A Word in Season: A Lasting Hope (Proverbs 23:17–18)

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When you look out into the world, which lives or lifestyles do you tend to aspire to?

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Perhaps you tell yourself, if I were just a little bit more like that, then I'd be a little bit happier.

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Or even you dress it up a little bit and say, I'd be a bit more useful. Think what I could do if I had what they have.

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And what they have is typically the wealth or the beauty, the fame, the influence, the pleasure, the ease.

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There is so much that the world esteems and we're so easily trained to think of it as what's really valuable and profitable.

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But in Proverbs 23, in verse 17, we're told not to let our heart envy sinners, but to be zealous for the fear of the

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Lord all the day or to continue in the fear of the Lord or to be in the fear of God all the day.

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For surely there is a hereafter and your hope will not be cut off. Here is the counterpoint, if you will, to that envy that too often grips our hearts, however we dress it up, a desire to be like the world in the best that it appears to offer us.

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But rather than envying sinners, rather than aspiring to be like those who really have no future and no hope, we ought to cultivate the fear of the

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Lord all the day. That's a reverent awe of God.

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It's that sense of living before him and desiring to please him and not to displease him because we know him as God and our

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God. And one of the things that ought to train us in that direction, one of the things that ought to press into our consciousness the distinction on the one hand between what the wicked have and what the

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God -fearing man has is the fact that eternity will prove what is truly valuable and profitable.

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Why should you not let your heart envy sinners? Why should you continue in the fear of the

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Lord? Because there is a hereafter and your hope will not be cut off.

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Now that's a painful reminder. It's a cutting reminder that the hope that the wicked have, the hope of the sinful man or woman, whatever it may be that they seem now to possess, it will not endure.

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That upon which sinners build all their hopes and expectations will pass with their passing and will pass away entirely with the passing of this world.

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The best that they have is just dust and ashes apart from the Lord God.

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But the believer, the fearing man who knows God, the one who lives before him in awe of him, service for him, delight in him, that is the person whose hope will not be cut off.

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There's no end to it. Whatever we may appear to lack here, we have

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God himself now and forever. There is a hereafter.

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There is a life to come. And it's that sense of eternity, that understanding and appreciation of the fact that this world is not everything that helps a believer now to value things as they ought to be valued, to esteem what ought to be esteemed.

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To remember, to use the Apostle Paul's notions, that the things that we see, that's not the really lasting stuff.

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The things that we think now seem so real, these are the things that will pass away.

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But the things that are not seen, those are the things that are eternal. Those are the truly lasting treasures.

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So when we think of the solid joys and the lasting treasures that none but Zion's children know, to use the language of the hymn, that should stop us envying sinners and aspiring to have only what wicked and godless people can attain to in this life.

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Some believers do attain to some of those blessings here, but that's not our goal.

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That's not our aim, and we're not to envy sinners for what they only have here.

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We are to exercise ourselves in the fear of the Lord our God, remembering that there is a hereafter, and that our hope, if it is in God through Jesus Christ, will not and cannot be cut off.