The Monopoly Money of Sinners Text: Proverbs 11:18
Introduction: Two Ways to Live
The book of Proverbs is relentlessly antithetical. It does not present us with a complicated menu of fifty different lifestyle options. It gives us two. There is the way of wisdom and the way of folly. There is the path of the righteous and the path of the wicked. There is the man who fears God and the man who despises Him. You are on one of these two roads, and they do not run parallel. They diverge sharply, and they end in two entirely different destinations.
Our modern sensibilities chafe at this. We want nuance, we want gray areas, we want to believe that we can build a decent little life for ourselves somewhere in the middle, borrowing a little bit from God's wisdom when it suits us and a little bit from the world's folly when that seems more convenient. But the book of Proverbs, and indeed the whole of Scripture, tells us that this middle ground is an illusion. It is a fantasy land. You are either building on the rock or you are building on the sand. You are either gathering with Christ or you are scattering abroad.
This proverb before us today gets right to the heart of the matter. It is a proverb about payroll. It is about what you are working for, what you are earning, and whether your paycheck will clear at the end of the day. Every man is a laborer, and every man earns a wage. The only question is whether you are earning real currency or counterfeit bills. The wicked man appears to be getting ahead, his pockets seem to be jingling, but Solomon tells us his wages are a sham. The righteous man, on the other hand, is engaged in a different kind of enterprise altogether. He is not just working, he is sowing. And his reward is as sure as the harvest.
We must understand that this is not simply good advice for becoming a successful entrepreneur. This is spiritual economics. This is about the fundamental structure of the world God has made. God has built this world in such a way that certain actions have certain built-in consequences. Honesty has a certain return. Deceit has another. Righteousness yields one kind of harvest, and wickedness yields another. You cannot cheat the system because the proprietor of the system is God Himself, and He is not mocked.
The Text
The wicked earns deceptive wages, But he who sows righteousness gets a true reward.
(Proverbs 11:18 LSB)
The Counterfeit Currency of Wickedness
Let us look at the first half of this sharp contrast:
"The wicked earns deceptive wages..." (Proverbs 11:18a)
The wicked man is a busy man. He is working, he is laboring, he is earning. From the outside, it often looks like he is succeeding wildly. He builds his house, he lands the promotion, he closes the deal. He cuts corners, he tells the convenient lie, he puts his thumb on the scale, and his bank account swells. He is earning a wage, and it looks for all the world like the wages of sin are pretty good.
But the Word of God attaches a crucial adjective to these wages: they are "deceptive." The Hebrew word means falsehood, vanity, a lie. The wicked man is working for Monopoly money. It looks like real currency, it spends like real currency for a time, but it has no ultimate value. It is a fraud. The deception works on the man himself. He thinks he is getting rich, but he is actually impoverishing his own soul. He is like a man who spends his life collecting shiny bottle caps, thinking he is a millionaire, only to find at the end that they are worthless.
How are these wages deceptive? In several ways. First, the pleasure they purchase is fleeting. Sin offers a quick, sugary rush, but it is always followed by a crash. "Bread of deceit is sweet to a man, but afterward his mouth will be filled with gravel" (Proverbs 20:17). The stolen water is sweet in the moment, but the guests in that house are in the depths of Hell (Proverbs 9:17-18). The wage is deceptive because it promises satisfaction but delivers only addiction and emptiness.
Second, the security they build is an illusion. The wicked man trusts in his riches, but they cannot save him in the day of wrath (Proverbs 11:4). He builds his life on a foundation of lies, but a righteous universe will not allow that structure to stand. The reason a dishonest man is a wicked man is that his dishonesty is an assault on the character of God, who is a God of truth. A false balance is an abomination to the Lord (Proverbs 11:1). So when a man builds his life on such things, he is fighting the very grain of the universe. It is only a matter of time before he gets splinters.
Ultimately, these wages are deceptive because they cannot purchase what truly matters. They cannot buy a clean conscience. They cannot buy peace with God. And they certainly cannot buy entrance into the kingdom of heaven. At the final judgment, all the deceptive wages of the wicked will be exposed for the fraudulent paper they are. The man who lived for them will stand before the throne utterly bankrupt.
The Sure Harvest of Righteousness
Now, look at the glorious contrast, the other side of the antithesis.
"...But he who sows righteousness gets a true reward." (Proverbs 11:18b)
Notice the change in metaphor. The wicked man "earns" wages, which implies a direct, transactional exchange. He does a wicked thing, he gets a wicked reward, right now. But the righteous man "sows righteousness." Sowing is an act of faith. A farmer casts his seed into the ground and waits. The reward is not immediate. It requires patience, diligence, and trust in the God who gives the growth. The righteous life is not a series of cash transactions; it is an investment in a future harvest.
This is why the world so often misunderstands the righteous man. They see him sowing, giving, serving, speaking truth when it is costly, and they think he is a fool. He is throwing away his seed. He is missing out on the immediate payoffs that the wicked seem to enjoy. But the righteous man is playing the long game. He is operating on a different economic principle, the principle of sowing and reaping.
And what is his reward? It is a "true reward." The Hebrew word is emet, which means truth, faithfulness, stability. It is the opposite of the deceptive wage. It is a reward that is real, solid, and lasting. It is backed by the full faith and credit of the God of the universe. This reward is true because it aligns with reality as God has constituted it.
This reward comes in many forms. There is a reward in this life. Godliness has the promise of the life that now is (1 Timothy 4:8). A life of integrity, hard work, and generosity generally leads to stability and blessing, not because the proverbs are magic formulas, but because this is how God has ordered His world. This is common grace. But we must be careful. Proverbs are not universal promises for every individual instance. Sometimes the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper for a season. Job's friends made the mistake of treating these general principles like rigid, mathematical axioms.
The ultimate reward, the "sure reward," is eschatological. It is the reward that is laid up in heaven. The one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap everlasting life (Galatians 6:8). This is the harvest that cannot be corrupted by moth or rust, the treasure that thieves cannot break in and steal. This is the "well done, good and faithful servant" from the Master Himself.
Sowing Christ's Righteousness
Now, we must press this further. If we stop here, we are left with a gospel of moralism. "Be good and get good things. Be bad and get bad things." And while that is true as a general principle of how the world works, it is not the gospel. The gospel is not a call for us to drum up our own righteousness to sow.
The problem is that, left to ourselves, we are all wicked men. We have all worked for deceptive wages. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Our own righteousness is, as Isaiah tells us, as filthy rags. If we try to sow our own self-generated righteousness, the crop will be pathetic, and the harvest will be judgment. We are not just sinners because we do sinful things; we do sinful things because we are sinners. Our hearts are factories of idolatry.
This is why the gospel is such glorious news. It tells us that there is a righteousness that is not our own. Paul puts it this way, that he might be "found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith" (Philippians 3:9).
Jesus Christ is the one who sowed perfect righteousness His entire life. He never once worked for a deceptive wage. He lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father, and His reward was to be the reward for all of His people. On the cross, He took all of our deceptive wages, all of our counterfeit currency, all of our bankruptcy and debt, upon Himself. He paid a debt He did not owe because we owed a debt we could not pay.
And in the resurrection, God the Father declared that Christ's sowing was acceptable. The harvest was abundant, and that harvest is a free gift to all who will repent and believe. Through faith, His perfect righteousness is imputed to us. We are clothed in a righteousness that is not our own. And it is only on that basis that we can begin to "sow righteousness" ourselves.
The Christian life, then, is the process of living out the implications of that imputed righteousness. We sow acts of righteousness, not in order to be saved, but because we have been saved. We are honest in our dealings, we are generous with our resources, we are faithful in our callings, not as a desperate attempt to earn God's favor, but as a joyful response to the favor we have already received as a free gift in Christ. Our good works are the fruit of our salvation, not the root of it. And as we sow these seeds, empowered by the Spirit, we can be confident of a true, sure, and eternal reward, all of grace.
So I ask you, what are you working for? Are you chasing the fleeting, deceptive wages of this world? Or are you, by faith in Christ, sowing righteousness for a reward that is as true and as faithful as God Himself?