I grew up during a time when the hazards of smoking were beginning to penetrate the public consciousness. There were warnings about fetal deformities, lung cancer, and heart problems. Eventually, in my young mind, it meant that you would “catch” cancer if you sneaked and smoked a Kool Menthol out of your mom’s purse. Of all the kids that did this (including myself), not once did coronary disease ever suddenly break out. “It happens after a long time,” a solemn adult told me. And yet, as a kid, I couldn’t deny I knew of people who lived to advanced ages while smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes.
Were grown-ups just trying to scare me?
Sometimes this is how we treat the Bible’s warnings and promises concerning the way we live our lives. Though the Scriptures threaten evil works with the worst sort of consequences, exceptions seem to exist all over the map. Evil often triumphs and is lauded. And though the Bible encourages righteousness with real-world rewards, deviations to that promise occur everywhere as well. Good is suppressed and lambasted just enough that it has spawned the cynical old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Then is the Bible just trying to scare us with warnings that have no teeth?
Hardly.
The wisdom principles of Scripture, such as in the book of Proverbs, invite us to see the world in likelihoods, not black and white certainties.
In Grasping God’s Word, Duvall & Hays write, “Proverbs present the rational, ordered norms of life. The many proverbs in the book are not universals (i.e., things that are always true), but rather norms of life (i.e., things that are normally true).” For instance, “Wise, righteous, hardworking people can expect a blessed, prosperous life while foolish, sinful, lazy people can expect a hard life.” Not only does God’s wisdom tell us this, but it is easily verifiable by observing the world around us.
But the Bible doesn’t leave us with such a neat, certain picture. It admits that there will be exceptions. Because for every crooked accountant penalized for cooking the books, every high-level executive jailed for embezzlement, every drug dealer murdered, every illicit sexual liaison exposed, every crime spree that ends on death row, there are those that get away scott- free, or even continue with impunity. They seem to hide in plain sight, justice overlooking them as surely as if they were camouflaged.
The wisdom book of Ecclesiastes speaks of this conundrum by portraying our world as cruel and irrational. But the wisdom book of Job presents the experience of one righteous man caught up in that maelstrom, of one who seems a stark contradiction to every positive promise.
In Job 20, someone had tried to present Job with one of those wicked-do-not-prosper maxims (which, according to Proverbs, is true). But Job countered it in the next chapter (21) with his personal observation of the wicked:
9 Their houses are safe from fear,
and no rod of God is upon them.
10 Their bull breeds without fail;
their cow calves and does not miscarry.
11 They send out their little boys like a flock,
and their children dance.
12 They sing to the tambourine and the lyre
and rejoice to the sound of the pipe.
13 They spend their days in prosperity,
and in peace they go down to Sheol.
14 They say to God, ‘Depart from us!
We do not desire the knowledge of your ways.
15 What is the Almighty, that we should serve him?
And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’
16 Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand?
The counsel of the wicked is far from me…
19 You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children.’
Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it.
That last verse was Job’s wry sarcasm that If the wicked were supposed to suffer for their evil, they apparently hadn’t gotten the memo. None of them were “catching” cancer.
Jesus Himself spoke a parable about a poor man named Lazarus, and a rich man, both of whom lived out their lives in their own separate trajectories. The rich man ignored Lazarus’s pathetic pleas for help and continued his partying all the way to his death (which didn’t mention a grueling or premature end, getting run over by an oxcart, etc.). Likewise, Lazarus continued his misery until his death.
Not until after death did God distribute manifest judgments between the two. The warnings of Proverbs will all pay out, but some don’t until after the coffin lid closes.
God has many reasons for allowing this kind of continuum. Some of it has to do with the mysteries of His longsuffering toward evil–His making time for repentance so the evil man can find saving refuge in the arms of Christ or proving that regardless of His patience, such repentance would never happen.
For those of us inclined to wonder if the Bible is just another Surgeon’s Warning label that might or might not apply, Paul wrote in Galatians 6, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (vv 7-9).
These verses have a proverbial tone to them (the wisdom of Proverbs) but recognize the antagonistic forces around us that grind us down and make us want to give up (the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job).
But as people who have been redeemed by Christ, we can never agree with despair. Certainly, when things turn out, God is working. When they don’t, God is still working.
- Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible, J. Scott Duvall, J. Daniel Hays; Zondervan, 2012, p. 424
- Ibid, p. 424
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
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