Low-Grade Happiness (Proverbs 1:10)
Updated: 1 day ago
My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. —Proverbs 1:10
It does no good to pretend it’s not true—evil is enticing. It really does appeal to our desires, which is why we need proverbs like this.
Why Evil Entices
Everybody wants to be happy. It’s not wrong. God made us that way. That’s why Jesus can appeal to our happiness in the Sermon on the Mount and be totally righteous: “Blessed [happy] are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are those who mourn . . . Blessed are those who are persecuted . . . Give . . . pray . . . fast in secret, and your Father . . . will reward you” (Matthew 5-6, emphasis added).
The effect of following Jesus is happiness of the greatest kind. That’s what He’s getting at in this sermon. But it’s not immediate or easy happiness. It requires enduring persecution and giving things up in this present life. In the end, however, the price is overwhelmingly outweighed by the product: infinite joy forever in His presence that will not worth comparing to the meager things we had to forego to get there.
Evil entices us the same way. It offers us happiness. But the happiness evil offers is of a much shorter duration and lower grade. And the ultimate cost for getting it—eternal judgment—far outweighs the return. Still, it entices us, because it offers happiness immediately and with little friction. It’s not hard to get pleasure out of evil. And tempters, like “good” salesmen, usually do a very good job of masking over the problems you’ll have with their product.
So evil can be very easily and very genuinely enticing.
How Do Proverbs Help?
Proverbs like our passage help us by reminding us not to buy what sin is selling. They help to “slap us out of it” when we’re tired of waiting and want to take a little dip into some of sin’s immediate pleasures. It’s easy to forget the risk, so the author reminds us not to follow. Just a few verses later he spells out why: following sinners leads to death (1:19).
Sin promises gain but in the end yields loss. You keep none of what you gain, and you risk losing everything. Sinful happiness seems easy, but it’s cheap and unloving (see v. 11). It's short-lived. It’s stupid, or in the words of Proverbs, foolish. Thanks be to God for His words of wisdom that help we who are all-too-easily-tempted sheep to avoid the deceit of sin and, instead, wait patiently and righteously for His much greater reward.
