Deed and Consequence
A Key to Reading the Wisdom Literature Without Being a Legalist
“Train up a child in the way he should go,” and “Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place,” and so on with many similar passages.
But, someone will say, “I served the Lord and I raised my kids right, but they did depart from the path,” and “I did trust in the Lord, and yet evil and plague have come to me!” So what gives?
Misapplication of proverbial truths, or failure to appreciate their peculiar settings, will have far reaching consequences in real life. At the heart of proper interpretation is a principle that has been called the “deed-consequence relationship”
What is this idea? In the words of Scripture, it is this: “whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). This plays out in various ways in the Bible.
In the covenant-law context, life is the consequence for which obedience is the deed, and conversely with disobedience and death. In both Eden and Canaan, that meant at least continued life in the land as opposed to exile. Applied to the wisdom literature, blessing follows listening to the voice of wisdom (Prov. 3:13) and the curse follows listening to the voice of folly (Prov. 14:1).
Job and Ecclesiastes may present difficulties to this, but there is already a framework to handle these difficulties in the Proverbs. That leads straight to the thesis which I intend to demonstrate: namely, that,
The ordinary wisdom of the deed-consequence relationship must be subordinated to the sovereignty and glory of God. Divine sovereignty is the first cause that often upsets our horizontal expectations; and divine glory is the final cause that is God’s reason for doing so. This is extraordinary wisdom.
By this wisdom we will mean both our interpretive understanding and our real life applications of the deed-consequence relationship. It is important to note what my argument is not. It is not that God’s sovereignty and glory ever eradicate the deed-consequence relationship; only that these subordinate that relationship.
The Structure of Proverbs as a Clue to a Norm
Chapters 1 through 9 give an overview of wisdom and folly. We could call this the “theological lens” of the book. Chapters 10 through 15 reinforce the deed-consequence relationship; and then 16:1-22:16 refine that relationship. In other words the section giving antithetical proverbs (10-15) clearly contrasts the two ways (wisdom and folly), whereas 16:1-22:16 confronts us with nuance in the relationship. There the phrase “better than” is constantly used.
These proverbs all have a common theological thread. The eternal blessings of wisdom override whatever advantage could be gained by folly. In each of the comparisons, there is an implied temporal advantage to the foolish path; but there is something even “better than” that. More importantly, perhaps, 16:1-22:16 give us numerous exceptions to the normal deed-consequence relationship. The very fact that so many proverbs show this nuance tells us that a broader form of wisdom is being displayed here than the narrower (albeit deep) wisdom in Job and Ecclesiastes.
Proverbs is written to the male perspective. In light of the torah of the parents (6:20), the wisdom of the Proverbs is a kind of real-life exposition of the fifth commandment. Thus, “long life is in her right hand” (3:16). That is, the young man who listens to Lady Wisdom early and often will, in general, live long in the land (2:21-22). However “in general” is the key phrase. “General” and “Universal” are not strict synonyms. A general truth is a kind of norm, but there are exceptions. A universal truth is one that is always true without any exception.
The difference can be seen in a famous case. Proverbs 22:6 is often treated as a guarantee from God about our children, even a quid pro quo. If I apply x unit of sound instruction and discipline, then God is obliged to save my children. So goes the thinking.
The overall structure of the Proverbs informs how we treat each individual proverb. A fitting definition in this light is a “paradigm” [1]. For example, it is generally true that, “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom” (3:13); but it does not follow that blessing will be universally felt as a result. More often than not wisdom will put us out of step with the spirit of the age, forcing us to deal with uncomfortable truths. Each individual proverb will give us a pattern that we can count on in a given context, so long as we leave room for mystery.
If each proverb is to be read as an entity in itself, with no other context, as McKane argues [2], this may present some challenge. However there could still be a unified picture. As it is, there is structure in the sections and groupings. Taken as a whole the Proverbs are sophisticated. Lucas remarks that, “Poverty can be the result of injustice (13:23) and not laziness (10:4). Injustice can lead to wealth (16:8). Indeed, several of the ‘better than’ sayings reflect the injustices and inequalities of life, which leave the righteous at a disadvantage (e. g. 15:16)” [3]. So there is generalization, but there is also nuance. They are more like patterns than prophecies. That a single proverb can only say so much is balanced by so many sayings that present multiple perspectives.
Absolutizing and Relativizing Proverbial Truth
To absolutize such a truth is to make the consequence follow the deed by resistless logic and in all possible worlds. In other words, such a truth would be as necessary as God himself. On the other hand, to relativize such a truth need not commit the opposite error. A truth may be relative to any set of superior truths. It does not imply that a proverb’s truth is as particular as each and every circumstance. It is not that relative. It is only relative to some larger context.
VanGemeren calls the sayings “situational” and “subject to divine sovereignty” [4]. He also suggests a theological grounding for this variation in the wisdom canon: “Proverbs addresses the first level of understanding God: the God of revelation and harmony. Other wisdom books (Job and Ecclesiastes) address the more complex world: the world of God’s hiddenness” [5]. It may be paradoxical to say, but it would seem that the more diverse and rarer mysteries so mishandled by Job’s three friends give us a glimpse into the deeper will of God. Deeper, but a narrower application of wisdom.
At the heart of the Wisdom books is the question: Where can wisdom be found? As we look from the perspective of a completed canon, and on this side of the coming of Christ, the answer may seem simple. For example, we who possess the completed canon can read how Job begins in the heavenly courtroom drama and how it ends in vindication and restoration. Yet in the middle of the dispute, none of that was evident. It is unsurprising, then, that part of their argument was over the source of wisdom. At one point Job sarcastically snaps at them: “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you … Who does not know such things as these?” (12:2, 3)
Another way to describe wisdom in the context of this thesis is that it skillfully discovers the mean between total absolutizing and total relativizing of any deed-consequence relationship. Wisdom is that which applies the correct “principle-tool” to its corresponding ethical job.
That is the beauty of the side-by-side comparison of answering the fool (cf. 26:4-5). The two seemingly contradictory dealings only make sense if there are two kinds of fools, or at least two stages of a fool’s life, or perhaps two scenarios of one’s own relation to the fool.
What the Proverbs hold out as the starting point in which the consequences are discerned is the fear of the LORD. Such fear is not that servile and suspicious terror of the guilty, but the awe-inspired impulse to know God above all else. This fear meant the same throughout Israel’s history, as Lucas argues, “‘fearing Yahweh’ came to mean having a loyalty to, and love for, Yahweh that is shown in obedience to his commandments … However, there is no reason to assume that in Proverbs the concept has become purely moral in content and lost the connotations of religious awe and devotion” [6]. Such fear prevents us from reducing even the supposedly “secular” proverbs to mere calculations for an egotistical life. That pagans can agree with many of the same things does not mean these can be torn from their eternal context. Kidner puts this well: “Proverbs is concerned to point out that what is right and what pays may travel long distances together; but it leaves us in no doubt which we are to follow when their paths diverge” [7].
In the fear of the LORD, wisdom looks for this point of departure. What pays off in this life must be valued only relative to what yields eternal blessing.
Another contrast that makes our standard clear is the following: “A rich man's wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin (10:15); but later we read, “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death” (11:4). Now would it be simplistic to conclude that one deals with the temporal and the other with the eternal? I do not think so. Another crucial proverb is this: “The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil” (8:13). Temporal consequences aside, to hate evil for the sake of eternal good: this implies that all other negative consequences mentioned in the Proverbs may even be accepted relative to gaining God. If one hates evil, then even a long life (which is a blessing promised in other proverbs) may be forsaken.
If “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (1:7, 9:10), then for that reason, wisdom will consist in humbly allowing for mystery in the unique way that God is dealing with each individual circumstance. Our application of the ways of God must be as diverse as God has ways. But this implies that we will have very few applications that feature a one-to-one correspondence to the truth. Even principles that apply across the board must be ministered diversely to different types of people. Consequently the error of Job’s three friends will be found in the degree to which they lacked this very wisdom. It may be that the perspective of Qohelet in Ecclesiastes is to be understood as falling short in this same way.
Covenant Life “in the Land” — Proverbs 2:21-22 as an Interpretive Clue
Scholars have often complained that the book of Proverbs lacks that same redemptive-spiritual quality as all of the other Old Testament books. Not only in its mode of discovery (which does not obviously appear to be unique divine revelation), but also in its content. However another subdivision of my thesis is that phrases like “inhabit the land” and “cut off from the land” ought to be understood in the same way as their usage in Deuteronomy. That is not to say that the Gentile reader may not apply the same principle to himself. It is of general application.
But canonical context is king here. Children in the fifth commandment are a kind of microcosm of a whole people group; and Proverbs 2:21-22 understands the same deed-consequence relationship: “For the upright will inherit the land … but the wicked will be cut off from the land.” Upright and wicked are nothing other than the character description of those who obey and those who disobey.
As the typological people of God, Israel’s stay on the land and subsequent eviction were likewise typological. I take it that when Bildad not so subtly suggested that Job’s children suffered the same fate as all the wicked (Job 8:4) and that when Job subsequently confessed, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (19:25-26), that he saw at stake an eternal inheritance both for himself and his children. Why else was he making sacrifices for them in Chapter 1? Calvin acknowledges that Job could have partly meant some hope in mediation and future reward in this life. However, he adds, “Job never could have attained such fullness of hope if his thoughts had risen no higher than the earth” [8]. Life “in the land” or “under the sun” can seem like a vast plane when one is inside of it. And it is not unimportant. We rightly say that it “counts for eternity,” but it should not be confused with eternity.
How then does the supremacy of the eternal promises and the typological language of “live long in the land” help us interpret the deed-consequence relationship in specific cases? In short, the consequence always follows the deed relative to God working out all things for his glory and the believer’s good (cf. Rom. 8:28). But that “all things” is the catch.
The consequence following the deed in each particular circumstance is always only one thing. And all things are always infinitely more than that one thing. That may seem a very disappointing principle if our main goal in life is to ensure a moral uniformity to our experience. The three friends of Job and Qohelet in Ecclesiastes take as their starting point the one-dimensional plane of life inside the horizontal system of morality and meaning. They teach us wisdom by their deficiencies in it.
Deed and Consequence in a Closed System of Morality
In his commentary on Job, Christopher Ash refers to the worldview of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as “the system” [9]. They paid lip service to God’s sovereignty and justice. Indeed they said many true things about the ways of God. However, such truths were isolated from the infinite-personal nature of God, and so became untruths. They were truths reduced to a “closed system of morality.” The ways of God were set into the order of nature such that a one-to-one correspondence was expected between x deed and its rightful consequence. The moral actor and his lot were not open to God’s free and mysterious dealing with the person as an individual case.
There is a logical fallacy in the friends’ reasoning called affirming the consequent. In this case it takes the following form: (1) If a man sins, then he suffers; (2) Job is suffering; (3) Therefore, Job has sinned.
The point is not that there could be no connection. There could be. The point is that it does not follow of logical necessity. But in the friends’ moral system, there was no other possible cause: “As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (Job 3:8). It is important to make this point so that my thesis is not seen to ignore the connection between sin and suffering. Take the instance of the man born blind in John 9. Jesus was not denying that all suffering is ultimately caused by sin — in the sense of its blameworthy source. Nor was he really denying that the parents or the man had sinned. The larger point is that God is always working out hidden purposes for his greater glory. Each unique, divine means to his greater glory intrudes into the system of horizontal deed and consequence.
There are two pieces of the puzzle set in place in the first two chapters: (1) God initiates the trial: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8, 2:3); and (2) Satan ultimately assaults God’s worth in suggesting that Job could only have mercenary reasons to love him (1:9-11, 2:4-5). What these two facts demonstrate is that God was putting God on trial in the book of Job, so that in the end, what Job gained through suffering was a greater glimpse of God: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (42:5). God was using Satan, sin, and suffering for the true end of wisdom, which is far greater than the clockwork ticking of deed and consequence.
However, even if we embrace this God-centered thesis, why do Chapters 3 through 37 exist? Why do their voices go on in such confident ignorance as they do? This too must be considered divinely intentional. It cannot be simply that God is vindicating himself through suffering. My thesis also implies that there is something blameworthy about the three friends’ thinking, and that this is communicated to us so that we may reject their way of thinking. In a nutshell, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar have no categories of the deed-consequent relationship except in a closed system of morality. Yes, God is sovereign and just in their view, but this “sovereignty and justice” make up the fixed fabric of the universe more than they form expectations of the infinite-personal God to intrude in unique ways with moral actors.
It would not be totally unfitting to compare their worldview to a kind of Moralistic Deism, or, we might even say, a “Christian karma.” What goes around in our moral performance comes around in our lot in life. And so we legalistically read that backwards to fix blame.
Fox attempts to transcend those who interpret Job as refuting the notion of divine retributive justice and those who think it shows God amoral. Rather, “God does reward and punish and compensate, but incompletely. Justice—the invariable and appropriate reward or punishment for all deeds—is immensely important to God, but it may be overridden by other principles” [10]. Unfortunately Fox then defines faith in God through suffering as acceptance that he is often unjust, and concludes that God needs human help in governance. That would come as a surprise to the God who challenges Job in his second speech precisely to govern the world! Putting that aside, we will at least find agreement that God’s justice in this lifetime is often subordinated. However it is never overridden by injustice, but subordinated to a greater justice. Another more orthodox commentator insists that Job had never cast doubt on God’s justice, only that he had not personally experienced it [11].
In the bulk of the narrative, Job and the three friends (as well as Elihu) are all in the “closed system of morality.” Job’s vantage point is even more specific: the ash heap. From there darkness really is more blessed than the day of his birth (3:3-26), God really does appear in pursuit of him (7:12-21). None of this is to deny that, once atop the ashes, Job does sin in saying some of the things he said. But when the book rules that Job was in the right and that, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (1:22, cf. 2:10), it is specifically addressing his speech that is on trial in the heavenly courtroom and in the debate with the friends. In other words: Did Job’s sin - with his lips or otherwise - judicially earn this suffering? And the answer is a resounding No. The abundant testimony in Scripture of the wicked prospering in this life (cf. Ps. 73) is sufficient to upend the moralistic system of the friends.
Deed and Consequence in a Closed System of Meaning
Unlike in the book of Job, the closed system of Ecclesiastes is a pursuit of meaning. The phrase “under the sun” is used twenty-nine times to speak of life either apart from God or else with God at a distance. By this closed system I mean nothing more than the “limited approach which does not take into account heavenly realities” [12]. Like the book of Proverbs, the dominant speaker in this book has a method of “observation and reflection” [13]; yet he comes to some radically different conclusions.
The basic interpretive difficulty is to discover whether the dominant note is optimism or pessimism. Is the recurring “vanity” (hebel) universal, as suggested by the word “everything” (kol)? Is it the last word? Are the calls to enjoyment nothing but a cruel tease? My own view, concisely stated, is that Qohelet never comes out of it in the course of this writing. He is struggling against the wisdom tradition that raised him. And though God is the giver of all good things that may be enjoyed under the sun, God is not brought in as a final resolution to the tensions. What do even the best things in life profit? (cf. 1:3, 2:2, 3:9, 5:11) The answer is clear: nothing.
Another recurring idea is that, “the same event happens to all of them” (2:14, cf. 9:3, 11). That is, the righteous and the wicked, the wise and the foolish. 3:20 says the same about man and beast. All of this means that the best sense of kol is really everything [14], since even the best things in life come to nothing. There may have been a second perspective (not to be confused with a redactor in conflict with the struggling Qohelet [15]), concluding the book with a caution toward hasty dabbling in the wisdom enterprise. This becomes a satisfactory way to resolve Qohelet’s unorthodox conclusions with the divine inspiration of the book. In this way, God is instructing his people in the absurdity of life without him.
A mature application of the deed-consequence relationship to Ecclesiastes would then expect there to be tension. A crucial text is 3:11: “he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
As Pascal famously said, “Man is wretched and man is great.” What is his greatness? It is this void that nothing in the world can satisfy. Does not the fact that these tensions bother Qohelet so much prove something? A being who exists for nothing more would pay no mind to the tension.
On the other hand 3:11 says that God restricts this sense of eternity. We hear that God is just. If we are a reflective person, we may even be able to reason that there must be an eternal justice? And yet this does not satisfy us when we see a particular criminal getting away with murder. We do not know what God is doing.
This is the best way to explain the “yes-but principle” of Hertzberg applied to 8:11-14. “Although Qohelet does not completely deny 8:12b-13, they do not stand up to the reality of life as he has observed it” [16]. In this case, yes it will go well with those who fear God, but there is much hebel that remains. Nothing in Qohelet’s closed system of meaning resolves this. And all four of the interpretive approaches must deal with the tension.
What my thesis suggests is not some novel approach to Ecclesiastes but the more modest point that the sovereignty of God is the pole directing wisdom’s compass through the tensions. God reserves the perfect distribution of justice for the Last Judgment. Short of that we would have to agree with the assessment of this book.
Since we have already applied this to the hearing of a just case with Job, we should confine our focus on Ecclesiastes to the value of possessing wisdom. The act of acquiring wisdom may not seem like a “deed,” but observing and reading and reflecting are all actions with moral implications. This is all the more pertinent for the kind of reasoning activity that wisdom entails. Wisdom is for practical living: the arena of moral action. Proverbs is emphatically positive in saying, “Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (4:7). By contrast, Qohelet claims to have surpassed all in wisdom, yet concludes that, “in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (1:18).
The reader of Scripture may detect a conflict. Proverbs says increasing wisdom is good; Ecclesiastes says increasing wisdom is (on the whole) bad. A deeper wisdom will need to choose between those deeds of wisdom that lie on the surface of each. Underneath one will find the eternal consequence to the wisdom that is found in Christ (cf. Col. 2:2-3).
The very practical nature of wisdom makes it unsuitable for discerning the exact ‘why’ and ‘when’ and ‘how’ of God’s providential distributions. Wisdom is for our lives, not for peering into the life of God. It is wisdom enough, then, to mind our business.
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1. Sandy, D. Brent & Ronald L. Giese, ed. Cracking Old Testament Codes (Nashville: B & H, 1995), 235
2. McKane referenced in Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1985), 48-49
3. Ernest C. Lucas, Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Psalms and Wisdom Literature (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 112
4. Willem VanGemeren, in Miles V. Van Pelt, ed. A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), 380
5. VanGemeren, in Van Pelt. 382
6. Lucas, Exploring the Old Testament, 110
7. Kidner. Proverbs (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1964), 31
8. John Calvin, Institutes, II.10.19
9. Christopher Ash, Job (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), especially 160-166
10. Michael V. Fox, “The Meanings of the Book of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 137, no. 1 (2018), 8
11. cf. Francis I. Andersen, Job (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1976), 140
12. Richard Belcher, Ecclesiastes (Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2017), 47
13. Belcher, “Ecclesiastes,” in Van Pelt. Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, 450
14. cf. Belcher, Ecclesiastes, 74-75
15. The “R1 and R2” model was put forth within the Heterodox Qohelet view - cf. Belcher in Van Pelt. 445
16. Belcher, Ecclesiastes, 46
