The Internal Architect of Ruin Text: Proverbs 17:20
Introduction: The Fountainhead of Life
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical. It is God's inspired manual on how to live skillfully in His world. It does not give us abstract platitudes; it gives us the hard, unyielding grain of reality. And one of the central themes of this book, and indeed of the entire Bible, is the absolute connection between the heart, the tongue, and a man's ultimate destiny. Our Lord Jesus Christ stated it with perfect clarity: "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (Matthew 12:34). Your words are a diagnostic tool. They are a constant EKG, printing out the true condition of your soul.
We live in an age that desperately wants to sever this connection. We want to believe that our words are just free-floating things, that our inner life is private and disconnected from our public persona, and that our ultimate fate is untethered to our daily character. We want to believe we can have a crooked heart and find good, that we can have a perverse tongue and not fall into evil. But this is like believing you can drink poison and not get sick. It is a rebellion against the very structure of the moral universe that God has made.
Proverbs 17:20 is a blunt and sober warning. It is a spiritual law, as fixed and certain as the law of gravity. It shows us that a man's ruin is not something that happens to him from the outside. It is not a matter of bad luck or unfortunate circumstances. A man's ruin is something he architects from the inside out. It begins in the unseen chambers of the heart, takes shape on the tongue, and is finally unveiled in the calamity of his life. This proverb gives us two parallel clauses that describe the same man from two different angles, the internal and the external, the root and the fruit.
The Text
He who has a crooked heart finds no good, And he who is perverted in his tongue falls into evil.
(Proverbs 17:20 LSB)
The Crooked Heart's Futile Search (v. 20a)
The first clause deals with the source, the fountainhead of a man's life.
"He who has a crooked heart finds no good." (Proverbs 17:20a)
The "heart" in Scripture is not primarily the seat of emotion, as we tend to think of it. It is the executive center of the human person. It is the seat of the will, the intellect, the conscience. It is the command center from which your entire life is directed. This is why Proverbs 4:23 says, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life." Everything you are, everything you do, flows out of this central core.
And here, the heart is described as "crooked." The Hebrew word means twisted, warped, distorted. It is a heart that is not aligned with the straight lines of God's reality and God's law. It is fundamentally bent away from God. This is the natural state of every man since the fall. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" This crookedness is not a minor flaw; it is a fundamental perversion of our nature.
Now, what is the consequence of this internal distortion? "He finds no good." This is a profound statement. It does not say that no good things will happen to him. A man with a crooked heart might win the lottery. He might have a beautiful family. He might experience moments of pleasure. But he "finds no good." Why? Because his crooked heart is incapable of receiving anything as "good" in the ultimate sense. His twisted perspective warps everything that comes into it. He cannot find true, lasting, objective good because he is constitutionally at war with the very definition of good, which is God Himself.
He is like a man with a warped compass. He is searching for the North Pole, but his instrument is fundamentally broken. Every direction it points is a lie. He may walk for miles with great effort and sincerity, but he will never arrive at his destination. The man with a crooked heart is on a futile search for joy, peace, meaning, and satisfaction, but he will never find it, because he is searching with a tool that is designed to lead him away from the only source of those things. He sucks the goodness out of every blessing and turns it into fuel for his pride, his lust, or his discontent. The problem is not with the world; the problem is with the finder.
The Perverted Tongue's Inevitable Fall (v. 20b)
The second clause shows how this internal crookedness manifests itself externally, and what its final result will be.
"And he who is perverted in his tongue falls into evil." (Proverbs 17:20b)
Notice the parallelism. The "crooked heart" corresponds to the "perverted tongue." The tongue is the heart's ambassador. It speaks what the heart dictates. A perverted tongue is one that is twisted and turned from its created purpose. God gave us speech for the purpose of truth, blessing, worship, and building up. A perverted tongue uses speech for lies, curses, slander, and tearing down. It is the primary way that the corruption of the heart leaks out and poisons the world.
This man's speech is characterized by what the Bible calls "perversity." This means he intentionally distorts what is straight and right. He calls evil good and good evil. He uses flattery to manipulate, gossip to destroy, and deceit to advance his own cause. His words are not a bridge to connect with others in truth but a weapon to be used for his own selfish ends.
And what is the guaranteed outcome for such a man? He "falls into evil." The word for "evil" here can also be translated as calamity, mischief, or trouble. The crooked heart's inability to find good results in the perverted tongue's ability to find trouble. It is an inevitability. His words create a world of strife, suspicion, and hostility around him. He sets verbal snares and then is shocked when he is the one who steps in them. He sows the wind with his mouth and reaps the whirlwind in his life.
This is not an arbitrary punishment from God. It is the natural, organic consequence of living against the grain of God's universe. It is like arguing with a chainsaw. The chainsaw will always win. The man who uses his tongue perversely is actively sawing off the branch he is sitting on. The fall is not a surprise; it is the logical conclusion. His ruin is a self-fulfilling prophecy spoken by his own mouth.
The Gospel Straightening
If this were the end of the story, we would all be without hope. For we are all born with crooked hearts. We have all, by nature, spoken with perverse tongues. We are all, therefore, destined to fall into evil and find no good. Our natural trajectory is damnation. The diagnosis of this proverb is universal.
But this is precisely why the gospel is such glorious news. The gospel is the announcement that God has provided a remedy for the crooked heart. The central promise of the new covenant is a heart transplant. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God says, "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26).
This is what happens at regeneration. God, by His sovereign grace, performs a divine spiritual surgery. He takes out the warped, twisted, crooked heart that is bent on itself and replaces it with a new heart that is inclined toward Him. He does not merely try to straighten the old, bent metal. He melts it down and recasts it entirely.
And when the heart is made new, the tongue begins to follow. It does not happen perfectly or overnight. The old habits of perverse speech still war against the new nature. But the fundamental direction has changed. The tongue that was once a fountain of bitterness begins, haltingly at first, to produce fresh water. The speech that was used to curse is now used to bless. The words that were weapons of selfishness are now offered as instruments of grace.
The Christian life is the process of learning to live and speak from this new heart. It is a process of consciously aligning our thoughts and our words with the straight-edge of God's Word. When we do this, the logic of our proverb is gloriously reversed. The one with a new heart begins to find good everywhere, because he sees the hand of a good Father in everything. And the one whose tongue is being sanctified by grace learns to walk in paths of righteousness, avoiding the calamity that sin inevitably brings.
The cross of Jesus Christ is the place where the ultimate crookedness was made straight. On the cross, our twisted sins were laid upon the only one with a perfectly straight and righteous heart. He took our perversity and gave us His integrity. He fell into the ultimate evil, the wrath of God, so that we might find the ultimate good, fellowship with God. Therefore, let us not despair at the diagnosis of our crookedness, but rather rejoice in the cure that has been so freely offered to us in Christ.