The Contemptuous Palate Text: Proverbs 19:28
Introduction: The War on Reality
The book of Proverbs is a book of applied theology. It is not a collection of folksy sayings for a quiet life; it is a training manual for spiritual warfare. It teaches us to see the world as it actually is, which is to say, as God sees it. And one of the central realities of this world is that there is a profound, unbridgeable gulf between the righteous and the wicked, between the wise and the fool. This is not a matter of social standing, or education, or personality type. It is a matter of the heart, and the state of the heart determines everything else.
Our modern sensibilities want to blur these lines. We want to believe that everyone is basically good, just a little misguided. We want to psychologize sin and call it trauma. We want to call rebellion a cry for help. But Scripture will have none of it. The Bible draws a hard line, a bright line, between the man who fears God and the man who does not. And this proverb, in its sharp and vivid parallelism, gives us a diagnostic snapshot of the man who has set his face against God. It shows us what he does and what he loves. It reveals the character of the wicked by showing us his relationship to two things: justice and iniquity. What a man does with God's law and what he does with his own sin tells you everything you need to know about him.
This verse is a description of a certain kind of man, a man who is not just incidentally sinful, but who is constitutionally bent toward evil. He is a Belial-man, a worthless man, and his worthlessness is demonstrated in his words and in his appetites. He is a living embodiment of the rebellion that began in the Garden, a rebellion that seeks to overturn God's created order and replace it with a chaos of its own making.
The Text
"A vile witness scoffs at justice, And the mouth of the wicked swallows up iniquity."
(Proverbs 19:28 LSB)
The Scoffer's Courtroom (Clause 1)
Let us take the first clause:
"A vile witness scoffs at justice..."
The Hebrew for "vile witness" is literally a "witness of Belial." Belial means worthlessness, wickedness, or destruction. This is not just a man who happens to tell a lie; this is a man whose very character is defined by his opposition to the truth. He is a professional rebel, a constitutional scoundrel. When he is called to testify, his purpose is not to reveal the facts but to destroy righteousness.
And what is his attitude toward justice? He "scoffs" at it. The word here means to mock, to deride, to treat with contemptuous scorn. For this man, justice is not a high and holy standard to be revered. It is a joke. It is an obstacle to be circumvented, a rule to be bent, a principle to be ridiculed. Why? Because true justice, biblical justice, is the application of God's unchanging law. Justice is God's standard of right and wrong applied to human affairs. It is the plumb line that reveals the crookedness of our walls.
The vile witness, the man of Belial, hates this standard because he hates the God who established it. He cannot live with a transcendent law that holds him accountable. His own desires, his own greed, his own lust for power are his law. Therefore, when he enters the courtroom, whether a formal court of law or the court of public opinion, his goal is to make a mockery of God's order. He will use truth when it suits him, and lies when they suit him better. He will twist words, assassinate character, and sow confusion. He does this because he is fundamentally at war with the Creator. To scoff at justice is to scoff at the Judge of all the earth.
We see this everywhere in our culture. We have men who stand up and, with a straight face, call evil good and good evil. They celebrate perversion as a civil right and condemn righteousness as bigotry. They scoff at the created order of male and female. They scoff at the sanctity of life in the womb. They scoff at the idea of a final judgment. They are all witnesses of Belial, and their public testimony is one of sustained, contemptuous mockery of the law of God.
The Gluttony of Wickedness (Clause 2)
The second clause shows us the internal engine that drives this external contempt.
"...And the mouth of the wicked swallows up iniquity."
This is a marvelous piece of Hebrew parallelism. The first line describes the man's public action, his scoffing. The second line describes his private appetite, his swallowing. The two are inextricably linked. The reason he scoffs at justice is that he has a ravenous hunger for injustice. He mocks the good because he loves the evil.
The image is one of consumption. The mouth of the wicked "swallows up" iniquity. Another way to translate it is that he "devours" or "gulps down" iniquity. Sin is not something he falls into by accident. It is not an occasional mistake. It is his food and drink. It is what he craves, what nourishes his rebellious soul. Jesus says, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me" (John 4:34). The wicked man could say, in parody, "My food is to do my own will, to defy the one who sent me."
This gets to the heart of what sin is. Sin is not just the breaking of rules; it is a disordered appetite. The unregenerate man does not just tolerate sin; he loves it. He finds it delicious. He rolls it under his tongue like a choice morsel. As Jeremiah says of Israel, "they have loved to wander" (Jer. 14:10). The mouth that speaks lies, slander, and mockery in the first clause is the same mouth that greedily consumes the sin that produces those words. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth also eats.
What does this man swallow? Iniquity. This is a broad word for sin, perversity, and moral distortion. He doesn't just commit one kind of sin; he has an appetite for it all. He drinks it down like water (Job 15:16). This is why you cannot reason a man like this out of his position. You are not debating his ideas; you are trying to talk him out of his lunch. He is not making an intellectual error; he is satisfying a deep-seated craving. His worldview is not a philosophy; it is an addiction.
Conclusion: The Only Antidote
So what do we do with such a man? This proverb is a diagnosis, not a prescription for a political program. It is here to give us wisdom, to help us recognize the players on the field. The man who scoffs at justice and the man who swallows iniquity are one and the same. His public contempt for God's law is fueled by his private love for his own sin.
You cannot fix this man by giving him more information. You cannot shame him into righteousness, because he scoffs at the very standard of righteousness. You cannot appeal to his better nature, because his nature is to devour what is evil. The problem is not his behavior; the problem is his heart. The tree is bad, and so the fruit is bad.
There is only one solution for a heart like this. It must be replaced. This is the promise of the new covenant. "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). Only a supernatural work of God can change a man's palate. Only the grace of God in Jesus Christ can take a man who loves to swallow iniquity and transform him into a man who hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
When the Spirit of God performs this miracle, the scoffing stops. The man who once mocked justice now trembles before it, and flees to Christ for mercy. The mouth that once devoured sin now confesses it. The man who was a witness for Belial becomes a witness for the truth. He is given a new name, a new nature, and a new appetite. He stops feeding on the garbage of this world and begins to taste and see that the Lord is good.