GOD’S WORD FOR JULY 27 ~ ~ Psalm 19:7 ~ ~ “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;”
Continuing excerpts from “the Pleasures of God” by John Piper
Yesterday we ended with these questions:
We could ask, does God have any delight in the behavior of non-Christian people in the non-religious areas of life? What sort of action does God delight in here? Why does he?
Proverbs 11:1 is a decisive pointer in answering these questions. The verse doesn’t say whether believers or unbelievers are in view. It simply says, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”
The implications here are far-reaching. Suppose you were a merchant in the Old Testament times and you sold corn meal. Suppose that in those days ten cents a pound was a fair price. Someone comes to you and asks to buy five pounds of corn meal. So you reach for your five-pound stone and place it in the dish on one side of the scales. Then you take your bag of meal and start pouring it into the dish on the other side of the scale. You pour until the two dishes swing at the same level. Then you pour the dish full of meal into your customer’s container, and he knows that he has been given the right amount. The size of a five-pound stone is common knowledge.
But then suppose that during the night you took a sharp, hard blade and dug a small hole in the side of the stone and worked it around hollowing out the inside until it weighed only four pounds. Then you covered the little hole over with clay the same color as the stone and let it dry. The next day you don’t use it on the educated and strong, because they might make a fuss over the smaller pile of meal, and might even examine the stone. But when the child comes on behalf of his mother, or when the widow comes who is partially blind, you use your hollow stone. Our text says that this is utterly reprehensible to God: “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord.”
Now, what sorts of acts in our day are implied in the phrase, “false balance”? I’ll mention four categories.
- referring to sellers
A gasoline pump that reads a penny more per gallon than it should or a grocery store scale that reads high. Maybe a medicine label that claims to do too much, or a realtor who doesn’t tell a buyer about a flooding problem in the house. It could be a college teacher who hasn’t written a new lecture in ten years and spends his time on his own pursuits.
- referring to buyers When the buyer schemes to pay less than the goods or services are really worth. You can see what God thinks of such an act in Proverbs 20:14. “It is bad, it is bad’ says the buyer but when he goes away, then be boasts” This would include paying some poor vendor in Tijuana a ridiculously small sum for a quality rug he had made because he is desperate for a sale and you can take it our leave it. It would include not paying a late penalty on my water bill by dating my check before the deadline.
The other way to categorize the acts denounced in Proverbs 11:1 is to notice that it refers to acts of deceit and it refers to acts of injustice.
- It includes acts of deceit in transactions with other people. So the act expresses a lie. For example, as you do your income tax returns this verse has something definite to say about whether your reporting is a delight to God or an abomination to him. Or you might file an insurance claim and lie about the extent of damages in order to get a better settlement.
- The other side of this category is that such acts of deceit always do an injustice to another person. A person does not get what is his due. For example, you might stick a person with a lemon of a car by not being truthful about its condition when you sell it. Or you might rush a refugee family into signing a lease for an unseen apartment and charge them exorbitant rent and leave the apartment in poor condition with no improvements.
I hope you can see that all such things are implied in Proverbs 11:2, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.” you can be a deceitful seller or buyer, and you can do an injustice to a buyer or seller.