CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN PROVERBS AND OTHER SCRIPTURES

Two of Jim Goad's “30 Contradictions in the Bible” concern the book of Proverbs. The first pair of passages is shown below.

    Proverbs 12:22 – “Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who act faithfully are his delight.”

    I Kings 22:23 – “So you see, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these your prophets; the LORD has decreed disaster for you.”

To begin with, Waltke helps to define some of the phrases in the Proverbs passage: “An abomination to the LORD...signifies that liars so repulse his nature that he casts them aside. The synecdoche lying lips...refers to fools, whose unreliable character cause them to distort facts either unintentionally (12:17) and/or intentionally (vv. 19b, 20a).”

As to the apparent contradiction itself, Kaiser has dealt with it in some length, but only a few of his comments will be quoted here: “It is a known characteristic of popular conceptions to express in an imperatival and active form things which we understand only to be permitted...So here in I Kings 22:22, 'Go and do it' (i.e., deceive Ahab's false prophets) signifies only permission, not a command or sponsorship. What really took place then was that God allowed a lying spirit to speak through the false prophets to deceive Ahab, for that is what he has made up his mind he wanted to hear. The efficient cause of the deception was not God, but the lying spirit....Since Ahab had abandoned Yahweh his God, hardened his own heart, and determined to use prophecy for his own purposes, God allowed him to be ruined by the very instrument he sought to prostitute. Instead of using the heathen nations as his rod of chastisement (Isa. 10:5), he uses Ahab's false prophets.” In other words, this situation is no different that the times God “hardens” someone's heart. He is not creating the hardening but just accelerating the hardness which is already present.

Kaiser next critiques other approaches to remove the charge of lying from God which he believes are inadequate. These include the following:

    1. People and God Himself do not need to always adhere to the absolute truth, but can lie in unusual cases. (Rushdoony)

    2. Lying by God is not just a case of permission but is a purposeful act of God to bring punishment on a person through the evil that person does. (Bahr and Sumner)

    3. God does in fact work evil directly, but without willing it or bringing forth sin. (Keil)

The second pair of contradictory passages is:

    Proverbs 24:17 – “Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble.”

    Psalm 58:10-11 – “The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.”

One would think that these two passages could easily be compared against one another since they both belong to the same general class of the Poetry and Wisdom Books in the Bible. But that is not entirely true. One characteristic of the Psalms is that most of them primarily express the honest, unedited feelings and raw emotions of the Psalmist as he turns to God in joy, anger, frustration, thanks, etc.

In contrast, the proverbs are cast in the form of dispassionate school lessons given by a loving father to his young son which attempt to instill in him the general principles of wisdom which should guide his future actions in life.

Next, some comments regarding Proverbs 24 are in order:

“To be glad at the discomfiture of an enemy is to express hatred of him, and to provoke God by assuming prematurely that God is on one's side. Cf. xxv 21-22; Exod xxiii 4-5; Matt v 43-45).” (Scott)

Waltke adds, “In truth the proverb teaches that the LORD will not promote further moral ugliness by maintaining the situation that exacerbates it. His righteousness demands justice, but his holiness demands that he desist. The two wrongs of the wicked person's actions and the son's reaction offset one another. However, the proverb does not address the wrongs done to God. Other texts teach that those sins will be punished (11:21; 16:5)...One may legitimately hope for God to right wrongs (2 Tim. 4:14) and should celebrate when God's righteousness prevails, but one must not nurse malignant revenge (cf. 2 Sam. 1:10; Job 31:29; Ps. 35:11-15; Luke 19:41-44).”

I think all would be in agreement with the above sentiments. But the problem seems to come in with the bloodthirsty comments in Psalms 58. Besides keeping in mind the fact that it well expresses the Psalmist's honest feeling toward the wicked, here are some other things to keep in mind:

Anderson: “We need not whitewash sentiments which are obviously pre-Christian in more than one sense, but it would be equally wrong to misunderstand these Psalms. The wicked could well be described as breakers of the Covenant oath, and therefore the Psalmist simply asks God to take the evil-doers at their word; this is hardly different from taking action against a perjurer in modern courts. In the blood of the wicked: this is clearly a hyperbolic expression which affirms, in its own way, that the righteous will see the total defeat of wrong and evil.”

Tanner: “The words are harsh, and it is here that we get some idea of the depth of the suffering by the one praying...The injustice is so pervasive that other options have ceased to be possible. But the true resolution lies in v. 11, not in v. 10 and its gruesome imagery...The bloodbath signals the end of the old regime (as it does in Ezekiel 37 and the book of Revelation) in v. 10 and the beginning of a new age of God's justice in v. 11. This psalm could be labeled by some as un-Christian because of its harsh wishes (vv. 7-9) and its gloating literally in the blood of the wicked (v. 10). Its words are hard to hear, and its wishes certainly do not reflect an attitude of 'love your enemies.' Instead, it reflects the reality of human systems that are so polluted that there is nowhere to turn for justice...In this psalm, the audience, if it can release its judgmental reading, can look for a moment through the eyes of persons forced to reside in such systems...From this perspective, the audience can hear anew the call to God to end oppression and bring forth a kingdom of justice.”

The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery has this to say in general concerning this sort of psalm: “The imprecatory psalms that call down curses on the poet's enemies present a variation on the revenge motif. The very fact that the speaker involves God to perform the vengeance reflects the omnipresent biblical premise that vengeance belongs to God (Prov 20:22; Rom 12:19; Heb 10:30), yet the vividness with which the poet prays for vengeance shows that the wished-for revenge has a human component as well.”

We will again conclude with comments from Kaiser, who starts out by summarizing various unsatisfactory ways of downplaying the comments of the Psalmist:

    1. These Old Testament ideas are no longer applicable in an age of grace.

    2. These are not actual desires for someone's doom, but just a prediction of it happening.

    3. Only spiritual, not human, enemies are in view here.

    4. These are only the misguided feelings of uninspired authors.

He strikes down these approaches systematically and then turns to Chalmers Martin for a description of valid principles which should be kept in mind when we are reading the imprecatory psalms:

    1. These are expressions of the OT saint for the vindication of God's righteousness.

    2. These are utterances of great zeal for the coming of God and his kingdom.

    3. These are ways in which the authors indicate their absolute abhorrence of sin.

    4. They are humble requests to God that he do to the ungodly what he had already vowed to do if they persisted in their sin.

Somewhat unspoken but behind all of the above comments is the fact that Proverbs 24 appears to be directed to those who are seeking personal vengeance on personal enemies they have. But in Psalms 58, the speaker views these wicked people as primarily the enemy of God, not themselves, and wishes Him to be vindicated.