By Robin Sam
THIS morning I was reading Proverbs 10 and I was struck by the number of times the word ‘righteous’ is mentioned in it. I counted all the 32 verses in it and found out that the word ‘righteous’ occurs nine times and its offshoot ‘righteousness’ occurs once. It’s almost like the Righteous Lord our God is crying for our attention by using the refrain two short of a dozen times. It’s like a compilation of the Righteous Man’s Blessings.
It’s amazing what righteousness can do to your anatomy. Verse 3 says ‘The Lord will not allow the righteous soul to famish…’ That’s providence for your body, mind and soul. Three verses down the line, we find this verse ‘Blessings are on the head of the righteous…’ Why should blessings rest upon the head? That’s the Lord’s anointing and head is the rightful place for it. If you had thought being righteous is neither profitable for this world nor for the hereafter, look at verse 7. It says ‘The memory of the righteous is blessed, but the name of the wicked will rot.’ That’s a promise and a warning for anyone who thinks there’s no eternity and one’s conduct on the earth does not matter. The righteous man may have died but his legacy will live on much after he’s left the world. The wicked man has no such legacy. His portion is to rot forever in hell.
I like verse 11 the best: ‘The mouth of the righteous is a well of life…’ That’s a great allegory. In proverbs 5:3 we see that the ‘lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil’. Pretty tempting alright, but ‘in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword’, we are warned. The righteous man’s (and woman’s) mouth will speak truth; there is nothing crooked or perverse in it (Proverbs 8:7-8).
The Lord’s blessings for the righteous man are holistic. The Lord makes sure his labor is rewarded (verse 16 in Proverbs 10). The blessings don’t stop with that. ‘The tongue of the righteous is choice silver’ (verse 20); ‘The lips of the righteous feed many’ (v 21); ‘the desire of the righteous will be granted’ (v 24); he ‘has an everlasting foundation’ (v 25); his hope will be ‘gladness’ not fear or doom (v 28). ‘The righteous will never be removed’ (v 30).
It’s interesting to note that the righteous will neither be moved (for his foundation is everlasting) nor removed. And because his mouth is a well of life, he brings out wisdom from it (v 31). He says the right things at the right time because the righteous man’s lips know what is acceptable (Proverbs 10:32; Proverbs 15:23). He will not be scoffed but receive honor because ‘A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver’ (Proverbs 25:11).
How on earth do you know if you are righteous? Romans 3: 10 says: ‘No one is righteous, not even one.’ That should not, however, make us despondent. The verse only underlines the fundamental truth about mankind – that we are all fallen beings.
1 John 3:7 says: ‘Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.’ The import of the verse cannot be overstressed. While it looks like a very simple definition of a righteous man, the writer adds prompted by the Holy Spirit, ‘as he is righteous’. Left to ourselves, we cannot be righteous.
It is in Jesus that we find the hallmark of righteousness. The righteousness of Jesus will make us Christ-like. It is by our faith in him that we are commended as righteous (Hebrews 11:4). We have a choice today to be righteous by admitting our sins and submitting ourselves to God and being washed in his blood. Whether the blessings of the righteous will descend upon our head or not will depend on the decision we make.
Robin Sam is the founding editor of The Christian Messenger newspaper. A journalist with over 16 years of experience, he has worked with The Indian Express, Sify.com and Yahoo! besides several other publications. He quit his job in 2008 to get into full-time media ministry. You can contact him at editor [at] christianmessenger [dot] in
