Why do the wicked prosper?

145 First see the blessed character in which the Lord visits the world. Certain truths may be learned elsewhere, such as creation and providence, but not judgment in righteousness, at least not until the end, and then it will be learned in the destruction of the wicked. This was what Job found so hard to understand — how those who did evil prospered, whilst the righteous were persecuted. This is just because the time of judgment is not come; the time of mercy is now going on, and we cannot have mercy and judgment at once. So all is a riddle now. There is too much of badness for man to be able to think that things are of God; and too much of goodness, even amidst all the ruin and wretchedness, for him to see how it is not of God. Men try to get over it, and to be indifferent to it; but there is too much even for selfishness itself not to see it. However favourable exterior circumstances may, for a few, partially remedy things, we must see that, taken as a whole, there is but ruin and wretchedness in the world.

But Zophar had no difficulty at all. That is generally the case with people who know very little; they fancy they know everything. Zophar, therefore, keeps up this — that there is the great fact, there is a righteous God above, and there are unrighteous, wicked people below, and God invariably deals with these wicked people now. That was not true. A large part of the world has always been allowed of God to apparently prosper in their evil, and the reason is that the time of judgment is not yet come. There may be judgments; there may be exceptional dealings with the wicked just as Job's case was a very exceptional dealing in the severity of his trial, and in the manner in which Satan was challenged by God to do his very worst; and God was secretly keeping up Job even when he was finding fault with God and thinking He was very hard upon him to allow all this. But he was kept up not only for his own good, but for ours. Now we have the Book, and are meant to profit by it for ourselves and for other people. "Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds; yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, where is he?"

People like to walk by sight, and that was the great fallacy that lay under all the speeches of these three friends. They looked at Job; they looked at what he was; and they look at what he now is in all this terrible crushing to the dust, and they said in effect, 'Well, God is a righteous God, and if there were not some dreadful thing behind all this, God would never have allowed it.' They were completely wrong, and Job was thoroughly right in saying, 'No, I know it is not so, and all your talk cannot get rid of the fact that you have most wicked men that are most flourishing, and you have pious men that are exceedingly suffering, in the world as it is now.' How is that? Because Satan is actively working here; because Satan is the one that men follow without knowing. They are slaves and captives of the devil; and those that are not slaves of the devil are the objects of his vengeance and hatred. God does not remove that; He does not put down Satan yet; he is allowed his way. And there never was a greater proof of it than his leading the world and the Jewish people to crucify their own Messiah, the Lord of glory. Was there any fault here? Here you have the crucial proof. Here was the absolutely sinless One and never such a sufferer.

Many like the Psalmist are perplexed at the prosperity of the wicked (Psalm 73:3). Everything seems to go well with them in life, and even in death. It was only when the Psalmist entered the “sanctuary of God” that he understood their end (verse 17), and it is the end that matters. God in His wisdom may allow His children prosperity in present things to carry on His work, but He may allow them to know adversity and poverty, giving them a rich compensation, for “Has not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith” (James 2:5).

Job knew that “The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure” (Job. 12:6), though Eliphaz thought that “in prosperity the destroyer shall come upon” the wicked (Job 15:21). What Eliphaz thought was sometimes right, but it was not always right, as the writer of Psalm 73 knew, and as we know from what is all around. When we realise that God has allowed Satan to become the god and prince of this world, and that he has the authority to dispose in some way of the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4:6), we will not be perplexed at the prosperity of the wicked.

God allows the wicked seeming prosperity with the intention of destroying them forever. Wickedness loves to flaunt itself, but suddenly it is dashed down from its proud height of self-confidence (v. 7).

(Vv. 4, 5) This leads to the assertion of the second great principle of God in regard to judgment, namely, God invariably gives space for repentance before He executes judgment. The execution of the judgment of God will most surely come, though, in the goodness of God, it may be long delayed. In His goodness God forbears to judge and suffers long with evil. It was so in the days of Noah, when God lingered for One hundred and twenty years before executing the judgment of the flood: it was so in the history of Israel, with whose evil ways God bore long before destroying Jerusalem and scattering the nation. It is so to-day when God in grace lingers over this judgment doomed world. How then does man treat this longsuffering of God? Alas! men despise the riches of His goodness. Because of this "for-bearance" men think that God will never judge: because of His "longsuffering" men think that God is indifferent to evil. Thus men despise the goodness of God, not seeing that the reason God "forbears" and "suffers long" is to give men space for repentance. The goodness of God thus makes manifest the hardness and impenitence of man's heart. God acts in goodness, and men despise "the riches of His goodness". God gives space to repent, and men are impenitent. Men condemn one another for doing evil, but they refuse to repent of their own evil. The fact that God gives space for repentance, shows that repentance is a necessity for each man in order to be right with God, and escape the judgment of God.

He cannot go with these apostates; and yet his soul is in conflict. For a Jew with his covenanted blessings and the legal curses upon iniquity, hard indeed would it be, to understand this flourishing of the wicked, while the godly suffer, — a state of things not always simple to the Christian, who is taught to take up his cross and follow Christ. But if he does not understand, he draws nearer to God that he may do so. In the sanctuary of His presence the secret is disclosed: he sees the end that is coming for the wicked. The "smooth places" in which God sets them are not signs either of His favor or of His indifference. They are the prelude to an awful fall, which comes as in a moment, and they are brought to an end, consumed with terrors. Their prosperity, while it deceives them, is but the image of a dream; vanishing when men awake; — is but this, when the Lord arises and shows it as their folly and shame.

But there is a limit to the conflict of his soul. It goes on "until" he returns to that secret place from which in spirit he had wandered — "Until," as he says, "I went into the sanctuary of God" (verse 17). The sanctuary speaks of the presence of God. Outside the sanctuary he looks at evil without God, inside he views everything, and everyone, with God. What a difference this makes! Outside all had been viewed in relation to time, inside all is viewed in relation to eternity. The wickedness of men, the goodness of God, the prosperity of the sinners, and the sorrows of the saints are no more viewed in connection with the passing moment, but in relation to the great end to which all is moving. Man — ever short-sighted — can take but a short view: God, with His far-reaching vision, sees the end from the beginning. It is true the Psalmist still views the evil of men, but now he views it with God, and at once the momentary prosperity and passing triumphs of the wicked fade from his view, and he sees instead the fearful end to which they are hastening.

This, however, is not all, for in the sanctuary we learn many truths. Thus it is that he discerns a second great truth that, though God apparently takes little notice of the prosperity of the wicked, or even the afflictions of the godly, yet actually God and His government are working behind all (verses 18-20). Thus he is brought to confess, "Thou didst set them in slippery places: Thou castedst them down into destruction … Thou shalt despise their image." It looked, indeed, as if the Psalmist had been in the slippery places, for had not his steps well nigh slipped? and on the other hand the wicked appeared to be firmly established on a rock, for did they not prosper in the world and increase in riches? Actually the godly soul was on the rock though shaking; and the wicked were in slippery places, though prospering. Viewing the prosperity of the wicked apart from the sanctuary the godly man was cast down; viewing the wicked from the sanctuary he sees, that in the end, they will be cast down. Away from God the prosperity of the wicked appeared very real and lasting, in the sanctuary it was but an evil and passing dream.

The sanctuary has, moreover, still deeper lessons for the soul. He has seen the true character and end of the wicked; he has discovered the government of God at work beneath things seen; now he must look beneath his outward walk and ways and learn the secrets of his own heart (verses 21, 22). The exercises come nearer home. If the sanctuary exposes the character of the sinner, it will also discover the hidden springs of evil in the heart of a saint. All is laid bare in the light of the sanctuary. "When my heart was in a ferment," he says, "then I was brutish and ignorant, I was as a beast before Thee" (verses 21, 22 N. Tr.). The brute beast acts without the slightest reference to God, and the saint is brought to own that if he leaves God out of his thoughts he will not only sink beneath what is proper to a natural man, but he will fall to the level of a beast.

Having plumbed the evil of his own heart, God can at once teach him brighter and happier lessons. For the sanctuary is a retired and sacred spot where the deep things of God can be unfolded to the soul. As indeed was the happy experience of another soul, in a later day, when she found the sanctuary of God in the presence of Jesus and, sitting at His feet, heard His word. The Psalmist has been led into the depths, he shall now ascend into the heights. He has learnt something of his own heart, and thus he is prepared to learn the heart of God. Never are we more ready to learn the goodness of His heart than when we have discovered the badness of our own hearts. The discovery of what is in us opens the way for the revelation of what is in Him. Hence the Psalmist's thoughts are carried away from all that he had been before God to delight in all that God was for him. He can say, "I was as a beast before Thee, nevertheless I am continually with Thee." When hot and bitter thoughts were raging in his heart, even then he was the object of God's unwearied care. He says, as it were, "God was out of my thoughts, but I was never out of His thoughts" — "I am continually with Thee."

But there was something still more perplexing, for there were times in the lives of the most honoured servants and saints, when they were suffering, and being made to pass through the deepest trials when the wicked were prospering, and at their ease. This was, to the righteous, most baffling. The patriarch Job, who was perhaps the greatest sufferer in the Old Testament — but there were many others (James 5:10-11) — had to say: "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. …" (See Job 21:7-13). So also with David "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree" (Psalm 37:35). Such things these men could not reconcile with the justice of God's moral government. In His revealed will, the order seemed to be joy and happiness for the good, but sorrow and suffering for the evil. The law had laid this down very fully and clearly, and it had been said, "He that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it" (1 Peter 3:10-11; also Psalm 34:12). Yet those who sought to live according to this were kept in suffering. Think of a man like Job of whom Jehovah could say to Satan, "Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth," yet his suffering were prodigious. It is just at this point that we may learn the wonders of God's wisdom, and see the richest and choicest of His dealings with His children in the world. The wicked may prosper for a brief season, as we have seen, but in a moment their candle goes out, and then for them it is the blackness of darkness for eternity. The righteous may suffer in a world where sin and death are permitted, but, this, in the hand of a Father, is educative in view of forming the character, and making them morally Christ like in view of future glory.

The standard of God's holy government is fixed and sure, and can never be lowered. What a man sows, that shall he reap, and punishment for sin is judicially and divinely certain, but to limit God in His dealings with His children to that is to dishonour Him, and to miss the richest and choicest of His designs. In point of fact, it displaces Him, leading to the conception of Him as an arbitrary Being, as the book of Job shews, and, coming to men, it turns the moral order of society upside down, and is accountable for the cruellest sufferings inflicted by men upon their fellows. In Job we have a man whose sufferings might well melt the hardest heart: yet, his friends (and they were men of a very high standard of life), through missing this important link in the chain of God's dealings with His servant, were turned into the cruellest and bitterest of foes. Why? Because, by limiting God's dealings to the punishment of sin, and missing the educative and promotive character of the sufferings, they could only conclude that such a great sufferer must have been a great sinner. What a solemn position these good men were found in. Condemning Job, by attempting ignorantly to justify God, instead of sympathising with the needy, they fixed upon him the cruellest charges. The position became a kind of deadlock, and those who came to help were found to hurt. The basis of their argument was wrong, their premises were false, and making a wrong start, both as to God and to Job, instead of the good that the circumstances called for, the very worst that was in them came out. It was doubtless thoughts like these that led the poet to write that "Man was made to mourn," for indeed "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn." Like the ecclesiastical tyranny of the dark ages of so-called "Church History," these men belied their messages, and were turned into despots of the inquisition. Thinking they were serving God by treating an unbroken sinner in faithfulness, they went all the length to recover him, and like many to-day, who conclude that THEY are the testimony, with hearts steeled against every human and tender feeling, persecute to the death those who may be like Job in the crucible of suffering, but, like him also, may be more in the thoughts and sympathies of heaven than themselves.

In Zechariah 6 we are shewn the government of God in the four monarchies, but neither as immediate government on God's part nor merely that of human government. We have seen power committed to man in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, and that he had failed therein. But it was not the will of God immediately to resume the reins of government in the earth, neither to leave the earth to the wickedness and the will of man without any providential bridle, without any government. He controls them, not by acting directly, so as to maintain the testimony of His character and His ways, but by means of instruments whom He employs, the result of whose activity is according to His will. The only wise God can do this, for He knows all things and directs all things to the accomplishment of His purposes. This is the reason that we see all sorts of things morally in disagreement with His ways in government, which yet succeed: a chaos as to the present, but the issue of which will furnish a clue, that will make manifest a wisdom even more profound and admirable than that which was displayed in His own immediate government in Israel, perfect as this was in its place. It is that universal providence, which, in its results, satisfies the moral exigencies of the nature of God; while in the intermediate course of things free scope is left to the active energies of man's will.