The Hard Face and the Established Way Text: Proverbs 21:29
Introduction: Two Kinds of Confidence
In the great contest of worldviews, which is the great contest for the world itself, everything comes down to confidence. Every man lives by faith, and every man acts with a certain confidence. The question is not whether you will have confidence, but rather what the foundation of that confidence is. Our modern age is an age of supreme, and supremely foolish, confidence. It is an age of brazen faces. We are surrounded by men who are utterly certain of things that are utterly nonsensical. They are confident that men can become women, that debt is wealth, that freedom is slavery, and that God is dead. This is not a quiet, personal confidence. It is a loud, aggressive, bullying confidence. It is the confidence of the wicked, and it hardens its face against all reason, all tradition, all revelation, and all reality.
But there is another kind of confidence. It is the confidence of the upright. It is not loud, but it is firm. It is not arrogant, but it is unshakeable. It does not bluff; it builds. It does not posture; it prepares. The world looks at this kind of confidence and mistakes it for weakness, because it is quiet. They mistake it for uncertainty, because it is careful. But they are dead wrong. The confidence of the righteous is the confidence of a man who has checked his foundations, who knows the architect's plans, and who is building on solid rock. The confidence of the wicked is the bravado of a man who has built his house on a sinkhole and is shouting at the top of his lungs that the tremors he feels are actually a dance party.
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical, and it is a book of sharp antithesis. It does not give us a fuzzy, gray world of moral ambiguity. It gives us a black and white world of wisdom and folly, righteousness and wickedness, life and death. And in our text today, we are presented with a sharp contrast between two kinds of men, distinguished by their faces and their ways. One has a hard face and a hollow way. The other has a humble face and an established way. This is not just good advice for getting along in the world. This is a description of the two paths available to every human being: the path of the covenant-breaker and the path of the covenant-keeper.
The Text
A wicked man displays a brazen face, But as for the upright, he establishes his way.
(Proverbs 21:29 LSB)
The Brazen Face of Rebellion
The first half of the proverb describes the character of the wicked man.
"A wicked man displays a brazen face..." (Proverbs 21:29a)
The Hebrew here for "displays a brazen face" can also be translated as "hardens his face." This is the face of defiance. This is not the holy boldness of the righteous, who are to be bold as a lion (Prov. 28:1). This is the impudent, shameless stare of a man who has determined in his heart to rebel and will not be corrected. This is the man who, when confronted with his sin, does not blush. He doubles down. He sets his jaw, not in righteous determination, but in stubborn rebellion.
We see this brazen face everywhere in our culture. It is the face of the drag queen reading to children in the library, staring down the concerned parents with contempt. It is the face of the politician lying with a straight face, knowing that the media will run cover for him. It is the face of the secular academic who dismisses the Word of God with a condescending smirk. This brazenness is a spiritual condition. It is the outworking of a heart that has suppressed the truth in unrighteousness for so long that it has lost the capacity for shame. Shame is a gift from God; it is the emotional response to sin that tells us something is wrong. When a man loses the ability to feel shame, he has seared his conscience with a hot iron. He has hardened his face.
This hardness is a form of bluffing. The wicked man's confidence is not rooted in reality or truth. It is a performance. He puts on a show of strength to intimidate others and to convince himself. His worldview is a house of cards, and so he must shout loudly to scare away anyone who might breathe on it too heavily. He is fundamentally insecure, because he is at war with the God who made him. He is a trespasser in God's world, and he knows it deep down. So he hardens his face to pretend he owns the place. This is the posture of every covenant-breaker. Adam, after he sinned, did not harden his face; he hid. But his spiritual descendants have learned to stop hiding and to start brazening it out. This is the face of Cain, the face of Pharaoh, the face of Absalom. It is the face of a man who has made himself his own god, and who will therefore brook no correction from the one true God.
The Established Way of the Righteous
In sharp contrast, we have the character of the upright man.
"But as for the upright, he establishes his way." (Proverbs 21:29b)
Notice the contrast. The wicked man focuses on his face, his appearance, his outward show of bravado. The upright man focuses on his way, his path, his conduct. The wicked man is all front. The upright man is all substance. The word for "establishes" here means to make firm, to prepare, to make sure. Other translations render it "gives thought to his ways" or "makes his way sure."
The upright man is not interested in bluffing. He is interested in building. He is not driven by arrogance, but by a desire for truth and stability. How does a man establish his way? He does it by submitting his way to the Word of God. He does not invent his own path. He consults the map given to him by the Creator. "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Psalm 119:105). The upright man understands that he is a creature, and that the Creator knows the best way for him to walk. He plans his way, but he knows that the Lord directs his steps (Prov. 16:9). His confidence is not in his own cleverness, but in the wisdom of God.
This is not a life of indecisive dithering. This is a life of careful, prayerful consideration. The upright man "establishes" his way. He is diligent. He thinks through the consequences of his actions. He seeks wise counsel. He measures his decisions against the straight edge of God's law. And once he has done so, he can walk with a true and settled confidence. This is the confidence of a man whose conscience is clear before God. He doesn't need to harden his face, because his heart is soft toward God. He doesn't need to put on a show of strength, because his strength is in the Lord. He is a covenant-keeper. He has submitted his life to the terms of the covenant, and he walks in the blessing and stability that comes from that submission.
This is the man who builds his house on the rock. The rains come, the floods rise, and the winds blow, but his house stands firm, because it is founded on the truth. The wicked man, with his brazen face, stands on the sand, shouting defiantly at the storm, right up until the moment his foundation gives way and he is swept away in ruin.
The Gospel of the Two Ways
This proverb, like all of Proverbs, sets before us the great antithesis, the great divide that runs through the human race. You are either wicked or you are upright. You either have a brazen face or an established way. There is no middle ground. And if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we have all, at times, displayed the brazen face. We have all hardened our hearts, stiffened our necks, and refused correction. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. "Who can say, 'I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin'?" (Proverbs 20:9). The answer is no one.
By the standard of this proverb, we are all condemned. Our ways are not established; they are crooked. Our faces are not naturally humble; they are naturally brazen in their rebellion against our Maker. If we are to be saved, we need someone to save us from our wickedness. We need a righteousness that is not our own.
And this is precisely what we have in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the truly Upright One. He is the only man who perfectly established His way. He always did what was pleasing to His Father. His way was firm, sure, and perfectly righteous. And yet, on the cross, He endured the ultimate shame. He who had no cause for shame took all of our shame upon Himself. He who was perfectly righteous was treated as the ultimate covenant-breaker, so that we, the true covenant-breakers, might be treated as righteous.
But He did not have a brazen face in His suffering. He had a face set like flint toward Jerusalem, a face of holy resolve to obey His Father (Isaiah 50:7). He endured the cross, despising the shame, for the joy that was set before Him. And now, through faith in Him, God performs a great exchange. He takes our brazen-faced rebellion and nails it to the cross. And He gives us Christ's established way. He imputes the perfect righteousness of Jesus to us. He gives us a new heart, a soft heart that is able to be ashamed of sin and to receive correction.
The Christian life, then, is the process of learning to live out this new reality. By grace, we put off the old man with his brazen face, and we put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator. We learn to stop bluffing and to start building. We learn to establish our ways, not in our own strength, but in the strength that God supplies. Our confidence is not in our performance, but in Christ's performance on our behalf. Because our standing is secure in Him, we can be truly bold, not with the arrogant bluster of the wicked, but with the quiet, deep, and unshakeable confidence of the sons of God. We are upright in Christ, and therefore, in Him, our way is established forever.