Proverbs 10:25

March 29, 2020

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 15:10 in the audio file.

Or, Solomon’s Tips for Establishing Your House in a Crisis

My wife reminded me of a scene from her all-time favorite movie (UHF) where Raul of Raul’s Wild Kingdom shows the audience his ant farm with the intricate little tunnels that took weeks and weeks for the ants to create. Then he picks up the whole farm and says, “They hate it when you do this,” shaking it like an stubborn Etch-a-Sketch.

God is really shaking things up around us. Maybe some of the things you’ve been building for weeks, or years, are wrecked. It doesn’t take as long for things to be broken. God is rattling the walls, and He’s opened up new windows, or at least made holes by knocking off the siding in some places. In a lot of ways life has been disrupted, and it’s not done yet. I’ve likened it to being dealt a hand of cards, and before you get your turn, the dealer takes your cards back and gives you a new hand. You make your plan, and before your next turn, the dealer decides to choose a different game. No matter how flexible you are, it’s wild. It’s tiring.

I’ve been thinking that “virus time” is sort of like dog years; the age rate is exponential at the beginning. When Peter wrote that with the Lord, a thousand years is as one day (2 Peter 3:8), is this what it feels like? And it leads to the eternal question: which came first, the lockdowns or the meltdowns?

This is why the author of Hebrews wrote, “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reference and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). He gives and He takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21). Behold, today is the day for worship. And tomorrow will be a day requiring wisdom.

We are being tested, whatever else God is doing, which I pointed out from 1 Peter 1:6 last Lord’s Day. God is refining our faith, and, what I want to encourage you with today, is that God is establishing our houses. He has sent a whirlwind, and those with wisdom will be better for it.

It’s stated simply in Proverbs 10:25.

When the tempest passes,

the wicked is no more,

but the righteous is established forever.

The “tempest” (ESV) could be translated as “whirlwind.” It’s a word used a few times in Solomon’s collection of proverbs. And this verse gives a few impressions. First, whirlwinds are for all, including both ends of the character spectrum, the wicked and the righteous. Whirlwinds are no respecters of persons. And second, the verse gives the impression that there are whirlwinds, plural. The proverb is axiomatic, it’s a universal truth. This verse isn’t describing the “Great Tempest” at the end of the age, it acknowledges that whirlwinds can keep coming. And the third impression is that whirlwinds pass. They come, they may come in waves, but then they go. Borrowing an idea from C.S. Lewis, it is not “always virus, never vacation.” So what do they leave behind?

The righteous are “established forever.” To be established is to have roots, to have the stability and strength of a deep foundation, so deep you need an elevator to get down to the bottom. The wicked are not so.

The coronavirus is a kind of whirlwind. It is a vortex of sickness and fear. In this whirlwind it is hard to breath, and hard to do business. You can’t really tell where the next piece of mayhem is going to come from. Clearly there is a storm in many respiratory systems, and there is a tornado in our economic systems.

I am not an epidemiologist, but from what I understand, God must have selected this particular virus out of His irony warehouse. Listen to this description, “the corona connects to a specific receptor on its victims membranes…[a[...]