The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
he turns it wherever he will.
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes,
but the Lord weighs the heart.
To do righteousness and justice
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
Haughty eyes and a proud heart,
the lamp of the wicked, are sin.Proverbs 21:1-4
The picture envisaged in 1 is of irrigation canals under the farmer's control. It is he, the farmer, who decides where the water will flow. This, says the writer, is how God controls not only the lives of men but also the powers that be. One thinks of the wonderful examples of the divine over-ruling in the affairs of empires and dynasties for the furthering of God's purposes in His people and in His word - Cyrus, Artaxerxes, and others who, autocratic and despotic as they were, were 'manipulated' by the hand of the living God for the fulfilment of His strategy of grace. It is wonderfully comforting and encouraging to realise that He is the God of history, and that He holds the whole world in His hand. The thought in 2 virtually repeats 16:2, on which see Note, Thursday, 29th November and compare Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 4:3,4. The emphasis in 3 is an important one in the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. The whole problem about the sacrificial cultus was that it tended - by its very insistence that atonement could be made only by something outside man - to obscure the truth that heart attitudes were important to God. This the prophets all thundered out ceaselessly (cf Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1, Isaiah 58). The AV margin reads 'light' instead of 'plowing' in 4, and this is the correct reading, as the RSV indicates. The light or lamp of the wicked seems simply to mean their life; so that what is being said is that when 'Haughty eyes and a proud heart' represent the whole of life, this is sin in the sight of God. It is, alas, true that this is all that some people live for. The emptiness of the social climber's existence is appalling, for those who have eyes to see.