The Divine Echo: Pursuing Two Things to Find Three
Introduction: The Economy of Heaven
The world operates on a principle of scarcity. You pursue one thing, and you do so at the expense of another. You pursue wealth, and you might find you have sacrificed your family. You pursue fame, and you will likely discover you have lost your soul. The world's economy is a zero-sum game. But the economy of God, the logic of the covenant, is one of super-abundance. It is an economy of overflow, of multiplication, of getting more than you bargained for. God is not a tight-fisted God. He is the God of the full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.
This is the principle that lies behind so many of our Lord's paradoxical statements. If you want to save your life, you must lose it. If you want to be first, you must be last. If you want to be great, you must become the servant of all. And here in Proverbs, Solomon, under the inspiration of the Spirit, gives us another one of these divine equations. It is a piece of heavenly arithmetic that confounds the wisdom of the world.
The world tells you to pursue life, and you will find it in a bottle or a bank account. The world tells you to pursue righteousness, and you will find it in your own moral resume. The world tells you to pursue glory, and you will find it in the applause of men. But Scripture redirects our pursuit. It tells us that the things we most desperately need are not found by chasing them directly. They are found as a consequence, as an echo, of chasing something else entirely. Or rather, of chasing Someone else entirely.
This proverb is a roadmap. It shows us the path, the objects of the chase, and the surprising, glorious destination. It teaches us that in God's kingdom, the man who pursues two specific things will find himself, at the end of the hunt, holding three. And one of the things he finds is the very thing he was chasing, but now it is accompanied by two glorious companions he did not expect.
The Text
He who pursues righteousness and lovingkindness Finds life, righteousness, and glory.
(Proverbs 21:21 LSB)
The Great Chase (v. 21a)
The verse begins by identifying the man and his mission. He is a man in motion, a man defined by his pursuit.
"He who pursues righteousness and lovingkindness..." (Proverbs 21:21a)
The word for "pursues" here is one of active, diligent, hot pursuit. This is not a casual stroll or a half-hearted amble. This is the language of a hunter tracking his quarry. This is the language of a soldier chasing down the enemy. This is what Paul means when he says he "presses on" toward the goal. And what is the object of this chase? Two things: righteousness and lovingkindness.
First, he pursues righteousness. Now, we must be very careful here. The Bible speaks of two kinds of righteousness, and one of them is a deadly poison. There is the righteousness that comes from the law, which is your own. This is the righteousness of the Pharisee, the righteousness of the checklist, the righteousness you manufacture in the stinking factory of your own self-will. This is the righteousness that Paul counted as dung, as rubbish, so that he might gain Christ. To pursue that kind of righteousness is to pursue damnation.
But that is not what Solomon means here. The righteousness we are to pursue is the righteousness that is a gift from God. We pursue it first by receiving it. It is an alien righteousness, credited to our account through faith in Jesus Christ. But once we have received that positional righteousness, we are then commanded to pursue a practical righteousness. We are to hunger and thirst for it, as the Lord says in the Beatitudes. This is the pursuit of living consistently with who we now are in Christ. It is the working out of our salvation with fear and trembling. It is the chase to bring our behavior into conformity with our new identity. We pursue righteousness because God has already declared us righteous. We run the race because He has already awarded us the prize.
Second, he pursues lovingkindness. This is the great Hebrew word hesed. It is one of the richest words in the Old Testament, and it is notoriously difficult to translate with a single English word. It means covenant loyalty, steadfast love, mercy, grace, and faithfulness all rolled into one. It is the love that God shows to His people, a love that is based not on their loveliness but on His unbreakable promise. To pursue hesed is to pursue the character of God. It means dealing with others not on the basis of what they deserve, but on the basis of the covenant. It is to be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful. It is to be loyal, steadfast, and full of grace in all our dealings. This is the horizontal application of the vertical reality of righteousness. Because God has been merciful to you, you must be merciful to others.
The Divine Surplus (v. 21b)
The second half of the verse reveals the glorious outcome of this two-fold pursuit. The hunter who was chasing two things finds that he has bagged three.
"...Finds life, righteousness, and glory." (Proverbs 21:21b)
Notice the structure. He pursues righteousness and mercy, and he finds righteousness, life, and glory. The first thing to see is that he finds what he was looking for. He who pursues righteousness, finds it. This is the promise of God. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled" (Matt. 5:6). God is not a cosmic trickster. He does not set us on a chase for something that cannot be caught. If you pursue Him and His ways, you will find Him and His ways.
But the pursuit of hesed, of lovingkindness, is not mentioned by name in the reward. This does not mean he failed to find it. Rather, the other two rewards, life and glory, are the very definition of what God's hesed looks like when it is poured out upon a man. To receive life and glory is to receive God's lovingkindness. It is mercy enough, and then some.
He finds life. The world pursues life directly. The motto of the world is "grab for all the gusto you can." But this is a fool's errand. The man who hoards his life will lose it. The wages of sin is death. But the man who pursues God's righteousness and reflects God's mercy finds life as a byproduct. This is not just biological life, the mere ticking of a clock. This is life as God intended it, full, abundant, and eternal. It is the life of God Himself, welling up within the believer. It is peace with God, fellowship with His people, and a deep, settled joy that the world can neither give nor take away.
And finally, he finds glory. The world chases glory with a desperate passion. They want their name in lights, their face on a screen, their deeds recorded in a book. But the world's glory is a cheap imitation. It is a bowling trophy glory, a vain and fleeting thing. The biblical concept of glory is one of weight, substance, and honor. It is the visible manifestation of God's excellence. For a man to find glory is to be honored by the only one whose opinion ultimately matters. It is to hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant." It is to receive that crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award on that day. This is true substance, true weight. It is the opposite of the fleeting vanities of this world. Sacrifice is true glory, because Christ was glorified when He was lifted up on the cross. By pursuing righteousness and mercy, we walk the path of the cross, and so we find the path to true, lasting, and weighty glory.
Conclusion: The Gospel Chase
This proverb, like all of Scripture, ultimately points us to Christ. Who is the one who perfectly pursued righteousness and lovingkindness? It is the Lord Jesus Christ. He was the only one who ever lived a life of perfect righteousness, and He was the perfect embodiment of God's hesed toward us. He went about doing good, showing mercy to the undeserving, remaining faithful to the covenant when all others were faithless.
And what did He find? He found life, righteousness, and glory. Through His resurrection, He found life, conquering the grave and becoming the firstborn from the dead. He was vindicated in His righteousness, declared to be the righteous Son of God with power. And He was exalted to the right hand of the Father, crowned with glory and honor. He pursued two things perfectly, and He received the three-fold reward in its fullness.
And because we are in Him, this pattern becomes our own. We do not pursue these things in order to be saved. We pursue them because we have been saved. We chase after righteousness because His righteousness has been given to us. We extend lovingkindness because His lovingkindness has been poured into our hearts. And in this great chase, we find that we are not running alone. We are running the race He has set before us, and at the finish line, He is there, holding out the prize. And that prize is nothing less than more of Himself: life in Him, righteousness from Him, and a share in His eternal glory.