forsaken their image of you in foolishness and rebellion have now invaded the vineyard and the field, it is, Lord God, your judgment upon us for not taking heed to your scriptures as they apply specifically to the civil arena of our lives.

Lord God, it is our desire to be able to give you an answer. You have sent us, Father, into this world as emissaries of the Lord Jesus Christ. And you have told us that in our worship of the true wisdom of God the Son, we’re to study this book and understand this portion of your scriptures, the Proverbs, so that this is where we’re going to find the wisdom of our Savior. We know, Lord God, that in this section we’re dealing with today, you grab our attention and say, “Listen to these sayings so that we may give an answer to the one who sent us.”

Help us, Father, to attend then to your word. May your Spirit, Lord God, empower us today by your word, by your truth, to be your mighty army going forth into this world once more. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, we have reached what I consider to be the pivotal section of this book. You know, the Lord God gives us this manual for training in maturity to make his church move from being princes to becoming kings, princesses to queens.

And this book is filled with all kinds of material. And I think that this center section is given to us at the center to help us focus upon some big themes that really are found in the rest of the book, but are kind of encapsulated here. You know, this is the fourth section of the book. If I would have gone on to read chapter 25, verse one, we would have read the heading to the next section: “These are the proverbs of Solomon copied out by the men of Hezekiah.”

Very clear section division. And at the beginning, I read the statement about listening to the words of the wise. And then we’ll see in a couple of minutes that almost toward the end of this section, it says “these also are sayings of the wise.” So there are definite sections here that bind these together. Chapter 22, the last half of it through the end of 24, is a unit.

The fourth day of creation, the Lord God places lights in the heavens to shine forth as representatives of his rule and reign. You know, “Let there be light” at the beginning—Sabbath light, God approaching his people at the end of the seven days of creation. The very middle is the creation of rulers in the heavens to rule the sun the day and the moon the night, and he puts the stars in there as a picture of rulers. We always—you know, it’s very common in the history of the world for national flags to have stars, moons, suns on them because they’re pictures of the rule of God in a culture.

Well, here we have the center section of this book that, if attended to correctly, will indeed provide us that knowledge that makes us rulers in the context of our spheres of influence and really that will make the church once more the head and not the tail, not just in Oregon, the United States, but in the world. And so this is that central section to do that very thing.

The fourth of the seven feasts, Leviticus 23, is the Feast of Pentecost. And on that feast, Moses, we believe, received the law of God on Mount Sinai from God. So the center of what we’re to do is to rule by the word of God. And here we have the wisdom of God given to us.

Now, we’ve sort of looked at the introductory section, and we saw in chapters 1-9, the two introductions. This transcendent wisdom of God is going to be delivered specifically to young people to make wise. And then for nine chapters, we have this introduction that says, “Embrace the right woman. Don’t embrace foolishness. Don’t embrace harlots, but embrace your wife.” And in understanding here the imagery, embrace wisdom by understanding correct relationships to women in your life—your mother, your sisters, and your wife. And in the context of all of that, then we found that embracing was not just referring to gender or sexuality.

But rather, on either side of that middle section of the introduction that told us to embrace the right woman and not the wrong woman, on either side, we had a list of seven things that are related to foolishness, things that God hates, things we’re not supposed to do. And those were pictures to us of whether we know if we’re embracing truly the wisdom of God or not. They’re analytical for us.

Then we moved on to the third section of the book last Lord’s Day. And we saw a big section, chapters 10 through the middle of 22—lots of material in there. But we looked at a couple of sections. We looked at a section later in that book in chapter 16 where God wove together Yahweh and the king, weaving him together. And what we’ll see here is that the culmination of the 30 sayings of the wise is that same weaving together of Yahweh and the king. And the need for the church in its wisdom to address civil matters based on the law and wisdom of God.

This is critical to what God wants for his people. And we saw that in the beginning section. But we also saw that section began in chapter 10 with very simple, you know, contrast. But the 30 sayings of the wise have very few contrasts. They’re a little more complicated. And we’ll see next week when we get to Hezekiah’s proverbs that he’s collected from Solomon that those are even more enigmatic in some places and they’re more thematic as opposed to individual contrasts.

So the first collection of Solomon’s proverbs starts simply. And you don’t even get to the king until chapter 14 or 15, middle of chapter 14. You go three and a half chapters without hearing about the king because the king is a later development of our maturation. We move through a cycle of life. The whole book of Proverbs is about the life of the Christian. We start out rather young and simple, and we become men and women differentiated by puberty.

And then what God wants us to focus on is vocation. And then what he wants us to focus on is marriage and establishing our household. And then what he wants us to focus on, as a result of that progression, then you’re ready to rule in the gate. And in a sense, the church does the same thing. So the book of Proverbs shows us the big arc of every individual’s life. And it really shows us the arc of the church as well as it integrates into a culture.

The purpose of it is to exercise God’s rule and wisdom in terms of the civil magistrate. That is one of the goals of what we do. And the way Proverbs lays it out, that is the goal by the end of the book—it’s a king talking. And so, you know, that’s the progression. And we’ll see that progression very distinctly laid out for us in today’s 30 sayings of the wise.

So, that’s what we’re going to look at. We’re going to look at the outlines that are in your order of worship. I’ve provided you a particular way that I have of looking at it. I think it’s correct. I think it’s very useful. And so what we’ll see is at the center of this book, we are given material that is really important and we’re given material that should be relatively easy for us to keep in our hearts and minds and on our lips. The Lord God wants us to be able to remember what the thrust of wisdom is.

And so he gives us this center section that helps us to focus upon that. So we’ll turn now to the outline and begin to work our way through what I think are the three sections of the 30 sayings of the wise.

Now, we saw, and as I read the introduction, hopefully you noticed this, that God kind of gets our attention with a few verses first before he begins enumerating these sayings of the wise. He says, “Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise.” That’s verse 17.

So, we’re in chapter 22. And we’ll just go verse by verse here for a little bit. So, you know, listen up. It’s important what I’m going to be saying. These are the words of the wise. These are not the words of the mediocre guy. These are the words of wisdom. These are like well-distilled proverbs. In other words, these are the words of the wise. Apply your heart to knowledge. It’s a pleasant thing if you keep them within you.

Let them all be fixed upon your lips. So these are ones—if you’re going to memorize a section of Proverbs, this is probably a section you’d want to start with. These should be on our lips. If not in direct memorization of this section, at least we should understand these particular proverbs. They should come more readily to mind to us than all the rest of the 5,600 proverbs in the book. These are explicitly told that these are supposed to be fixed upon our lips. These are ones we speak of at a moment’s notice, so that your trust may be in the Lord.

So Yahweh is given here. The transcendent wisdom of Yahweh is going to be described for us here in a way that is supposed to be easily bundled together within our hearts and then upon our lips.

Now verse 20—no doubt many of you said, “Well, whatever he read there, it doesn’t say that in my scriptures.” One of the problems with the Old Testament—difficulties, I should say—is that there are sections of the Old Testament and the wisdom literature, particularly Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. There are several areas of these wisdom literatures where the Hebrew is obscure. Words that are only used once are used. We’re not sure what the meaning of them is. This is just the difficulty the Lord God has given to us. And so, no doubt in some of your translations, you have what the New King James says in verse 20: “Have I not written to you excellent things of councils and knowledge?” And so “excellent things” is the way they’ve translated a particular Hebrew term here. And the way other translations have translated is “30 sayings.”

“Have I not written to you 30 sayings? 30 things. Excellent things. 30 things.” And I believe that 30 things is the correct translation. And without getting too much into detail here, the fact is that the next couple of dozen verses are identical to a wisdom book supposedly written by a pharaoh in Egypt. And at one point in time they thought that the pharaoh’s wisdom book predated Solomon’s and he just incorporated it into this book.

Now more detailed chronological evaluations have gone on, and they think that actually the pharaoh copied Solomon. I’m not much concerned one way or the other. The Lord God can use whatever mechanism he wants, but I know that by the time it hits this book, it’s the inspired word of God, regardless of the transmission mechanism of how that happened. Well, it’s helpful for us to have that because in those sayings, those Egyptian sayings that are identical in every other respect, it is very clear here that in verse 20, this verse should say, “Have I not written to you 30 sayings?” And in Egyptian, or whatever the language was that it was written in, there’s no doubt that it’s 30.

And so here we have an obscure Hebrew term that can mean 30 or not. And so because of that correspondence with identical sayings, I believe it’s 30. Plus, I think it’s pretty easy to look at this next set here in the next couple of chapters and see specifically 30 sayings. And if these are—remember, you know, that one of the things that the scriptures do is give us numbers, give us evaluation tools and groupings to help us to memorize.

So if these are supposed to be upon our lips, and then he says, I’m giving you 30 sayings, it’s a little easier to hold it all together. So that’s the way I’m dealing with it: 30 sayings of the wise. And I’m doing this in three groups of 10.

And again, here I think we see the same progression we’ve seen in other places in the Proverbs where the first set of 10 sayings are really focused on vocation and diligence in vocation and what work is all about and what it isn’t about. The next set of 10 focuses on the establishment of a household. And the last of those 10—saying number 20—is that a household is established by wisdom. A home is established by wisdom. And that middle section has a lot of these parent-child proverbs kind of mixed in there, kind of exhortations to hear your parent and to bring joy to your parent. And then there’s some very specific warnings given that are very appropriate in terms of people who have got vocation now and now they’re moving ahead to establish their own families.

And then the last 10 sayings of these 30 sayings of the wise are ones that are very specifically about civil rule, ruling in the gate.

So we have the same progression. And right away, you see right away, just by recognizing that flow, the Lord God has equipped us to train our children correctly: to focus on vocation and diligence, then to help them to focus on how to marry well and how to build a home. And then to tell them that if you’re not done yet—we’re glad we’ve got the home, but there’s civic responsibilities that the church of Jesus Christ must attend to.

And how, you know, how can we have a better illustration of the importance of that than the events that have happened in Multnomah County the last few days? The church needs to speak with the prophetic voice of the Lord Jesus Christ to that arena. And we need to bring not some kind of mixed natural law traditional argument along. Some of that can be good. You’re supposed to answer a fool according to his folly, but you’re also to not answer a fool according to his folly and to give him the better way, to teach him the right way.

And the church of Jesus, if we do not stand up and say at this critical juncture that the word of God commands us in our civic responsibilities to have the civil laws of our country framed in accordance with all 66 books of the Bible—if we don’t speak up for not leaving the Lord out of our civil affairs, who will? No one. It is our job, the job of the church. And we have a task to engage in over these next four or five months to do whatever we can.

And then there’s some very specific things we can do to engage into this particular arena with the word of God. And that’s what this set of Proverbs tells us. We move forward.

All right. Let’s look at the first set of 10 then. And I believe that they’re structured in such a way—again to repeat this pattern I mentioned about last week that’s so common in the scriptures—of going through the first four commandments.

The first four commandments are a short form of the Ten Commandments. They just are. And you see 1, 2, and 3 leading to 4, leading to a sabbath rest. And the Sabbath in the Old Testament is all about enthronement. It’s leading to the enthronement of God’s people and Sabbath day rest. And the way Solomon frequently talks about that Sabbath is about stressing the other half of that command—the diligence required in the six days of the week.

So let’s look at these first set of 10.

First one is found in verse 22: Do not rob the poor because he is poor nor oppress the afflicted at the gate. For the Lord will plead their cause and plunder the soul of those who plunder them.

This beginning of these sayings of the wise deals with our vertical relationship. The Lord will punish us if we’re not gracious to those who are lower than us. You see, so immediately right out of the gate, the first proverb in this set of 10 has to do with our need to be gracious to the poor because God has been gracious to us.

Verse 24 is the second one: Make no friendship with an angry man and with a furious man. Do not go lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul.

So now by specifically focusing on the angry man, we’re told that in our relationships horizontally with other image-bearers of God, with other sons, so to speak—the son is the image of the father. On that horizontal plane, we’re supposed to not engage in particular kinds of friendships with particular kinds of people.

So, we’ve been addressing the vertical plane, now the horizontal plane.

And then number three in verse 26: Do not be one of those who shakes hands in a pledge, one of those who is surety for debts. If you have nothing with which to pay, why should he take away your bed from under you?

And this proverb is about the importance of the covenants, the bonded covenants that we enter into. Okay. Cosigning for loans is what’s being specifically addressed. But it’s a form of covenant obligation that we enter into. And from my perspective, this is very much, you know, in terms of the third commandment. The first commandment has primary relevance to the father. The second commandment says no other images of God. Don’t worship by image because Jesus our brother is the image bearer. It refers primarily to the Son.

The third commandment is primarily geared to a Spirit-empowered witness in all that we do. And the Spirit is the one who seals and brings people together in bonded relationships of covenants. So here we’re encouraged not to sin against the Holy Spirit, but to be careful and wise in the covenants that we form in our lives.

So a vertical relationship, a horizontal relationship, and then a focus on the sort of covenants we enter into or don’t enter into.

And that brings us to the fourth saying, which starts in verse 28. And what I’ve given you on the outline is that I think that these next seven statements form a chiastic structure with particular bookends. If you look at verse 28, it says, “Do not remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set.” And then if you look down at verse 10 of chapter 23, “do not remove the ancient landmark, nor enter the fields of the fatherless, for their redeemer is mighty. He will plead their cause against you.”

So, we’ve got a section here where it begins with the admonition not to move their landmarks and ends with that same admonition. These are markers that this section now is a singular section. And so, what we find in this section is an emphasis upon wages, earning money. What do we do with our money? The admonition to not remove the ancient landmark. Why do you want to move it? Because you want to steal land. That’s the whole purpose of it. So, what we’re being warned against here is not going about appropriating wealth improperly.

Remember, this is a huge theme in the book. The very first warning right out of the chute to the young man in Proverbs chapter 1 is not the adulterous woman. Rather, it’s the companions who want to go and rob people. That’s how it all starts. You know, vocation and a proper way of attaining wealth and proper use of it. A proper exercise of vocation and diligence precedes the warnings against embracing the wrong woman. And it’s the same way here. The fourth slot, the fourth saying of the wise, is specifically aimed at telling us not to go about acquiring wealth in this way. And the implication is, of course, that we’re supposed to go about acquiring wealth in the proper way with diligence by working six days, as the fourth commandment tells us.

And then verse 29 really sticks out: Do you see a man who excels in his work? He’ll stand before kings who will not stand before unknown men.

So that’s the fifth saying, and it is the only positive saying in this first group of 10. All the rest are negative: Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. And now, you know, it’s very easy for you, after hearing this instruction, to say those first ten commandments, first 10 sayings rather, first 10 sayings of wise—they all kind of focus really at the center on one positive statement. And that is to excel in your work, to be diligent in your vocation. From one perspective, that’s kind of the whole message here. And so diligence in vocation becomes the single positive command, and it comes in this section, I think, where these seven sayings are a meditation on the fourth commandment. Excellence in vocation.

Verse 23: You sit down and eat with a ruler, consider carefully what’s before you. Put a knife to your throat if you are a man given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food.

Do not overwork to be rich because of your own understanding. Cease. Will you set your eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings, fly away like an eagle toward heaven.

That’s, you know, another specific saying. And then the next one: Do not eat the bread of a miser.

Okay. So, we’ve got—you know, don’t move the landmarks for an act. At the very center, we have this statement to not seek riches ultimately, to not overwork to be rich. On either side of that, we have these warnings against how you eat, with people, whether it’s the ruler or the miserly man. And so it seems like in this fourth commandment section we’re being funneled in to a particular truth here.

In addition to excelling at our work, our work is not to be essentially characterized as being overly worked to become rich. To focus upon riches as our motivation is what are we being warned against here? The purpose of diligence and vocation is not to be the accumulation of riches. They can go away in a heartbeat. They can go away just like that. This thing—they grow wings and they fly away. And if your motivation for your labor, your diligent working six days a week, is to be rich, you’ve gotten the whole thing upside down. You become idolatrous with money.

Your purpose is to go about doing the work of growing your field, your vineyard, beautifying the earth, and being used by God to bless the world. The end result of this, as I said, the closing of this section of these seven proverbs, returns to the theme of not moving the ancient landmark. But it doesn’t just say that, does it? No, it says, “Don’t remove the ancient landmark nor enter the fields of the fatherless, for their redeemer is mighty. He will plead their cause against you.”

See, the beautiful thing here—these are becoming more mature, these proverbs. The structure is a little more mature, a little tougher. This is kind of on the surface, though, not tough to figure this out. The tenth saying completes the last seven by doing the balance to the moving ancient landmarks, but it really wraps up the bookend also to the whole set of 10. Because remember, you know, we began by not oppressing the poor at the very beginning of the list of 10. Remember?

So, the number one is the need to be gracious to others the way God has been gracious to us. And it ends with that at the end too. Don’t oppress the poor. The Lord God, in both of the last sayings 1 and 10, the power of Yahweh is implored for you to remember to be gracious and not oppressive toward the poor.

Okay. What does it all give us then? You know, you can meditate on this. It’d be good to teach this. Take this outline home and teach it to your children sometime this next year. It’s important things for children to learn.

What does it kind of wrap up to be? Well, the first set of 10 says, you know, as you’re going to move toward rain and authority in being a king, the first thing you got to do is be diligent in your vocation. The first training you give a child is to be diligent. And to be diligent not ultimately for the accumulation of wealth, but to be diligent in the vocation so that they can bless other people with it—the poor who are at the beginning and end of this entire section.

Our motivation for our vocations is what’s being addressed here. Our motivation is not to be selfish. It’s to be for the extension of grace to others.

Now, God promises lots of blessings and all that stuff. We’ll see that in the next set, but the first set, you know, there’s just no other way to say this, but the most important thing for a person once they go through puberty is to move toward vocation and to become diligent. And the way to train us in diligence is to train the young children to do that as well.

So, diligence, hard work, the Sabbath commandment is key to the first set of these three sets of 10 sayings. You know, implied in this is the rest of the Sabbath commandment, the resting, the putting aside of labor on the Lord’s day now, or the Sabbath in the Old Testament. And I’m convinced that we’re not going to make significant changes in this country until the fourth commandment becomes prominent in the churches once more.

They’re prominent in the wisdom literature, and the application is primarily toward diligence. But the implication is always that diligence ceases in terms of vocation on the Lord’s day. And so, you know, you can’t get to being the head and not the tail if we don’t somehow exalt the Lord God as the God of our time, working us six days a week diligently in vocation to produce blessings to the world, but then stopping that labor on the Lord’s day. That’s where it starts. It goes on from there, though.

The next set of 10, I think, is kind of summarized in the last verse of this section. I’ve got it on your outlines down there, saying number 20 at the end of this section, in chapter 24:3-4.

Through wisdom a house is built, by understanding it is established. By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

Yeah, riches aren’t bad, but they’re not to be our focus and our motivation. Our motivation is to be wisdom, diligence, and vocation. Establishing a home, establishing a home on wisdom.

So, let’s look at some of those proverbs real quickly as we move toward the third section. Establishment of the home by wisdom. So, what this section, as I mentioned earlier, is characterized by a return to the parent-child theme, a return to the need to honor our parents.

Verse 12: Apply your heart to instruction, your ears to words of knowledge. Do not withhold correction from a child. If you beat him with the rod, he’ll not die. You shall beat him with the rod and deliver his soul from hell. My son, if your heart is wise, my heart will rejoice. Indeed, I myself, my inmost being, will rejoice when your lips speak right things.

So, again, you know, we’re to be rejoicing our parents.

So, we have the first few sayings which are really domestic sayings, and these are kind of peppered throughout this middle section of 10. I’ve given the peppering effect on the middle section of your outline. But the important thing to take away today is that this section is set in the context of parent-child domestic relationships because that’s what it’s about.

The middle section of set 10 of these three sets says: having established vocation and diligence, now you turn your attention to building your home, getting your wife, going about establishing your own home apart from your parents. So vocation first, then marriage and a home. Adam—the same thing. Vocation first, naming the animals, then marriage to assist in his vocation. That’s the flow. And I, you know, I don’t know how else to say it—when you see people all the time, marriage becomes the first thing out of the gate, and then they sort of patch in vocation because they want to get married and they got to patch in the vocation side.

That just isn’t the way God’s word ever puts it. Vocation comes first, and establishing a vocation, and then building the family. And so this is peppered with these domestic relationships—fathers, mothers being caused to rejoice, etc. But that’s not all that’s here.

The other thing that’s here are warnings. And they begin in verse 17:

Do not let your heart envy sinners, be zealous for the fear of the Lord all the day. Surely there is a hereafter. Your hope will not be cut off. Here, my son, be wise. Guide your heart in the way. Don’t mix with wine drinkers.

So, we’ve got a warning against sinners and bad company. Then we’ve got, you know, more of that domestic stuff. Now, listen, son, this is also important. Don’t drink too much wine. And there’s a long section, you know, warning about the dangers of wine included in this set of proverbs.

The drunkard, the glutton, will come to poverty. Drowsiness will clothe a man with rags. Listen to your father who begot you. Don’t despise your mother when she is old. Buy the truth. Don’t sell it. Wisdom and instruction, understanding. The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice, and he who begets a wise child will delight in him. Let your father and your mother be glad. Let her who bore you rejoice, my son. Give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways. For a harlot is a deep pit, and a seductress is a narrow well. You see, son, get my—you know, make your parents happy.

Make them happy by what? Three things. One, avoid bad company. Two, avoid drunkenness. And three, avoid the wrong woman. And as we see when this continues, he goes back then, he describes the adulteress in verse 28. She also lies await for a victim, increases the unfaithful among men.

And then in verse 29, this long set of verses about drunkenness. Who has sorrow, who has woe, who has contentions, complaints? Those are the ones who linger long at the wine, verse 30. So that goes on for a while. We have these strong admonitions against drunkenness. And you know, then after that concludes, the beginning of verse 24:1:

Do not be envious of evil men nor desire to be with them, for their heart devises violence, their lips talk of troublemaking.

And then it concludes, through wisdom a house is built. So the idea is that this middle section is about establishing your own home. Now you’ve learned vocation and diligence, now you establish your own home. And as you go about doing that, apart from your parents, you got to avoid three things. And again, they’re chiastically arranged: Don’t hang out with evil men. Don’t be with people that get drunk or are gluttons. Don’t hang out with the wrong women. Don’t be a drunkard. Don’t hang out with wicked gods. And so the three warnings of the introduction section of the book come back to us here.

So the second section is moving us from vocation to becoming a householder. And the important saying now is that it doesn’t stop there. You know, it seems like the church of Jesus Christ for the last couple of generations have said that there’s 20 sayings of the wise. You know, I mean, all you ever hear about is build families, strong families, strong families, strong families. Actually, there’s 10 sayings of the wise. Diligence and hard work and vocation and calling is pretty well thrown away too these days, not as much as the last 10, but the middle 10 is all the focus. Family, family, family, family, family, family.

I’m here to tell you that if you got 10 sayings of the wise, your family will not survive. We will not survive as a Christian culture with 10 sayings of the wise. And believe me, Christian culture is under attack in this country.

I went to see Hidalgo. Oh, nice movie, you know. I don’t remember what it was rated—pretty lightly rated, you know, no nudity or anything. A head does get lopped off, and you know, it’s kind of a fun movie, a nice Mustang based on a true story. Why is there so much increasing dismemberment going on in these movies? I don’t get that, but there is a lot of it anyway.

So, you know, kind of you’d think it’d be a family movie. You know, one or two vague references that are not so good, but the odd thing about the movie is that the hero, just like in The Last Samurai, is a drunken American soldier who served with Wild Bill Cody or whatever it was. You know, it’s kind of the same thing. If you’ve seen Samurai, it’s the same kind of character, but he’s Indian. And the way he wins—well, here I go, spoilers. If you don’t want to hear about this—but you know, the way he achieves his goals in the movie is by calling on his Indian spirituality and ancestor worship. And the people that he’s with are over there in the Middle East, and those guys are all good Muslims, and they’re presented as good people. Too, for the most part—as bad guys, but you know, the real evil person in the movie is a woman who is an adulteress, a temptress, horrible person. And she’s not just called the English woman. She’s called the Christian two times at least, maybe three.

“Oh, the Christian, you’ve seen the Christian woman, the Christian?”

I’m telling you that if they have tried that with a Jewish person it would never have seen the light of day. That movie there is, you know, examples of hatred against a particular group, and it’s not the Passion. In contemporary movies right now it’s Hidalgo. Now it’s not a major theme, and I don’t want to be too hard on the movie. I, you know, but it’s just astonishing to me that this culture has no trouble characterizing Christians, you know, in that way when they could not do that with Buddhists or Muslims or Jews or anybody else.

So, you know, we’re not going to have our families succeed here long term if all we got is 10 sayings of the wise. The Lord God loves us more than that. He’s going to whip us to say, “Hey, not only are there 20 sayings and your kids should be brought up with diligence and with an understanding of the Lord’s day and how that culminates your faithfulness to the Father, Son, and the Spirit.” But you got these last 10 sayings as well that says, you’ve got responsibilities in the culture.

You are called to be the head and not the tail. You are called to minister grace to other people through use of the civil mechanism. So let’s look at these last of the 30 sayings of the wise.

So this is the last section of the outline, and you know, it’s the hardest one to sort of look at in terms of a structure that kind of easily flows. But let’s just read through these and see what we’re told here.

The very first one is in verse 5:

A wise man is strong. Yes, a man of knowledge increases strength. By wise counsel, you will wage your own war.

Well, there you go. Right out of the chute, we’re told that involvement in this particular arena will be a waging of war. It’ll be hard work. It’ll be difficult sledding. But, you know, it is remarkable to me that the church of Jesus Christ understood this verse, waged war not through swords, but through the preaching of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, through service, through helping people, through rescuing them from their own sins. The church of Jesus Christ advanced 2,000 years—at least 1,900 years till almost the whole world had become evangelized in the 19th century.

Now, in the last century, my son kind of ranted on this last week from Idaho about this, and he pointed this out. 2,000 years, church advances. Church backs out of civil arena. Theonomy is some kind of strange doctrine. Theocracy is some kind of weird thing now. And the church backs way away from that for the last 100 years. And what happens? We got homosexual marriage in Multnomah County. We’ve got people who are engaged in deception and sin.

Not that they’re deceiving others. That probably goes on with some of them. But I’m telling you, this culture is deceiving young people into entering into homosexual relationships and marriages. They are not, as I said last week, all homosexuals and lesbians are not our enemies. They are victims of the state increasingly. And there are certainly liberal churches and families saying it is an okay thing—peace, peace when there is no peace.

I saw just a sad thing last week—one of these couples being married, two men, and interviewed by I don’t know which channel, you know, it’s interesting the press coverage. Isn’t this fun? And they’re having, you know, champagne. And this man was saying, “I, you know, when I get the marriage license, then I’ll finally have peace.”

You see, they want the stamp of approval upon an activity that God says is not ever going to be approved. And it’s just a deceit of the civil state to give that guy the illusion that he’ll be able to come to peace. You know, that’s kind of what, you know, many of these men think—that if they can just get culture to approve of what they’re doing, they won’t feel guilty. But it’s their consciences that are testifying to them. And the civil government should be adding to their conscience, telling them, “No, this is not good, and we’re not going to approve your marriage.”

Now, the church has been battling for 2,000 years aggressively. Well, and now we’ve backed out of this, and now we have homosexual marriages. And now, you know, well, should we get involved? Well, I don’t know if we should get involved in this or not. You know, if we get involved in politics, that the idolatry—and you know, the people around us think politics is the savior to everything. And as a result, you know, there’s a complete—you know, there’s a real lack of a solid blowing of the trumpet of Jesus Christ to the congregations of the Lord Jesus Christ to engage in this arena. The whole point of this—these last 10 sayings—is to enter the war. Engage! Mightier is he who is in us than he who is in the world.

We should have no fear of this. We should have tremendous confidence knowing the word of God expects us to engage next.

If the church does not open her mouth in civil matters, does not speak forth the truth of God to the gate, she has become a fool. She has become a fool, a fool. And she must repent of that. I follow it: when we do not speak into this arena the truth of God’s word, if we don’t open our mouths in the gate, this core set of what wisdom really is and what the Lord Jesus Christ has accomplished for us says that we have become a fool.

He implies do evil will be called a schemer. The devising of foolishness is sin. The scoffer is an abomination to man. There’s no strength in that guy. He says, get into the war, you know, speak to the gate, engage in ruling in terms of civil rule. Don’t worry about those guys that are plotting against you. They’re going to come to nothing. They’re lightweights. There’s no strength in them.

And then verse 10: If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.

Well, here we are. Are we going to faint? Are we going to get frightened for our children and our grandchildren? Well, a little bit of fear might be a good motivating factor. But we should be strong, courageous warriors for the Lord Jesus Christ. We should enter this arena with the preaching of the word of God, with proclamation to the civil magistrates, with circularizing constitutional changes here in Oregon to prohibit this and doing whatever else we can do in terms of political action to affect the rolling back of what is going on in Multnomah County.

That’s our job. We have a day of adversity upon us. We have a day of trouble, a day when Christians are being mischaracterized as people that hate people. You know, not in the sense of, you know, the scriptures have a proper hatred of real wickedness and evilness, but we’re being characterized as people that don’t really care for the homosexual or the abortionist or whatever else.

We do, as we’ll see in just a couple of minutes. That’s to be our motivation. So, we have to engage in this. Otherwise, our strength is small. We’re not wise. We’re fools.

And then the next verse tells us, here’s the obligation. We got lots of motivation now. Engage the war. Do it in wisdom with counselors, you know. Don’t—if you don’t open your mouth, if you don’t engage by opening your mouth, you’re going to be a fool as a church. Don’t worry about the opposition. Have strength in the middle of the day.

And now we’re told what we’re supposed to be doing in all of this, right?

Deliver those who are drawn toward death. Hold back those stumbling to the slaughter.

You see, we have people in Multnomah County stumbling toward marriage licenses. They’re stumbling toward being reinforced in their sinful actions. We have, you know, young women stumbling toward the abortion clinic. And you know, the babies are not stumbling. It’s the women who are being coerced, you know, by the civil state, by their parents and teachers. Those are the ones who are stumbling to their own slaughter. That’s first application of this verse. It doesn’t mean rescue those who are being drugged and pulled there. It means those who are, because of their sin, headed towards slaughter.

That was all set up for us in the introductory chapters of this book. The young man sees the woman, goes after her thinking he’s doing the right thing, but her way is the way of death. He’s stumbling to the slaughter. That’s what this is talking about.

Hold back those from foolish actions that are destructive to them and will lead to their destruction as people. Abortionists, women who give up children for abortion, hold them back from the slaughter. Our young people who are tempted sexually, tempted to go down to the pornography shop—last year, destroy that pornography shop. Take it out. Not through physical might, but through the preaching of the word, the coalescing of the church of Jesus Christ to speak to the issue, picketing, drive them out of business so that your children aren’t lured by all of that and stumble toward the slaughterhouse.

And you know, people who are confused about their sexual orientation—I’m telling you, I don’t know how you go to public school for 10 years anymore and not be confused by it. How could you not be confused by sexuality in this culture if you’re part of the mainstream public school system? Of course, you’re going to be confused. Those people are being encouraged by the civil state in sin. They’re stumbling toward the slaughter.

It is our job to minister to them by saying, “No, the civil government will not approve what you’re doing because it’s wrong. The Lord Jesus Christ says it’s wrong.” The only peace you’re going to find is when you repent of that sin.

It’s no help to these people. It is not kindness toward homosexuals to approve of their marriages. It’s not kindness. The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. It is cruel to these people to give them some assurance that now they’ll finally attain peace inside their consciences. No. It is our job to deliver those who are drawn toward death and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter.

If you say, “Well, it’s really not part of our business. We don’t really know what’s going on. We’re not sure all the legal technicalities. They’ll work it out.” Well, does not he who weighs the heart consider it? He who keeps your soul, does he not know it? Will he not render to each man according to his deeds?

If the call of extending mercy and grace to people in rescuing them from their sin isn’t strong enough to you, well, now he brings the whip and says, “You know, I’m trying to encourage you to the right application of what you’re called to do, Christian. Go engage in this world. Win the war by winning men and nations to the Lord Jesus Christ and to his statutes, and thus minister grace to the community.” If that’s not enough for you, I will whip you when you do not do these things.

I see that you didn’t engage. I see that you didn’t talk to your neighbor frankly when they asked you about what gay marriage was.

I had—it was a wonderful time on the bus Thursday as I was riding home. There was another Christian man there. I met once before. He’s an out of work accountant, and he’s preached and goes to a Calvary Baptist. And it was just so wonderful to be engaged in a forthright kind-hearted but a forthright discussion with him about homosexual marriage and the problems with it in a public bus where I know I’m surrounded by people who have a completely different mindset. You know, it was just—and that’s what we should do.

We should have this courage to speak up and enter into these conversations. And God says if you don’t do it, you can’t be a Christian engaged in the civil arena with civil matters, to speak into the gate of public policy. Understand that I see that, and I will hold you to account.

My son, eat honey because it’s good and a honeycomb which is sweet to your taste. So shall the knowledge of wisdom be to your soul. If you have found it, there is hope. Your hope will not be cut off.

Do not lie and wait at a wicked man against the dwelling of the righteous. Do not plunder his resting place. For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again.

You see, we have strength through this message. If we’re doing the right thing, engaging in the right way, God says, “Hope is ours.” Whether it’s short-term or long, the Lord God will move this nation toward righteousness again. We have a sure hope. And even if we’re defeated in the short time, God says you’re going to be raised up seven times. Don’t let fear hold you back. Be strong knowing that the Lord God controls all of history.

We are called to have strength in the hope that he ministers to us.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls. Do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.

You know, it’s good to rejoice when righteousness of God happens in a culture. It’s not good to rejoice because some poor guy has been crushed somehow under the weight of his own sin. You see, if we take personal delight and gloating sort of thing in that, then the Lord God says that’s wrong.

In the midst of the call to engage in civil policy matters and to rule of the land, we are called to exercise grace, graciousness.

Do not mock the Lord. God will turn away his wrath from him.

Do not fret because of evildoers or be envious of the wicked, for there will be no prospect for the evil man. There’s hope for you, no hope for them.

My son, fear the Lord and the king. Do not associate with those given to change, for their calamity will rise suddenly. Who knows the ruin these two can bring?

So the conclusion of this section, to tell you to engage in civil matters. Fear the Lord and the King. Again, just like earlier in this book in chapter 16, which you saw last week, the weaving together, the stitching together of Yahweh and the king. The king is to be a representation of Yahweh and his wisdom in the land.

The rulers in Multnomah County, the judges, the elected officials in this county, in Clackamas County—these are all to be reflections of the wisdom and civil understanding of Yahweh, the things that he has called us to do. We have obligation to engage this arena.

We’re meeting as pastors this Wednesday. We had met last Wednesday. Special meeting this Wednesday to talk about voter registration. What can people do today to try to do something? Well, the biggest thing you can do is be prepared to engage in this. Not in a fearful way, not in a way that makes it sound like you’re just scared to death of these people who engage in this particular sin.

I mean, there is a sense in which there’s an escalation of rebellion against God. But you know, they just are being led into this in so many ways. We don’t, you know, hate these people. As I said last week, those that are, you know, haters of the Lord Jesus Christ and are self-conscious in their attacks of the church, that’s another thing. But the average person now who is tempted to this activity, it is our job to rescue them from the slaughter.

Speak like that to your neighbors. Speak like that to your co-workers. Bring this message that, you know, our Christian faith is the only thing that can really produce soundness in the civil arena again.

But then the other thing we can do is register to vote. In order to sign a petition to change the constitution of the state of Oregon this November, we get those petitions back in May. The only way you can sign it is if you’re a registered voter. And the only way you’re going to be able to, you know, vote for good people and vote against evil people who want to hurt the homosexual community through saying it’s okay what they’re doing—the only way to affect that is through voting.

And so it is our obligation, I think, to enter into that. And so for the next three or four weeks in Oregon City, there will be a big push in all the churches, at least all the ones that are cooperating with our group, for voter registration and preparation for a potential petition drive in May to put this on the ballot.

Yahweh and the king are blended together.

Now, then there are a few more sayings of the wise here, and I know I’ve run long, but look at verse 23. These things also belong to the wise.

And then we got another three or four things. So we got 30, which is the bulk of it, and then a few more sayings of the wise. And it begins with the civil thing. It’s not good to show partiality in judgment.

So it begins with a kind of a kingly emphasis. And then in verse 27:

Prepare your outside work and make it fit for yourself in the field. Afterwards build your house.

Again emphasizing vocation and then the establishment of your family. So repeat the major themes of what’s going on here. The need to have good relationships with our neighbors.

Verse 28: Don’t be a witness against your neighbor.

Those are the first three. And then the last one, fourth of the slot again, is what I read at the conclusion of the scripture reading earlier, beginning at verse 30.

I went by the field of the lazy man, by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding. He has a field, he has a vineyard, and he has a wall. And the slothful man, his field and his vineyard have been trampled, and his wall is broken down.

We know by now what this imagery is all about. It’s the field and the vineyard. The nurturing work that man is called to do. The growing and establishment and manifestation of Christ’s kingdom on the earth is all pictured in the field and the vineyard. And at the same time, we have a guarding work to do. We have to have a wall.

You know, when we get to Hezekiah’s proverbs, the first section, the first chapter of Hezekiah’s proverbs begins with one similar to this. A man cannot rule his spirit; it’s like a city without walls. You see?

Well, the fool is one who is slothful, and his wall is broken down. He does not defend what God has given him to mature and to grow. And I mean, you’d have to be a blind man today to read these verses and not make immediate application to what’s happening now.

Are we concerned that there are men and women who are trampling now the possession of God, this portion of real estate, who are taking a country built primarily by self-conscious Christians, trampling it underfoot? Are we concerned that’s happened? Are we concerned that we have no defenses left to stop them legally from what they’ve done in Multnomah County?

Well, yeah, we are. We see what’s happening. He says here, you know, I saw it. I considered it well. I looked on it and received instruction.

Do we today? Do we perceive what’s going on in the pages of the Oregonian? Do we see it? Do we receive instruction? Do we know? Can we have enough wisdom to figure out what the basic problem is in this country right now?

The vineyard, the field is being trampled underfoot. The wall has been broken down. Why? Well, I see it. I consider it. I think it’s because of the slothfulness and maybe in some cases the cowardice of the church of Jesus Christ. Certainly the bad theology that’s retreated from the civil arena. Maybe there’s no common grace in the civil courts. There is no shared Judeo-Christian value. Those things mean nothing to this culture. This is an evolutionary mindset at work.

This is a culture now that has seen incredible transformations technologically. Why would we want to be tied in our social and marital ethics to the way those people that just were coming out of a pod did it? That argument won’t work. God’s taken away that argument.

“Well, it’s good for the children.” What do you know? You know that for the last 15 years gays have been adopting children in this thing? You know, do you know that, you know, probably nearly the majority of children are now raised by single-parent households? They don’t have both sexes represented to them. That argument isn’t going to wash. It’s just not going to work.

Praise God. The only argument that will work is: this is what the Lord God says. This is what truth is. The church of Jesus Christ has to wake up.

This pastor I was talking to, this accountant guy, said, “Well, we were talking about it in Camby. It’s like a sleeping giant being awoken.” I’ve heard that phrase three times this last week in discussions I’ve had. We’ll see. I don’t know. I hope that’s the case. I hope the church of Jesus Christ is a sleeping giant and not a dead one right now in this culture.

We’ll see over the next few weeks and months. We will know. Truth will come. And if not, then it will come when the civil government comes knocking on that door and says, “You know, in your church constitution and covenant, you have to say that homosexuality is an abhorrent sin. That’s illegal. That’s a hate crime.”

You don’t think that’ll happen soon? If this continues at this pace, we have not, as I said in my prayer, we’re not on a slippery slope anymore, folks. We’re on the edge of the abyss. This is unraveling.

Now, that’s the bad news. The good news is God says, “Consider it. Think about it. Look a little on the part of the church. What tremendous difficulties it’s produced. Our poverty has come upon us like a prowler, our need like an armed man.”

But is the Lord God’s arm shortened somehow because of that? 2,000 years of history of the proclamation of the gospel transforming the world. And even now in the midst of our culture, transforming Islam, making a kinder, gentler version, as they showed in Hidalgo, a Christianized version of Islam. We have nothing to fear except our own cowardice, our own slothfulness. That’s what’s produced the problem.

May the Lord God grant us the courage and boldness of the Lord Jesus Christ. No sluggard he. He fulfilled his work. Praise God. You know, we can meditate on the Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ. The same—see interesting connection of events and the providence of God—to focus upon the diligence of the Lord Jesus Christ to do the Father’s will, and the end result of that, as he says to his mother in the movie version at least, “See, mother, I make all things new.”

That’s the power of the Lord Jesus Christ in the church. May he grant us that power, that diligence to fulfill the work, including those last 10 sayings of the wise in our day and age.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we do ask you, Father, to transform us by your Spirit. Grant us the diligence of the Lord Jesus Christ, his courage, his boldness, his wisdom, his compassion, and his mercy as well. Do not let us, Lord God, be characterized as a people that are tight-lipped. Help us to be characterized, Lord God, as a people who love other people and want to rescue them from their foolish sins.

Grant us, Lord God, strength, courage, compassion. Grant us the character of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we ask it. Amen.