Read Proverbs 13
There is God’s way and there is
everything else and Solomon continues along the path of dichotomous sayings
intended to impart wisdom to us. So, I
could just say, “Here are some more golden nuggets.”
Occasionally, Solomon just makes a
statement of the human condition.
Consider verse 7.
One
person pretends to be rich, yet has nothing;
another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.
This doesn’t say be rich. It doesn’t say be poor. It says look at our human condition. We wear masks. We put on facades. The quality of honesty
comes from God and is not necessarily natural to our human nature.
The quip doesn’t define all, but
surely many.
I don’t have much
but I want people to think I am rich. That’s human nature.
I have
considerable wealth but don’t want people to know it.
That’s human nature.
I want people to think I measure up to
the world’s standards.
I don’t want people after me for money
all the time.
It’s just human nature. Solomon just throws one in that says here is
the playing field, guys.
One person pretends to be rich, yet
has nothing;
another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.
He follows this somewhat tangentially
with the next coupling.
The ransom of a man’s life is his
riches,
But the poor does not hear rebuke.
If you are rich and your kid is
kidnapped, you can pay to get him back.
The more you have the more you can pay.
If you don’t have much, who is going
to kidnap you anyway?
Not too long ago and not too far away,
I had a publisher that went out of business.
It was Tate Publishing. They
advertised themselves as a Christian publisher.
Before I signed on and gave them my retainer, I had a bunch of
questions. I didn’t need a vanity
publisher.
These guys seemed to be the real deal,
so I published about a dozen books through them. They were supposed to market these
books. Their marketing was terrible, so
I marketed them myself.
They were supposed to have
editors. They had style manualists—I
think I invented that term after a couple months with Tate. They could follow a style manual but didn’t
really have the wherewithal to be an editor.
They were not quite the package they
promised to be, but they did publish books.
They had that part down fairly well.
There were a few drawbacks, such as
they didn’t pay royalties. It was
understandable at first. Sometimes a
company waits for you to hit a threshold of a hundred dollars or so, before
they want to cut a check. That’s
understandable, but after a couple years, I wasn’t getting any checks and
neither was anyone else.
Then they were unable to do the one
thing they could actually do and that was publish books as the creditor that
owned the printing press reclaimed his property for non-payment. Tate Publishing was out of the publishing
business.
Many people sued Tate. I got all sorts of queries wanting me to join
the fray and sue these bums. I didn’t.
Why?
Because I would have probably
won. Even the attorney general was in on
the action pursuing what Tate had done from the criminal side. I think I would have won hands down if I had
sued. I don’t know how much, but I think
it would have been a few thousand dollars, maybe more. I think a court might have awarded punitive
damages as well. What they did was wrong
and they should have to pay.
So why didn’t I go after them?
Even if I won, how do I collect from
someone with no money? They went out of
business because they were broke. How do
I collect from someone who is broke? Sometimes it pays to be broke.
There was no ransom—no award—to be
had. Nobody goes after the guy with no
money. Plus, I think in our tax-heavy world, if I had won I would still owe
taxes on my award whether I received it or not.
It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just
the way things are. The rich are targets
because they can pay. The poor don’t have
the same problem.
By way of a rabbit trail, I liked the
President of Tate Publishing. He had
been a Marine door gunner in Vietnam. I
had come in contact with him a short time after I moved to Burns Flat and
wanted to get the school zone signs moved.
If you didn’t notice or remember, the
school zone signs used to be about 10 yards apart, at least as you were driving
south on State Highway 44. There was a
sign that said BEGIN SCHOOL ZONE and 10 yards later there was another sign that
said END SCHOOL ZONE. Then you came to
Webb Street and another 50 yards down the road you finally got to the school,
but by then you were out of the school zone.
For the first time since I had
returned to God’s country, I used the phrase, “That dog don’t hunt.”
I called the highway department. It was after all a state highway, but only
got an answering machine. After I week,
I went to the school superintendent’s office.
He said the school had no control over the sign and suggested the town
board. The town board said that I should
call the highway department. I had been
down that road.
I thought that I should make my local
representative aware of the issue. I did
and was told that he was too busy. Of all the tap dancing answers that
politicians sometimes use, I had never come across one that said, “I’m too busy
to look at issues in my district.”
You remember quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to
anger.
I was losing on the slow to anger front. Do you ever have those time
where you think it’s time for a streak of profanity or you need to go kill
something or someone with your bare hands?
OBTW—I didn’t think a run of bad words would be enough.
But, I decided to take one more stab
at getting this done through official channels.
It came down to a coin toss—Keating or Fallin. Fallin won the toss and I elected that she
received.
I fired off an email, thinking that it
would take a couple days to get through by phone. In an hour, I received an answer to my email
from the governor’s chief of staff. That
email said, “It will be fixed within 24 hours.”
My standard closing to correspondence
is generally, Semper Fidelis.
The chief’s closing was Take the
Hill.
I knew there was a Marine on the other
end of this dialogue. His name was Richard
Tate. After his government service, he started Tate Publishing as a Christian
publishing company. After a couple
years, he turned the business over to his son, Ryan Tate.
You might have seen Ryan on Fox News
years ago as a business consultant. You
haven’t seen him there in recent years because his business—my publisher—went
bust.
But the guy who started the business
was a good guy. Two hours after my
email, I was driving south on Highway 44 and went by the school and the signs
had been moved. The school was within the school zone.
I usually tell this story in
conjunction with teaching Acceptance of Authority and ask the question,
“Do you think I slow down in the school zone?”
Of course, I do. It’s my school zone.
Enough for today’s rabbit trail. Let’s move on to one of the most intriguing verses in the Proverbs.
A
good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for
the righteous.
You should leave something for your
children and their children. I will be
blessing my grandchildren with books by Tom Spence. They will have increased in value by the time
they get them because thanks to my publisher going out of business, they will
all be out of print.
We should leave something of this
world for our posterity who are still navigating this world. It might not be much but it says that I had
enough to provide for my family and bless others and still something to leave
my children’s children. It says that in
this life I was master over my money and not the other way around. We will get to that in chapter 22.
To be master over your money, you must
set aside your tithe before anything else.
Then you budget for your needs, for the needs of others, and for the
inheritance that you will leave. To be
master over your money and possessions, you have to use the “B” word—Budget.
You have to tell every dollar where to
go, and that includes what you will leave as an inheritance. It is good to leave an inheritance for your
children’s children and not all of you can give copies of Tom Spence books.
Every one of you can leave the most
valuable thing ever to your children and their children and that is the gospel
of Jesus Christ. This should be delivered
before you die. Your kids and grandkids
don’t need to wait for the reading of the will to receive this.
It’s good that you leave something of
worldly value to your kids and their kids when you are gone, but it is essential
that you share the gospel with them while you are still alive.
Let’s just call this Rabbit Trail
Sunday, because here is your next one.
On occasion, while I was at OSU, I
would drive down to Edmond and go out towards what is now Arcadia Lake and
spend the day with my grandfather. He
drove a grader for the county and did truck farming for longer than I could
imagine. He had retired from moving dirt
with a blade but never retired from growing watermelons.
Spending a day with him in his
retirement—and he was getting up there in years—involved sitting in 2 old
chairs in front of a black and white television and watching a baseball game or
at least 4 or 5 innings of it depending on when the signal was good and when it
wasn’t.
There was a wastebasket between our
chairs with a paper bag in it. That was
not for trash but for spitting in. My
grandfather would take out is tobacco pouch, take a chew and then hand me the
bag.
Just for the record, chewing tobacco
was healthy back then. Cigarettes were
becoming toxic, but chewing tobacco built strong bodies 12 ways.
As the reception was terrible—some of
you who get upset when your Netflix movie says buffering just can’t know the
pain of straining to see if you still had any picture at all—we had time to
talk.
One day it just hit me. I needed to ask my grandfather if he knew
Jesus Christ. How do you bring up this
question to a man who is decades older than you? My question was answered in moments.
He started telling me that out
of everything in life, knowing Jesus was the most important. All I had to do was keep acknowledging and
agreeing and he kept talking.
How would I broach the subject? Never had to.
He needed to tell me. I think he was happy that I had already been given
the good news by my parents and Sunday school teachers and actually knew some
of the Bible.
End of rabbit trail.
A good man leaves an inheritance to
his children’s children, and the best part of that inheritance is the gospel.
OK, that actually ties in with the message so it doesn’t count against my
rabbit trail quota.
Now, to the second part of this verse.
But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous
Consider this verse in the context of one we covered just a couple weeks ago.
Wealth is worthless in the day of
wrath,
but righteousness delivers from death.
You can’t buy a stairway to heaven and
you can take your wealth with you. The
righteous person knows that he can leave an inheritance to his kids and
grandkids, but the sinner is so short-sighted that he does not receive the gift
of life for his future or take care of his descendants when he is gone.
The wealth of the sinner is stored up
for the righteous. Some of us would like
to see some stimulus checks sent out when a sinner dies. Let’s divide up those proceeds right
now. I don’t think that one is quite on
the mark, but if it is I prefer my direct deposit.
Consider the Parable
of the Talents. Two servants are
told well done good and faithful servant. One is labeled wicked and lazy. When all is said and done, the first servant
who had five talents and made five more is given the talent of the third
servant who buried his talent in the ground.
You had better believe that the
disciples remembered Proverbs 13:22 (even though these quips of wisdom were not
enumerated then). The wealth of the
sinner is stored up for the righteous.
God will balance the scales as he sees
fit in his time. If there is a redistribution of wealth it will be as God
allocates it.
We have instructions as to what we are
to do. Be master over your money and possessions,
so much so that you tell everything you have and own what to do. This will bring glory to God and provision
your family as well as having some sort of inheritance for your children’s
children.
A good man leaves an inheritance to
his children’s children,
But the wealth of the sinner is stored
up for the righteous.
There is God’s way and there is
everything else and leaving an inheritance—especially the gospel of Jesus
Christ—is God’s way.
Amen.
