Proverbs 19:28 commentary

28 ¶ An ungodly witness scorneth judgment: and the mouth of the wicked devoureth iniquity.

Job 15:16 How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?

We have talked in previous verses about false witnesses who slander others with lies, people who encourage others less experienced to sin, and those who follow instructions that cause you to turn from the truth. Here is a picture of a person eating iniquity which is synonymous with transgression and eating sin like food as the verse in Job uses the simile of drinking it like water.

The book of Job also says;

Job 34:3 For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat.

A false witness is most certainly an ungodly witness and such people hold any type of judgment in contempt. They are so evil they eat sin as if it’s a delicious meal. They live for what they do. To tear down another’s reputation, to get someone in trouble, or to ruin a family gives them a great sense of power and control.

Ungodly witnesses testify to lies disguised as the truth and are often as deceived as the people they are trying to corrupt. The young Timothy is warned about this by Paul.

2Timothy 3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.

And Paul makes it clear that there were already people at work corrupting God’s words.

2Corinthians 2:17 For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ.

There were many in the early church who did what they could to corrupt the word, such as the Cainites, whose heroes were Cain and Judas, Christ’s betrayer, who wrote the apocryphal (of questionable authorship or authenticity) Gospel of Judas which the early church leader, Irenaeus, disposed of so clearly. There were the Ebionites who viewed Jesus as just another prophet like Moses and who believed Christians had to follow Jewish law, rejecting Paul’s writings to the Christians. There were the Gnostics, an occultic group who valued secret knowledge and the understanding of special mysteries, and who believed that attaining such knowledge was the key to salvation rather than having a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. You are engaging in Gnostic, occultic behavior, even though your intention may not be the same, whenever you look for secret codes within the Bible or try to ascertain meanings from unusual combinations of numbers, and the endless permutations of end time prophecies and what they must mean or trying to calculate back to the date of the beginning of the earth or the universe, information which is not revealed in the Bible, or in the constant setting of dates for Christ’s return. Think about that the next time you are invited to a prophecy conference or are encouraged to read a book like The Late Great Planet Earth.

For two thousand years now, some Jews and Christians have been more concerned with trying to know things that are not given to us than with obeying Christ, having a relationship with Him, and letting God speak to them through the Bible. Just read Rabbi Silver’s A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel. Ungodly witnesses write endless books like The Book of Enoch and The Gospel of Thomas in ancient times and penned phony works trying to exploit the names of books that God placed no value for us to have on like the fake Book of Jasher, written in the 1800’s in pseudo-Elizabethan English to make the simple believe it was a translation of a lost book of the Hebrew Bible which God did not preserve for us. Ungodly witnesses penned manuscripts like the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus that have been the undoing of so many modern Bible scholars. In modern times, there are numerous books written by ungodly witnesses on secret Bible codes and naming the international villain of the day or even a president or specific pope as THE anti-Christ, saying they know this because of a special sequence of numbers or letters that God has revealed to them. Moses told the Hebrews when He gave them the Law God had given to him;

Deuteronomy 29:29 The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.

There are many things that you and I aren’t given to know in this life; things we can’t know. We have enough to keep us busy by just doing God’s will as prescribed specifically in the Bible. We are to be always looking up for Christ to return for us NOW but before you try to conquer the date of Christ’s return or the “Rapture of the church” why not try to conquer lying, thoughts of adultery and fornication, faithlessness, prayerlessness, not reading your Bible, not having compassion for the lost, the sick, or the poor, not honoring and respecting your parents, provoking your children to wrath, and not being a living testimony and sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ungodly witnesses not only mislead but they mock judgment as they often believe they are repeating something that God has laid on their heart about Israel or Russia or even a dead Arab dictator. Like the Gnostics before them they hold to secret, arcane, and special knowledge to justify themselves as Christians. They look to manuscripts that Christians in general never viewed as having authority or were being burnt as trash by monks as having more credibility than the Bibles used for centuries by Christians that led to a missionary fervor, unprecedented in history, in taking Christ’s gospel around the world. They say “the originals said this or that” when they have no way of experientially or scientifically knowing that is so, but are too proud and haughty to admit that their reliance on those manuscripts is no more scientific than my reliance on the King James Bible, in fact, less so as God has proven to ME that this Bible is true and compelled me to read and listen to it over 55 times while they don’t even read their pseudo-Bibles through once, usually.

Or an ungodly witness will laugh at God completely and hold Jesus in contempt, encouraging the naive, the inexperienced in life, and those prone to rebellion within the church itself to commit sins that drive a wedge between their minds and God and to destroy their lives with iniquity and dissolution. Ungodly witnesses sow doubt and distrust of God in the hearts of once sincere believers looking for any answers they can find outside of God’s words in His Book. Ungodly witnesses will use worldly philosophy or pseudo-science to counsel you, to “help” you, to “empower” you, to raise your self- esteem; your love of Self, anything but the Bible. These proud, wicked people drink their iniquity like water and eat it like a delicious meal, and they are not satisfied until they have led you astray.