TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles - Date: October 8, 2026. Lesson 199-2026. Proverbs 30:18–20. When Sin No Longer Bothers You

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

In this edition of Morning Manna, Rick Wiles and Doc Burkhart examine Proverbs 30:18–20 and four mysterious paths that leave no visible trace: an eagle through the air, a serpent across a rock, a ship through the sea, and the way of a man with a maid. Agur then makes a disturbing turn to the adulterous woman who sins, wipes away the evidence, and declares, “I have done no wickedness.” The greatest warning is not merely hidden sin, but a conscience that has become comfortable with it. When sin no longer troubles us, the silence of our conscience should never be mistaken for the approval of God. Lesson 199-2026 Teachers: Rick Wiles and Doc Burkhart You can partner with us by visiting MannaNation.com, calling 1-888-519-4935, or by mail at PO Box 399 Vero Beach, FL 32961 MEGA FIRE reveals the ancient recurring cycles of war and economic collapse that have shaped history for 600 years. These patterns predict America is now entering its most dangerous period since World War II. Get your copy today! www.megafire.world Get high-quality emergency preparedness food today from American Reserves! www.AmericanReserves.com It’s the Final Day! The day Jesus Christ bursts into our dimension of time, space, and matter. Now available in eBook and audio formats! Order Final Day from Amazon today! www.Amazon.com/Final-Day Apple users, you can download the audio version on Apple Books! www.books.apple.com/final-day Purchase the 4-part DVD set or start streaming Sacrificing Liberty today. www.Sacrificingliberty.com

Welcome to Morning, My North. Welcome to Morning, My New Rachel North. Your teachers, Rick Wiles and Dr. Burkla. Get your Bible and notebook and get ready to hear before. What are the four things the Holy Bible says are too wonderful to understand? Hello, I'm Rick Wiles, and this is Morning Nana, a weekday Bible class. These four things are identified in Proverbs chapter 30, verses 18 through 20. So please open your Bible and prepare to learn new things from the Word of God.

And I sincerely hope that our lessons enrich your life and deepen your walk with God. That's the purpose of doing this Bible study five days a week so that all of us grow in our understanding of the Word of God. and that we're brought closer, deeper into the presence of the Lord. Well, obviously, we should invite the Holy Spirit. If we're going to be deeper, closer to the Lord, we need His Spirit. So let's pray, invite the Holy Spirit, who we know is already here with us. If you're born again, the Spirit is in you. But I think it's just an act of respect to say to the Holy Spirit,

you are welcome, you are desired. please come take your seat and and lead this Bible study today and then after we pray Dr. Raymond Burkhart will introduce today's topic so let's pray Almighty God our Father in Heaven Father we love you and praise you and we love your son and we love your Word we love your Holy Spirit dear Holy Spirit take your seat at the head of the table and preside over this lesson and teach all of us the depth of knowledge that is in the word, grant us wisdom and understanding for the expansion of the kingdom of God, for the increase of the church, for the enlightenment of the church of God. And we ask all these things in the name of Jesus Christ,

our Savior. Amen. Amen. Praise the Lord. Welcome to Morning Man. I'm glad to have you here with us today. We have a lot of ground to cover today. We're covering three verses out of Proverbs chapter 30 today, starting at verse 18. So let's get started and let's not waste any time and getting into the word here. Proverbs chapter 30, verse 18. I'll read from the King James today. There'll be three things which are too wonderful me, yea, four, which I know not. The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a maid, such is the way of an adulterous woman. She eateth, wipeth her mouth, and saith, I've done no wickedness. All right. So, let's get into this today. Croverbs chapter 30 versus 18 through 20.

And our teacher, Agar, has his second numerical saying, which we're going to see repeated throughout chapter 30 here. And it's poetic. It's the most beautiful passage in his material and then the most disturbing turn in it. Versus 18 and 19 named four things Agar calls too wonderful for him. An eagle in the air, a serpent on a rock, a ship at sea, and a man with a maid. Beautiful pictures here. Poetic in their treatment. And the list needs genuine admiration. Agar is not complaining about his ignorance, he is delighting in it. These are things he cannot trace, and he finds absolutely wonderful and marvels. And then, verse 20 turns the observation dark.

Such is the way of an adulterous woman. It's the identical Hebrew construction, Ken Derrick, the same way that govern the four wonders. So that word way, that same idea, comes to the way of the adulteress woman. She, too, leaves no trace as the others. So the connection is trackless here. None of the four things in verse 19 leaves a trail.

The air closes behind the eagle, the rock takes no mark from the serpent, the sea heals over the ship's wake, and the mystery between a man and a woman leaves nothing visible. The adulterist leaves none either, but where the first four are wonders, hers is scary. It's a horror because what her trail conceals is guilt. Now, I'll be up front with you and say that some interpreters read verse 20 as a separate proverb.

That happens to follow. Just happens to be there. The grammar argues otherwise. It's because of that word kendaric in there, the Hebrew word in there, such as the way. It's used in the first four treatments and in the treatment of the adulter's woman. And so it's the connected phrase that binds verse 20 to the list preceding it. And so our goal today is to examine what makes those four things wonderful. Why Agar included the fourth among them and what he is saying by attaching the fifth that shares their quality, but none of their glory. We get started today

with an examination of verse 18. Here's Rick. All right. Doc, I'm going to put 18 and 19 together because they flow together. We'll start with there be three things which are two wonderful for me. Yay, four, which I know not. Again, here's this pattern we see in Agar's writing. He starts with three, but he always says, no, there's four.

And it's all through chapter 30. too wonderful. It means to be extraordinary, marvelous, below and comprehension. The Hebrew word that's used here is Hala. And it's used 70 times in the Old Testament. It denotes acts of divine power or hidden matters. that things too difficult for human comprehension. It's the same word throughout the scriptures.

So Agar is not frustrated by these four things. He is delighted by it. He is astounded. There are four things that I think about it. Yeah, I can't comprehend. They're so wonderful. I just can't comprehend them. He's not upset.

He's delighted in these four things. that distinction sets the tone for the whole saying, and it connects back to the opening confession. You remember in verse 2 of chapter 30, Agar said he was more brutish than any man. In verse 3, he denied having learned wisdom. Now here, he lists four specific things that he can't comprehend, and he does so with pleasure. In the beginning, it was all like, it was kind of like he was frustrated. Like, man, I'm a brute. I'm worse than a brute.

I've never learned wisdom. And now by this verse, he's smiling, saying, there are just some things I can't, they're just beyond my ability to understand. So he's a man who is honest about his limits. And he's saying, even though I know that my intellectual capacity, by spiritual comprehension, both of them are limited. I can still enjoy the mysteries that are in God's creation. Because a man or woman pretending to be competent must either explain these things away

or just avoid the subject. Okay, so now we go into verse 19. What are these four things? the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, in the way of a man with ape made. I start with the way of an eagle in the air,

in the heavens, high in the sky. Just stand and watch a large, beautiful, majestic bird, ride the winds and then try to describe the path that it took I live out in the country and so I'm blessed with a lot of wildlife here and at times there are eagles

that are here and other very large birds and I watch them circle in the sky I watched them ride the wind currents, and then laying in so gently in all trees in my yard and just be perched at the very top of a very high tree and overlooking. They're just there majestically overlooking everything. This is what Agar is looking at.

He's just saying, I can't even comprehend it. It's so amazing to me. Then he says, the way of a serpent upon a rock, a snake crossing sand, leaves an unmistakable track, but a snake crossing bare stone leaves nothing at all. He's observing a snake, perhaps sunning itself on a rock, just stretched out on that rock,

bathing in the sun. And there's a second wonder, how does this snake move? How does this serpent, Go from one place to there. It has no legs. And yet it crosses the rock. It continues on its way.

Then he mentions the ship in the midst of the sea. The wake of the ship is visible for a minute or so. But then the water closes. The sea keeps no record. The ship is moving. You can see its path. flee. But the sea closes in on that wake, and there's no trail where the ship had come from. So Agar has named three things that pass through three of the four classical elements, air, earth, water.

Notice each one is passing through. The bird, the serpent, the ship, and none of them leave a bark. And he says, this is just fascinating to me. They travel, and yet they're They leave no history. Then he gets to the fourth one. The way of a man with a maid. The words that are used here are important to understand. The Hebrew word gave her means the strength of a young man, a man in his prime.

And then a ma, meaning a young woman who is of the age to be married. So this is a strong young man and a beautiful young woman in both of them in their prime years. And it's the same word that Isaiah used for a virgin shall conceive. Matthew Henry

observed that the first three are wonders of nature and the fourth is a wonder of providence. and that anger has placed the greatest of them last, the way are we a man with a young maid? Yes. What do you see in this fourth item? I'll let you take it from there. Well, we've got to be careful with the way we handle this fourth one here

because there have been different interpreters that have understood it in basically two principal ways. and how you interpret it affects how the passage is taught. So the first reading takes it as the mystery of attraction. So how does a particular man come to love a particular woman? What is it that draws two people together out of all the people in the world? What is it that puts these two together? Now, if you look at it this way, on this reading, the wonder is that the process,

The process leaves no visible track, and it kind of follows along with the pattern of the three. You know, you really can't examine a courtship and identify the moment or the mechanism by which two strangers become bound to each other. It happens, and the path is untraceable. I think of my own relationship with my wife, Mia, how, you know, out of all the people we could have met while we were both living and working, South Korea, of all places, God had put her there for 12 years and only had brought me there for a year at that point. And somehow we connected out of all the people in the world. And there was an instant attraction. Of course, I can understand her attraction to me. But what was the, you know, what was it that brought that about in my own life? I,

Consider it God's providence that brought us together. So that's along that same thinking there. Now, other interpreters take a different tack on this, and they take it as the marital union itself, the mystery by which two people become one flesh. Now, really, both readings are defensible, and both fit leaves no trace theme. The second has, some would say,

a stronger claim to fitting verse 20, which immediately follows, because we're talking about the marital union and then we're talking about a prostitute in the very next verse, describing a woman who's done something physical and left no evidence. Now, what should be really firmly stated is that the fourth item is not a vice. Okay, so let's be clear about that. It sits among three wonders of creation, described with that same. word that you mentioned are the Palau. And Agar calls it

too wonderful, not too wicked, but too wonderful. It's a mystery. How is it that these things happen? How is it that these events occur and you can't trace it? And this matters because when we get to verse 20, its

term can retroactively contaminate verse 19 if the transition is taught carelessly. The way of a man with a maids, is a wonder. The way of the adulterous is a counterfeit of that. Now, of course, Scripture consistently treats the union of man and wife as truly a genuine mystery rather than just a mere biological fact. We look at Genesis 224. Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother and she'll cleave until his

flesh, cleave until his wife, rather, and they shall become one flesh. How's that happen? How do they become one flesh. That's the wonder. That's the mystery. And the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, quoting Genesis 2.24, seems to call it exactly as aggregate calls it. He says in Ephesians chapter 5, starting at verse 31, for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. And Paul says, this is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ in the church. So the Greek word there in Ephesians 5 that Paul uses is Mysterion, a thing hidden, a thing not fully disclosed,

not a mystery in the sense of, you know, like a detective story, we're trying to figure something out, but something wonderful, something beyond human comprehension. Paul doesn't explain the union. he just calls it a mystery and points beyond it and says this is a picture of Christ in the church. And so Agar's fourth item stands in a long biblical tradition of describing marriage as something marvelous rather than something merely functional. You know, men and women come together in marriage in a variety of different ways around the world. in different cultures, some are arranged, some happenstance, you know, but it's still just a mystery

how a man and a woman become one. And so the union of a man and woman is treated in scripture as belonging on a list with eagles and flight, ships at sea. It's not a mechanism. It's wonderful. It's a wonder. And a wonder is diminished. by being explained rather than honored, isn't it?

I mean, if you try to figure it out, Rick, it's not a mystery anymore, it's a puzzle. And there are people that like puzzles, but this isn't a puzzle. This is beyond human comprehension, Rick. Yes, that's the message. There's just some things you're not going to understand. Now, this turns in a dark, ominous,

way. Verse 20. Such is the way of an adulterous woman, she eateth and wipeth her mouth and saith, I have done no wickedness. What brought this about? Why did I agree take this a broke turn? The same Hebrew word governs first 20. They governed the first four wonders. This direct. the Hebrew word, the way, the path, the road. So direct can be used three ways. Number one, as a literal path, a physical road, a journey from one place to another, or it can refer to life's choices.

The moral direction your life goes in, your values, your daily decisions that shape your character. Number three, it can refer to your spiritual walk, walking in alignment with God, in flowing with his divine moral order. Here's the point Agar is making. Four ways that leave no trace. Remember the eagle flying through the air, the snake prowling over the rock, the ship moving through the air, the snake, prowling over the rock, the ship moving through. the sea, how a young man and a young woman are brought together. He says, it leaves no trace, no trail.

But then he adds a fifth. She eateth and wipeth her mouth. Doc, this is like, this is an, it seems like an odd statement in these problems. Here's a, this is a prostitute, a harlot. Let's go back. Does he, no, he doesn't call her a prostitute. He calls her an adulterous woman. Correct.

Yeah, and I called her a prostitute, but it does say adulterous woman. She's not necessarily a prostitute. She's an adulterous woman. Doesn't mean she's standing out on the street corner hustling for money. The horror of this verse is in the image. And the image is a meal. She eats and wipes her mouth. You just wonder, like of all the things that you would talk about an adulterous woman,

why are we talking about she eats a meal and wipes her mouth? So he's chosen the most ordinary physical act available. It's not a crime. It's not a struggle. it's not anything dramatic. She has a meal. And she wipes her face after she eats the meal.

What does this have to do with these things? The gesture is the point. Wiping the mouth removes the evidence that eating had occurred. It only takes a second and nobody thinks about it.

The adultery is described with the casualness you would talk about lunch. And note what Agra does not say. He does not describe her as tormented or conflicted or wrestling with her conscience. He does not say she justifies herself with elaborate reasonings. She just wipes her mouth. And then she makes a simple statement, I have done no wickedness.

she's not claiming that the act was justified she's claiming it never happened this is the point or at least nothing happened that belongs in the category of sin right this is the main thing she just

doc she dismisses her sin with the same level of casualness as wiping your mouth after you eat a meal. In other words, it's gone. Right. So she's wiping her sin away. It's gone.

I didn't do anything. I did know wickedness. And it's done with such casualness. It's like taking a napkin of wiping your mouth. It's not a big deal to her. The dismissing her sin is no big deal. She's not conflicted. She's not convicted.

She's not repentant. She's not sorry. She just wipes away her sin. There's nothing happened. It's like somebody saying, oh, there's no ketchup on my lips. They wiped it off. Well, there's no ketchup on your lips now because you wiped it off. But she's saying it, there's no sin.

I just wiped it away. In other words, Doc, she is making herself her own savior. She can sin and forgive her own sins. So Adam Clark, whom we often quote, he said this is the most alarming feature of this verse. He said, it's not the adultery, but for composure. That a conscience capable of this level of calmness after committing a serious sin has passed the point that the Bible describes in other places as being the searing of a conscience. There's no conviction by it. It's just a matter of taking a napkin of wiping away to sin.

Right. And so the theological significance here is that it describes, like he said, a conscience that has stopped registering sin. And scripture treats that condition as among the most serious a person can reach. Now, let's notice the progression that Agar has constructed all across this chapter. Back in verse 12, it described a generation, pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness. And verse 20 shows an individual instance of exactly that.

She's washed. She's wiped her mouth, right? In the Septuagint surrendering explicitly, it says washed. And she has concluded she's clean. And so the New Testament names this condition directly. We read in 1st Timothy, chapter 4, verse 2. speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a high iron. And the Greek word there that's used for searing is actually a medical term.

Cotterized, burns, so that the nerve no longer transmits. That's the way they used to treat wounds. So a cauterized wound does not hurt. that's what cauterization accomplishes, and that's why this image is so exact. Now, in Hebrews chapter 4, verse 19, it describes the same result that this woman has found herself in, who being past feeling have given themselves over to lasciviousness. In other words, their conscience is seared and they see no sin. and that word that's used there in the Greek means past feeling, having ceased to feel any kind of pain,

the same picture that we get with cauterization brick. All right, Doc, so I noticed there that you skipped over that Greek word that means cauterized. It only has eight syllables. That didn't intimidate you to this. It's like, I decided to look smart. There is no way I'm going to attempt to pronounce a word with eight syllables. That's just not going to happen. I've heard that in English, Rick.

Yeah, I was eager to see if you were going to say it. What we do in our outline is that we have the Hebrew and the Greek words that we can refer to. But some of these words are really challenging to pronounce. So the mechanism is repetition. A conscience that is overridden often enough stops objecting, and the silence is experienced by the person as innocence. So this Bible study in Proverbs, we've told you about similar things.

of back in Proverbs 26, verse 11, the dog that returned to his vomit. Proverbs 29, verse 1, the man who is often reproved, hardens his neck. It's a pattern in the book of Proverbs. And Jeremiah, chapter 6, verse 15,

were they ashamed when they had committed abominations? Nay, they were not at all ashamed. neither could they blush. Right. So the idea here is that to a person living in a pattern of hidden sin who feels nothing about it, well, verse 20 is a warning to them. And the absence of distress is not evidence of innocence. It may be evidence of that seared conscience there.

But to a person tormented by guilt over sin, already confessed, verse 20 is not about them. Okay, if sin bothers you, this is not about you. This is, the woman that Agar describes doesn't feel anything, doesn't feel any remorse or guilt about what she's done. But a person who is suffering or sin, thankfully, in God's mercy, has a conscience that's still working, Rick. And that's evidence that grace is at work rather than its absence. our dear teacher of Charles Bridges observed that the presence of distress over sin is actually a mercy,

since the one thing worse than a troubled conscience is a quiet one, and that Agar's adulteress would trade her composure for a single night of genuine guilt if she understood what her calm actually indicated, Rick. All right, so Doug, let's talk about why Agar put these things together? He paired versus 19 and 20,

and he could have, he could have made this a point about the adulterers anywhere in the chapter, but he chose to place her here. Is there a reason? Let's try to figure this how. The shared feature is that nothing is visible afterward. The eagle passes through the air and the air closes behind it.

There's no trail. Eagles don't leave con trails. They just soar. There's no history. There's no markings of where the eagle flew. The serpent crosses from sand, soil over the rock, and the rock has no mark. There's a mark in the sand, but not on the rock. The ship sails through the sea and the water closes in behind the ship, and there's no trail.

A young man and young woman are joined, and no outward thing can testify to how they came together. And the adulteress rises from her bed of adultery, wipes her mouth, and walks into a room where no one can tell. The four things are wonders because their tracklessness is glory. The adulterous is a horror because her tracklessness is concealment. The first four are not concealed, but the adulterous, her behavior, her trail is concealed. This is the entire hinge of the passage. The same quality can be beautiful or terrible depending on what it is. It hides.

There's a second connection that we should take a look at. Agar's fourth item, the way of a young man or the young maid. And verse 20's adulterous. Doc, isn't it interesting that they both involve the same act between two people, man and a woman, and yet they have two entirely different settings, two different outcomes. He says one is beautiful and the other one is a wharf. Yes. One is a wonder.

The other one is a counterfeit that borrows the wonder's invisibility to cover itself. Our good friend Spurgeon, Charles Spurgeon, the Reformed Baptist preacher in London and the 1800s. He said that the sin's great advantage is that it frequently looks exactly. like something good from the outside. And that the adulteress in this verse is standing in the doorway of a mystery she has robbed. Yeah, so there's one further observation, theologically, that as we close this lesson out, it concerns what the passage assumes about God.

So what do we mean by that? Well, Agar says these things lead no trace visible to him. They're too wonderful for me, for which I know not. And so what he's talking about here is his own limitations. He says the limitationist is. And he says it twice, by the way. And nothing in the passage suggests that the tracks are invisible to God.

Okay, so you have the four examples there of the things too wonderful that leave no trace. Well, from the human perspective, yes, they leave no trace. But God knows the trace of each one. knows the track of the eagle. God knows the way the serpent moves. God knows the way of a man with me. He knows all these things. And he also knows the way of the adulteress as well. That's precisely the assumption the adulteress is operating under. She's concluded that because no human being can trace her way that no one can. That's a great thought to think about there. Now, Scripture repeatedly denies this, and throughout our teaching here in Proverbs, we've examined it over and over again.

For instance, Proverbs 15.3, the eyes of the Lord are in every place beholding the evil and the good, which would apply right here. Proverbs 521 says, for the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings. and God considers all his goins. Now, it's important to know that Proverbs 521 uses the very same word that Agar uses in this passage, that Hebrew word direct, meaning ways, the ways of a man. And so all these different ways, the five ways they've mentioned here, the ways that Agar cannot trace, well, guess what? They are tracing.

there before the eyes of the Lord. God can trace each one of them, including the way of the adulteress. Now, another passage would give us additional insight on this, Rick, is found in Job chapter 34, starting at verse 21, and it reads, For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings,

there is no darkness nor shadow of death where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves. And so, Rick, in summation, what really is this passage all about? God is all seeing, all knowing, all present. There are things that we can't understand, and it was made that way. And they're wonderful. And they're wonderful. They're wonderful.

Okay. I can't understand the sunsets I see. They're beautiful. there are things that I see that are just astounding in God's creation. They're too marvelous to understand. They're just there to enjoy. But there are things that people do in darkness that they know is wrong, but they say to themselves, I did know wickedness.

And they believe that they covered their tracks. God sees their tracks. God sees the trails of all these things, the things that we can't comprehend, but he also sees the tracks of those who think that they've covered their sins. And that's the message for all of us. So don't condemn others. Don't put your fingers at others. You just be concerned about yourself.

What tracks are you leaving? What trails are you making? As the Lord can see them. And he'll talk to you about it someday. hopefully he'll talk to you about it before you leave this world so you can make things right but he'll talk to you about it someday it'll be there you know doc from time design i watch what is in pastor john brooke uh he's the man that wrote the book imagine heaven years ago it was a new york times bestseller he he interviewed about 1,500 people who had near-death

experiences. And one of the common features of their testimonies is that many of the people said that when they arrived in heaven, God played their life before them, like a movie screen. It wasn't every single thing, but their life from childhood to their death was shown to them. good things and bad things. They had to watch it. So those trails, those tracks are going to be there. These people were, they were in the presence of God.

And most of them said, Doc, that after watching it, they realized the Lord had been with them the whole time, even when they didn't know him, even when they were far from him, they realized when they stood before him, and they watched their lives, laid out in front of them, they realize that God had been with them

throughout their lives. And so maybe that's the message here. Okay, just, aren't we all leading tracks? Are we all making trails? One way or another? One way or the other. Maybe they're invisible to false people,

but they're not invisible to God. And there are just some things that you're here to see in the world. You can't understand. it, you're just to enjoy it. And praise the creator for it. Like animals. You know, they're just things I see in animals.

I can't even explain it. Just watch it, behold it, enjoy it. He made them, and they're just something to watch. Okay, as always, we hope this has been a blessing to you, and we ask that you share this lesson with your friends and loved ones and introduce people to whort him out. Help us grow and help other people grow. The more people grow from a word being told a morning manna,

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