Clough Proverbs Lesson 23
Exhortation to divine viewpoint wisdom – Proverbs
3:1-6
In Proverbs 3 we
enter another section in the first unit of the book. Proverbs 1-9 encompasses an exhortation
section to this book. This means that
for those chapters the writers of Proverbs is encouraging the people to get
with it as far as wisdom is concerned, wisdom being the use of truth for God’s
glory, but it involves more than simple acquaintance with God’s revelation; it
includes besides acquaintance with God’s revelation actual practice and use of
this revelation in day by day circumstances.
This third chapter continues the movement that we have seen in this
book. You remember the first section of
Proverbs, verses 1:8-19 dealt with getting the young person’s attention and
this means that the young person has as one of his prime problems his eyes on
other people and what other people think of him. And so the Bible recognizes this and says
that a young person is not going to take in the Word, is not going to really
pay attention to the Word of God unless they have the guts to stand up to some
of the people with whom they associate.
And so verses 8-19
deals with the wrong crowd and says to the young person, until you are ready to
dictate to them and stop letting them dictate to you, you are not going to
listen to the Word of God because it’s too threatening to you personally. You will feel threatened because you will
feel that if you listen too much you might become the object of ridicule or
something, and so in order to break this off quickly the first section of
Proverbs is devoted to the wrong crowd.
The second section
of Proverbs has to do with verse 20-33, and this section has to do with getting
wisdom while it can be found. And this
second section says to the young person that the day of opportunity passes and
that you aren’t always going to be able to get this, that you have a certain
time limitation because you can be innocently stupid only so long and then
after hearing the Word of God you become deliberately smart or deliberately
dumb, one or the other, but you can no longer remain innocently stupid. So the second unit builds on the first one.
Then we said last
week the second chapter, the whole of it has to do with the cause effect
framework and has to do with our maturity, which we have labeled, following
after Ephesians 3 as Christ in the heart and in the second chapter we start off
with positive volition in verses 1-4.
These four verses tell us that we should “seek wisdom as we do silver,
search for her as we do for hid treasures.”
And in 20th century vernacular this means simply to put as
much effort into the pursuit of Christian maturity as you put into pursuit of
your business goals and profit making.
So the first step
is a strong positive volition that will not be stopped by details of life. And the author of the second chapter says
that if you do not have this you cannot go any further. Remember, he is talking to believers. He is not talking to non-Christian; he is
talking to people who have already become Christians. And the problem there is not just positive
volition at the point of gospel hearing, when a person hears the good news of
Christ, trusts in Christ and their Savior and is born again; that’s not the
point, that’s easy. But what he says is
after a person has reached this point of positive volition at God-consciousness
and at gospel hearing, then he must have a strong consistent seeking and
pursuing after wisdom.
And then in
Proverbs 2:5-6 he says, “Then you will understand the fear of the LORD,”
because the Lord will speak to you, in other words you will have enlightening
ministry of the Holy Spirit, you will have the beginning of an erection of the
divine viewpoint framework in your mentality.
So you will be able to think in many different areas of your life, many
different categories of activities, all of this from God’s perspective. And then he said later on, from verses 7 and
following that this will result in this fourth step which is an experiential
appreciation of God’s love on a personal basis, so that you can watch and can
understand that God loves you and really means to say that He loves you and
this acts as a deterrent against all sorts of temptation and two categories of
temptation are given in chapter 2. Then
finally, fulfillment and this is why the second chapter ended in verse 20,
“That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths of the
righteous.” Verse 22, “But the wicked
shall be cut off from the earth, and the transgressors shall be rooted out of
it.” This means that the ultimate step
in maturity is an enjoyment, a full enjoyment, a full fulfillment because of
union with God’s eternal plan.
Now in the third
chapter we have another progression. The
first dealt with the wrong crowd, then we dealt with getting wisdom now, and
then the second chapter the cause and effect, and now come to the third chapter
and in this chapter we have a very important point made and a point which
separates the Word of God from Egyptian wisdom, separates it sharply from
Assyrian wisdom, Babylonian wisdom, Chinese wisdom and Greek wisdom. This is a sharp divergence here. And it is this divergence, this mark in the
third chapter that causes a separation of human viewpoint and divine viewpoint
wisdom. So all of chapter 3 is going to
be devoted to one common theme. What is
that theme? It’s an exhortation again,
like the previous section, except chapter 2, it’s an exhortation to divine viewpoint
rather than human viewpoint wisdom. So
the exhortation is directed not just to wisdom, blank, general category, but to
a certain peculiar kind of wisdom, divine viewpoint wisdom versus human
viewpoint wisdom, and furthermore, continuing the same theme, not only is this
an exhortation to divine viewpoint rather than human viewpoint wisdom but it
shows what this will mean in your personal relationships other. It will show what this means in your personal
relationships with others.
To get the thought
of Proverbs 3 before we go into the details I’m going to take you to a New Testament
passage where this is given to us in about five verses and these five verses in
the New Testament summarize the content of the third chapter of Proverbs. Turn to James 3; in James 3, in the wisdom
book of the New Testament, James corresponds to Proverbs, you have in James
3:13-18, the two kinds of wisdom. The
Old Testament person as well as the New Testament person was always in danger
of making a mistake. The mistake was
that he would see the issue as just one of gaining wisdom and he would neglect
a very, very important point, and that is in God’s Word wisdom isn’t even the
end goal, but it is our personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ
that is the issue. And so when we speak
of divine viewpoint wisdom the way we distinguish in the Bible divine viewpoint
wisdom, one of the ways, there are other ways of doing it, but one of the ways
of distinguishing it is that divine viewpoint wisdom always has as its number
one point our personal relationship with the Lord. Human viewpoint wisdom is sort of impersonal
and it tends to be mechanical. So the
thing that separates, then, is there’s a personal element to divine viewpoint
wisdom and not to human viewpoint wisdom, and James brings this out.
Now to catch the
point and why both Proverbs 3 and James 3 are sharply distinguishing the human
viewpoint and divine viewpoint on the basis of impersonal plus personal, is
because they are linking the performance factor with our social
relationships. Look, here’s a person
operating on human viewpoint wisdom; the Bible says that one of the performance
signs that such a person is working on a human viewpoint basis is his
relationship socially, his social life.
That would be the first to deteriorate under human viewpoint
wisdom. He will not be able to get along
with other people; he will constantly have irritation in this area and there
will always be something wrong. Now this
is not a total truth in the sense that every time you can’t get along with
somebody… Jesus couldn’t get along with people in His day either but it had no
implications in this direction. The
point however is that generally speaking human viewpoint wisdom and its use in
your life is going to show up right here.
And you will see this operate in the third chapter of Proverbs and James
3.
Now this shouldn’t
strike you as strange, should it because what did we say about human viewpoint
wisdom? It’s mechanical, it’s impersonal
and if you have neglected the personal element out of your relationship vertically,
then obviously the personal element is going to be out of your horizontal
relationships also. This should be
unexpected. And conversely when we come
to divine viewpoint and when we have our personal relationships established in
the vertical then what should surprise us but this has overtones and
applications horizontally, that in our horizontal relationships we also have a
personal factor operating. So you see, then, that this is not some vague dry
theological principle because here the impersonality works out in your behavior
pattern with other people and here the personal factor in divine viewpoint
works out similarly in your relations with other people.
Notice, for
example, James 3:13, “Who is a wise man and endured with knowledge among
you? Let him show out of a good
conversation,” that’s an old King James word meaning a good behavior pattern,
“his works with meekness of wisdom. [14]
But if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie
not against the truth.” Now in verse 14
where you read “bitter envying and strife,” obviously that has to do with
personal relationships and so he’s saying the fallout of human viewpoint is
that you will have envy and one of the signs here and one of the worst mental
attitude sins is envy, and here it’s showing up. “…if you have bitter envying and strife,” and
of course with this mental attitude in your heart you’re never going to get
along with anybody and this will show up very fast. “…bitter envying and strife [in your heart,
glory not], do not lie,” James says, “against the truth.”
James 3:15, “This
truth [wisdom] descends not from above, but is earthly, sensual, and
demonic.” The first word, “earthly,” is
another way James has of distinguishing human viewpoint wisdom from divine
viewpoint wisdom. Human
viewpoint—earthly; what do we mean by “earthly?” We mean that it is cut off from any
revelation; divine viewpoint is heavenly in the sense that it receives revelation
from God; no revelation, plus revelation here, no revelation here. What do we mean by this? That God reveals part of His mind to man here
in the divine viewpoint; in the human viewpoint you’re operating on what men
think, you’re operating on human opinion
and you have no vital in the mind of God at this moment in history. So we have the first facto that this wisdom
is “earthly.”
The second factor
is that it is “sensual,” that is, it will be powerless to cope with the
flesh. Your flesh has been inherited
from your parents and you have certain drives that are inherited and you have
others that are acquired in the process of your life and human viewpoint wisdom
will do nothing for you in that department.
It will not curtail various lust patterns; what may happen is that you
will substitute one for another; it you eat too much you might wind up
stopping, eating too much and then start chewing bubble gum, so one way you
ruin your clothes and the other way you ruin your teeth, but at least you have
a shift in the lust pattern but it’d still be over-racing, you just substitute
one for the other and that’s how flesh type wisdom operates.
So it is earthly,
it is sensual and it is demonic. And the
last term, the demonic factor, shows that demons influence believer’s minds.
And if you think you can sit there or operate in the Christian life without
this third factor operating you are a very naïve individual and you have my
sympathies because it means that you have rejected the biblical view of how the
world operates and that at any given time your physical brain is subject to desires
and so on, thought patterns and temptations directly from demonic forces. And so James is contrasting the two.
And then he says,
James 3:16, “Where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil
work.” Now verse 16 is very empirical;
James says let’s not get too theoretical about this, just look, where you see
the envy and the strife, the outworking of the inner mental attitude, then you
can see confusion and every evil work.
Verse 17, “But the wisdom that is from above,” you see “from above,”
this is the heavenly wisdom that is based on revelation, “from above is first
pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good
fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. [18] And the fruit of righteousness is sown
in peace by them that make peace.” In
other words, one of the factors that is the sign of this is peace. Now we have every color under the sun up here
so just stick with it; I’m not going to be artistic in the positioning of the
colors so art students, you will have to pardon me. “Peace” and here we have “envy” and those are
the two outward signs of these two kinds of wisdom. We could spend a lot of time in the James
passage but there’s one word that I want you to see before we go back to
Proverbs 3 and that is the expression in verse 17, “easy to be entreated.” What that means is teachable. Divine viewpoint wisdom always knows that it
in itself is incomplete; human viewpoint wisdom always tends in practice to
think that it’s complete.
I’ll show you where
this comes out in Proverbs 3 so let’s turn back to Proverbs 3. This is one of the most famous chapters of
the entire book; it is a chapter which many of you who have been Christians for
some times probably have memorized verses from and this particular chapter has
a lot of important content. But as
always we must first analyze the form of the chapter, it’s exhortation type
literature. How can you spot exhortation
type literature? Exhortation type
literature always has three elements or at least parts of these three. The first thing, it always has some sort of a
circumstance, sometimes has a circumstance, it always has a command and it will
always have some sort of a motive or a result clause. And sure enough, if we study the first part
of the third chapter we discover this structure.
Proverbs 3 can be
divided into three parts; the first 12 verses constitutes the first part; from
3:1-12 you have the first section of the chapter and this particular section
has to do with exhortation to loyalty, that’s the topic of the first 12 verses,
loyalty to God or to Jehovah or Yahweh.
And then we have from verses 13-20 a break in the text; I’ll come back
to that. Then from 3:21 on to the end of
the chapter, verse 35, we have an exhortation to wise personal relationships. So here we deal with the outworking, the
peace described in James, the personal relationships. But in between the exhortation literature is
broken.
You can see this,
just skim down the first 12 verses and you’ll see imperative after imperative
after imperative, honor this, do this, don’t do this, but then you notice what
happens when you get to verse 13, there’s a break in the style of the writing.
And so beginning in verse 13 it starts to say “Happy is the man who finds
wisdom…. [14] For the merchandise of it
is better than the merchandise of silver,” and it goes on and describes
wisdom. And this style persists until
verse 20, then notice in verse 21 verse it picks up the old style, “My son, let
not them depart from thine eyes,” so you start off with an imperative. So the last part is exhortation, the first
part is exhortation, but what is the center part, verses 13-20? That actually is a psalm and it’s a psalm of
praise to wisdom. So this is the
structure of the third chapter: the first 12 verses, exhortation to loyalty to
Jehovah; the second section deals with a psalm of praise; the third section
deals with an exhortation to wise personal relationships.
This Sunday we’ll
deal with the first part of the first section.
It will take us quite a while to move through this third chapter; I want
to take it slowly so we can pick up all the details. Let’s look at the structure of verses 1-12 in
more detail. I think if you follow with
me as we go through these 12 verses you’ll notice a two-fold structure that is
repeated over and over and over. Instead
of the circumstance, that is omitted here, so the three parts to exhortation
wisdom literature: circumstance, that’s eliminated and we have left command and
motive. You’ll see this; look at
Proverbs 1:1, “My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my
commandments,” that’s the command. Verse
2, “For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.” There’s your motive. So we have a verse pair; verses 1-2.
Verse 3, “Let not
mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck; write them upon the
table of thine heart.” There’s your command.
Verse 4, “So that you find favor and good understanding in the sight of
God and man.” There’s your motive, so we
have another pair. Verse 5, “Trust in
the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understandings. [6] In all thy ways acknowledge Him,” so
verses 5 and 6a constitute the command; the result, “He shall direct thy
paths,” so there we have a third pair.
Verse 7, “Be not wise in thine own eyes; fear the LORD, and depart from
evil,” that’s your command. Verse 8, “It
shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones,” there’s your
motive. So we have another word pair.
Verse 9, “Honor
the LORD with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine
increase.” Verse 10, the motive, “So
shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new
wine.” So again we have a pair. Then verse 11, which is quoted in Hebrews 12,
“My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD, neither be weary of His
correction,” that’s the command. Verse
12, the motive, “For whom the LORD loves He corrects, even as a father the son
in whom he delights.” So you can see
that this is all made up of pairs. It’s
quite obvious that it should be read as pairs and you’ll get a lot more out of
Proverbs if you read it and learn to recognize the form; find out where the
command is, find out the reasons for the command.
And by the way,
this should be a guide to parents. This
is a father teaching his children and I want you to notice he just doesn’t give
commands. He gives commands plus
reasons. Now it’s true that in the day
to day practice, after a command has been given and explained it’s not necessary
to go into a 500 word theme on why little Johnnie should brush his teeth after
every meal. That’s true but still, when
the command is initially given there should be some explanation and this shows
you why. There are no arbitrary commands in God’s word; it is always reasoned
out and given attention.
Now let’s look at
Proverbs 3:1, “My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my
commandments; [2] For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add
to thee.” This is the first verse pair;
the command, verse 1; the motive, verse 2.
Let’s look at verse 1. “My son,”
here we go back to the third divine institution. Remember there are four divine
institutions. Divine institution number
one is responsible labor. These divine
institutions are essential creation ordinances; you may have come to know these
under another title somewhere else, under another teacher. They are known historically as creation
ordinances; some of the Dutch theologians refer to them as sovereign spheres,
Abraham Kuyper and others, sphere sovereignty and so forth. But we call them divine institutions here and
this refers to volition or man’s responsibility. That is a creation ordinance. The second creation ordinance is
marriage. The third creation ordinance
is family. And those are the three major
spheres; all other social spheres come from those except one. The fourth divine institution is a post fall
ordinance introduced in Noah’s day and that is government. You can also list a fifth one and that is the
concept that you have various racial sub groupings in the human race so that
you have a racial, linguistic, cultural breakup of the human race into
nationalism, and that would be the fifth if you want to chart it that way.
So we have these
four or five divine institutions functioning.
Now the tendency in the 20th century is to say that
government takes over all the other spheres and here’s where we are remarkable
imbalanced in our own national thinking today.
These spheres are so constructed in God’s Word and you just look at them
for a moment, these spheres are so constructed that if one expands the others
have to contract. You have no way of
increasing the strength of one without decreasing the strength of the other. And
so if you increase the strength of government one of the others has to go
somewhere. And as government power
increases then the family and marriage will decrease, and that’s exactly what
we see. With the government stepping in one can also argue that as the family
weakens then it creates a vacuum and government expands to take over that
vacuum; that could also be another corollary.
So watch how these
spheres interact, and one of the spheres is education. Where does education
fall in this? The book of Proverbs is
quite clear, “My son.” “My son” is a
title given in Israel to teachers and the fact that the teachers were known as
fathers, as we have seen in the Sunday School lesson, Elijah and Elisha, proves
that education is a function or a social function that is connected with the
third divine institution. That’s the way
the Bible views it, not with the fourth.
State education is only a substitute with an original biblical design
that the father and mother are to do the teaching; they are the ones that are
held responsible. Now it is true that
obviously all parents aren’t qualified and the Bible recognizes that. It’s quite obvious, for example, in Israel
that the parents didn’t do all the teaching; they turned their children over to
priests, that’s what Hannah is going to do in 1 Samuel, she turns her son over
to the priest for education, but notice who does the turning over—she
does. The priest doesn’t come and say I
will take your son; no-no, it’s the other way around, the parents recognize they
can’t do the job and so they provide the education, but it is still the choice
and the volition of the parents.
So education is
tied to the third and not the fourth divine institution in Scripture. And this is where, every once in a while
we’ll have some group of know-it-all educators who will get up on their soap
boxes and proclaim that everyone else in the world is dumb except them, and
actually that’s not true because in the college where I went all the flunkies
wound up in education courses. This is
not to insult any of you who are education majors because you want to be but it
was my experience anybody that couldn’t pass the hard courses in theoretical
math or physics always wound up taking education courses. And it’s quite obvious why. So this shows you that the people that do the
education in our country are not the best educated people, nor the most
intelligent. The people that do the
education largely know how to say nothing profoundly and they will tell you all
sorts of techniques and give you 8,000 different audio visuals to do your job
with and have nothing to do with the educational process whatever. Imagine what Jesus did, He didn’t have a
slide projector; He didn’t even have an overhead projector. So the techniques of teaching can be adapted
to the teacher but they’re not the essentials; the essentials always go back to
the teacher and the content… always content!
The best teachers are the teachers that can communicate the most content
to you and stimulate the most thinking on real content. Now that’s true education.
And here you see,
by the word “My son, forget not My law,” in other words, it emanates from the
father.
Now the word “My
law” is most interesting; notice, it’s my commandments, now the law, the Torah,
and the commandments here that are given in verse 1 really didn’t come from the
Jewish father, did they? They came from
Moses, but isn’t it interesting that when you read the text that although Moses
has given the Law or the Torah, and as a result of that the father or the
parents take the Torah and they communicate it to the sons, and there’s your
line of authority. The parents take
their authority from the Torah and when they give the Torah to the children it
is the parents Torah; it has been brought into the third divine
institution. So “My son,” I teach you
it, it is my Torah and they are my commandments, even though historically Moses
gave the Torah and Moses gave the commandments.
Now in Proverbs
3:2 we have the result; this is the simple result. By the way, the phrase, “let thine heart hold
on to the commandments” also tells us something about how souls work and it
might be good to review at this time a little bit about how our souls work and
how the conscience works in the human person according to the Bible. Each of us
has a conscience and when the mind gets information, the Word of God comes to
the mind and it sits there and we don’t act upon it, in other words, we neglect
the Word of God, although we have heard the Word we neglect it, we go on
negative volition, now certain things begin to happen. And these things you can’t stop from
happening; there’s no way you can stop this from happening. All you can do is surrender to the fact that
this is the way we have been designed; this is just the way God has built
us. You can’t stop this; you can observe
it happening in your life but you can’t stop it. The only way you have is choosing one way or
the other.
So we have
negative volition, here’s a person on negative volition, they’ve got some Bible
doctrine here in their mind, but since they’re on negative volition, their
God-consciousness in their conscience begins to condemn the mind and the mind,
under the condemnation of the conscience, because the person knows what is the
truth, they have heard the truth, they know exactly what the truth is in a
certain situation but they want their own way, and they are neglecting the Word
of God that they have heard, then certain things begin to happen. The first thing is that the mind begins to
start its defense mechanisms against the conscience, one of which is
suppression. And it starts to suppress
all this Bible doctrine into the unconscious and so you have a great buildup of
all this Bible doctrine that at one time was in the conscious mind but no
longer; it has been dumped out of the way.
You can’t erase it because memory can’t totally be erased but what
happens, the mind has a mechanism for getting rid of it and that is it dumps it
into the unconscious so that in your unconscious now you have all this doctrine
that you have once learned but you have never obeyed, you have never submitted
to and as a result you’re headed for trouble.
You’re headed for
trouble because number one, you’ve got this suppression process operating
that’s constantly dumping this stuff down into your unconscious. A second process begins to happen and that is
that scar tissue begins to develop on the conscience; the conscience has not
been listened to. The mind says no, no,
no, no, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear
it and so out of this you have the conscience begin to get covered over with
scar tissue, porosis described in the
New Testament, the New Testament Greek word porosis. So you have this hardening occur and so there
are two processes that begin to set in here that are quite dangerous and this
is why the author of Proverbs 3:1 said “let your heart hold on to My
commandments.”
How does the heart
hold onto the commandments? The heart
here refers to the mind and the conscience.
How are the mind and conscience going to hold onto the commandments? There’s only one way; you see, once the mind
has been exposed to the Word, like many of you have been exposed to the Word,
once the mentality has been exposed you haven’t got any choice except one and
that is to obey or disobey. So the only
way you can keep verse 1 operating, “let your heart hold onto My commandments”
is to submit to them because if you reject them, if you reject the father’s
authority and the authority behind him, the Lord, then what is going to happen? These two processes are going to set in
motion: dumping, suppression to the unconscious and you’re going to have this
scarring on the conscience. That’s going
to happen and you will not be able to hold onto these commandments. Remember verse
1 is given to believers, not unbelievers.
These are people who under the Old Testament economy have already
accepted Christ as Savior, but they have rejected. And so this is a warning to believers, if you
want to hold onto the doctrine that you have heard you have got to submit to
it; there is no other way of holding on.
Proverbs 3:2,
here’s the motive for holding on; here’s the motive for obeying it and avoiding
all this problem on the inside. “For
length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.” This is literally true. The word “peace” is explained in Psalm 38:3,
here is shalom, how the Hebrew word shalom is used and you’ll see that it
doesn’t just refer to mental peace; there’s a shade of meaning to shalom that you want to understand to
understand Proverbs 3:2. A lot of
benefits accrue to the person who will submit willingly to the Word of God, one
of which is shalom, and usually shalom is translated “peace” so you
think of mental peace. Well, that’s true
but that’s not all of it and here in Psalm 38:3 is a description of David when
he was out of fellowship. Here’s a
Christian that’s badly out of fellowship, grossly out of fellowship, negative
volition all the way and he is having suppression into his unconscious occur,
he is having scar tissue on his conscience and then in verse 3 he says, “There
is no soundness in my flesh because of Thine anger; neither is there any rest
in my bones because of my sin.” Now the
word “rest” is the word shalom and
the word “bones” here means physical body.
And the Bible is stronger with this shalom,
it’s far stronger than just mental peace; the Bible goes so far as to assert
that in the body, because of its union with the spirit, and union and the soul
is the result of both the body and the spirit, because of this union negative
volition not only sets a war between your conscience and your mind, not only is
the mind going to be fighting the conscience but your body is going to be upset
and the result is going to spill over here and start to affect this whole body.
The whole body is affected; shalom
means that the body is [can’t understand word] at peace; the body is not pulled
down by all sorts of the warring conscience and mind going on.
This might not
have been appreciated up until our own century but in our century a lot of work
has been done in medicine about this problem of psychosomatic effects and it
has been traced by some doctors to what is the emotional center in the brain
and here you have a situation where anything that your brain registers and your
brain is registering the fight between the mind and the conscience, is
immediately reflected all throughout the body in practically every major organ
in the body. And this has been shown and
now that we are understanding more about modern anatomy we can understand how
you cannot separate mind from body; they are one, and how you think determines
how you feel all the time. People
usually feel depressed; sometimes people come in and they say oh, I feel so
depressed and usually they have it backwards, they’ll say I feel depressed,
therefore I can’t get my job done. Oh
no, it’s the other way around; they haven’t been doing their job and they’re
flat lazy and because they feel guilty about being lazy they feel depressed. That’s the way it goes. It’s completely opposite; nobody can’t get
their job done because they feel depressed, it’s the other way around. The depression comes from past behavior
patterns of negative volition and depression has been brought on by
disobedience. So we can see from modern
anatomy what David is talking about and now what Proverbs is speaking of.
In Proverbs 3, for
these three things shall be yours if you let your heart hold on to these
commandments; that is, when you take in the Word of God as a believer and you
operate on it then these three benefits occur to you, “length of days, and long
life,” that is longevity, and the implication in verse 2 is that you can
actually shorten your life by bad mental attitudes, by rejection of the Word of
God, you know certain things to be true and so that’s rejecting the conscience
and the conscience begins to fight with the mind and the mind fights back and
you get all these defense mechanisms and chaos in here, and then the first
thing you know the emotions start in and they haven’t got any leader and so they
become the leader and you have a person operating on the basis of their
emotions; the emotions are loose, all over the place, no restraint, no
direction, nothing! How does this come
about? Rejection of what is known to be
true. And it is a hard, hard life, and
this section of the Word of God tells us that the physiological fallout from
disobedience is fantastic. And so this
is why “length of days, and long life” and so on, refer to the dangers… they
refer to the benefits and oppositely the dangers of disobedience. Disobedience will shorten your life. You’ll be taken up with mental attitude
envying, strife, jealousy and so on and it takes its toll. “…and peace,” shalom, the last word in verse 2, “peace” means health both
physically and mentally.
Now this is not
teaching that you’re going to be 100% healthy going this route because of the
fall but what it is saying is that you can minimize the effects of the fall in
your life by submitting to what is known of the will of God. Now you can continue to glory in your
disobedience and when we do this we’re on negative volition and we have some
little pet thing over here, and so we glory in that, negative volition toward
God, we know that’s wrong so what do we do?
We play with it anyway, and so we get spanked; we still play with it,
get spanked some more. This is why later
on in verses 11-12 the topic of discipline and chastening comes up in this
context and this is why the tendency is going to be even, because we know we’re
wrong, God begins to apply the paddle, we still defy it. And so there’s a warning given a the end of
this first section, don’t you despise the chastening of the Lord and the idea
is that when the Lord begins to apply the paddle it is possible for the
believer to still reject Him… still reject Him, and then there’s some terrific
price to be paid.
So verse 2 in
summary means that you have a physiological fallout, a tremendous result from
obedience or disobedience.
Now Proverbs
3:3-4, the second pair. “Let not mercy
and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of
thine heart; [4] So shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight
of God and man.” Now the word “mercy and
truth” looks like this in the Hebrew, chesed;
chesed means loyal love. This one,
together with truth, which looks like this, `emeth, this is the word from which we get “amen” from, these two
words hooked together refer to something the critics don’t like to see in the
book of Proverbs and that is it proves that Proverbs presupposes the existence
of the Mosaic Law. The critics always
like to say Proverbs is early, in some cases early, and then the law came
later. Huh-un, because here you’ve got
legal terminology just as you had legal terminology at the end of chapter
2. So here again we find evidence of the
Law.
And what does it
say? You let “mercy” which is loyalty, chesed means loyalty or loyal love,
something far out of the modern view of the word l-o-v-e, but chesed means
loyalty to a covenant. There are two
words in the Hebrew for love; one is chesed
and the other is ahav, ahav type love
is love that is sovereignly given to an object; chesed love is love that is given to someone with whom you have
made a contractual agreement. So chesed refers to a loyalty to a relationship
that has already been established and chesed
cannot be done by the non-believer. So
chesed cannot, this whole passage, cannot refer to a non-believer. It refers to the believer who already has a
defined personal relationship. And if
you will abide by the terms of that relationship, fine. For the Christian this means taking in the
Word, it means submitting to the Word, it means using 1 John 1:9 if necessary.
So, “Let not
mercy,” loyalty, “and truth forsake there,” and then the next two expressions
in verse 3, “bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine
heart,” are expressions for knowing to the point where you really know it. This doesn’t mean intellectual acquaintance
with it. Let me take you to some
passages in the Law to show you how this was used and how this was attained in
common every day practice.
Turn to
Deuteronomy 6:8, here is how this was literally done in the nation Israel, and
this also shows you why the Pharisees were very wrong in Jesus’ day. The Pharisees in Jesus’ day took this to be
the point where they would actually take a piece of paper and write some of
these commandments on and bind them on their forehead and bind them on hands
and this was used in Matthew 23 and other passages where Jesus chewed them out
for it. But that isn’t the meaning of
it. “You will bind them for a sign upon
thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.” Now that is talking about knowing it so well
that it becomes second nature to you.
The analogy that Paul uses in the New Testament is the analogy of the
athlete; look at the athlete. No athlete
can go out and exercise or participate in his sport without going over it
enough so it becomes second nature to him.
And this is why you have these grueling workouts over and over and over
and over and over and over and over and over again until it becomes second
nature.
Now that is the
nature of verse 8, do this over and over and over and over and over until it
gets so ingrained in it it is literally part of you. How, verse 7 tells you how it was done, “You
will teach them,” those words which I command thee, “you will teach them
diligently unto thy children, and shall talk” literally “in terms of them when
you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you
rise up.” That verse is a text that
defines education in the nation Israel.
And you’ll notice how the parents did it; this doesn’t mean they told
Bible stories from breakfast till supper.
What it means is that no matter what the topic of conversation was it
would always be with reference to a divine viewpoint framework. This is why we’re busy developing materials
in our Sunday School where we will have all the families with children in the
Sunday School on this system and we will have the erection of the divine
viewpoint framework in every family unit. Why? Because this is the way Israel
did it and after this divine viewpoint framework is built then any subject,
from music to zoology to anything can be dealt with in that framework and that
is how these people were educated. So,
“you shall bind them for a sign upon thine hand.”
Now turn to
Deuteronomy 11:18, another text that speaks to the fact that the Law was to be
not only memorized, it was to be ingrained in the thinking processes of the
people, to think in terms of divine viewpoint.
“Therefore shall ye lay up My words on your heart and on your soul, and
bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your
eyes.” This phrase, “bind them as a sign
upon your hand,” what this really means, it’s a Hebrew idiom and it came from
the observation, it’s a very clever observation they made here. The observation was that a person who knew
something very well would automatically respond and he would move his
hand. And so the expression came to mean
their hand, there is something bound on their hand that makes the hand move
correctly. This would be, with
reference, for example, to a craftsman, a carpenter who works with his tools
over and over and he can produce some fantastic things in wood. And they would just notice, here’s a man who
is trained in a skill; over and over and over he’s worked, watch the
carpenter’s hand as he works with the wood.
And so they would notice the manual effect of the knowledge that had
been ingrained in the person. And so
that’s why this expression came to be.
In other words, learn it so well that your hands automatically perform. See, this is wisdom; this is the chakmah of the book of Proverbs.
One further reference,
Jeremiah 31:33, this particular verse proves that this idea of writing the word
on the inward parts, this proves that Old Testament saints were regenerated
because in Jeremiah 31:33 it says, “But this shall be the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel:” this is future.
Jeremiah has lived in a time of national disaster; Jeremiah ministered
in the southern kingdom in Judah from about 700 down to 586 in this period of
history, not over a hundred years but within that interval; during that time he
saw the collapse of his nation and he said that God says this is never going to
happen again because I am going to give something to the nation the second time
that will prevent it. What is it? “The covenant that I will make with the house
of Israel: After those days,” that is the days when the nation is falling apart
and after Christ returns, “after those days, saith the LORD, I will put My law
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their God, and
they shall be My people.” That means
national regeneration. But this phrase
proves that individual regeneration was occurring in Solomon’s time when this
book of Proverbs was written. That
phrase refers to regeneration.
Back to Proverbs
3:3, “…bind them upon thy neck; write them upon the tablet” or “the table of
thine heart.” Again this is believers;
and please notice again that this is not automatic. Regeneration gives you the desire to learn,
it gives you the equipment to learn but guess who has to do the learning? You do.
And that learning takes time and practice and failure and more practice
and more learning and failure and more practice and learning, over and over and
over again.
But then in
Proverbs 3:4 here’s the result. “Then,
so shalt thou,” those of you who have King James it’s just another way of
saying then, “Then you will find favor and good understanding in the sight of
God and man.” But actually the Hebrew
doesn’t even read that way. “Thou shalt
find favor,” “find favor” is an imperative, it is sort of a command and you say
wait a minute, I thought the command was supposed to be only in verse 3, not in
verse 4. The reason this result in verse
4 is given as a command is because so many people would put verse 4 before
verse 3. See the tendency is I want success;
I want success and then I’ll consider the Word of God, verse 3. But the way this has been very cleverly
worked is you do this, this, this and this and then you do this. And it’s a way of expressing a result, it’s
saying the tendency is that you will find favor and good understanding but
don’t try to do it first. So the writer
is putting this in the imperative.
Finding favor and
good understanding refers back to conscience.
Remember we said that every human being has a conscience. This is what distinguishes man from the
ape. There is a discontinuity in
creation in the area of… the general theory of evolution is a philosophy that
attempts to bypass this. Evolution, philosophically,
is nothing more than the continuity of nature.
It’s a philosophical and religious premise and has nothing to do with
science, in spite of the fact The National Academy of Sciences would like to
have everyone believer that. Conscience
is a quality or an ability of the human that separates him from the ape and
what is it? It is a sense of
absolutes. And you cannot have language
without conscience.
We said conscience
did six things; what are those six things that conscience does? The first thing that conscience does, it
undergirds society as part of the first divine institution. Conscience makes the first divine institution
work. If we didn’t have conscience there
would be no first divine institution. If
you don’t have conscience you don’t have responsibility. So the first thing that conscience does, it
allows responsibility to exist and provides the basis for communication. You cannot have language without
absolutes. Secondly, what is the second
thing that conscience does? It restrains
the individual and this is the point that’s made in verse 4. Conscience restrains the individual two ways:
you have a person here and they’ve got to live with their own conscience. That’s the first way conscience restrains
you. The second way is that they face
people out here in society and those people have consciences, so the person has
to live with their own, that’s the first thing, and the second thing, the
person has to live with other people. So
the conscience restrains behavior by operating two ways: out from other people
and inwardly. That’s the second thing
conscience does; it restrains the individual.
The third thing, it orients the ego by providing an absolute point of
reference. The fourth thing, it approves
or disapproves of faith. The fifth
thing, it stores our record, and the sixth thing, it responds to the Word of
God. So those six things we developed
earlier that the conscience does.
In this passage
we’re watching one of those things. When
it says “you will find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and
man,” this passage sets us up for the rest of the entire passage because this
passage is saying you have a person here who is on positive volition. You may have people out here who are
unbelievers, who have nothing to do with God but they still have a
conscience. They still have some sense
of absolutes. And this means if you are
operating on positive volition you are at peace with other people’s
consciences. And this, later on in the
text, is going to provide the floor underneath personal relationships. This is why this whole 3rd chapter
is going to end in verse after verse after verse after verse after verse after
verse that has to do with personal relationships. And it all starts here, “finding favor and
good understanding.” This does not mean
the other person agrees with you. All people
didn’t agree with Jesus Christ but Jesus Christ had the okay of every man’s
conscience in His generation. All the
people that crucified Christ knew they were wrong when they did it. And so therefore living in favor with men is
a reference to the base of personal relationships.
Now watch, just
for a quickening of this, so this doesn’t just slide off your back, just
contrast this with what’s going on all around us here. Everybody’s concerned with personal
relationships; business corporations have these seminars where they bring all
their salesmen and executives together—how can we increase the efficiency of
our personal relationships in our firm, how can we do this, and so on. They have all these “how to” sessions and
“how to” seminars, weekend conferences for businessmen and so forth, to improve
personal relationships. Do you know what
the Bible says? The secret to all
personal relationships is living with your own conscience and if you live with
your own conscience you’re not going to be afraid of what somebody else
thinks. And not only that, but you can
have another person disagreeing with you and you can still look them in the eye
and relax with them because you know behind their disagreement they still respect
you. Now that is a tremendous first step
in healing personal relationships and it can’t come about unless you have the
recognition there are absolutes. This
business of sociological relativism is a bunch of bull, there is no such thing
as relativism. It is absolute all the
way and the Word of God says it is all the way.
So we have this
beginning with the absolutes and through dealing with submission to the
absolutes to the cross of Christ, God has provided forgiveness at the cross; we
confess our sins to Christ, we have the conscience cleansed and we begin to
move. So that’s what verse 4 is all
about.
Now Proverbs
3:5-6, one of the most famous of all and many of you have memorized this and
this is about as far as we’ll get this morning.
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own
understanding. [6] In all thy ways
acknowledge Him,” and then conclusion and motive, “and He shall direct thy
paths.” Let’s look at the three conditions. First, “trust in the LORD with all thine
heart.” The word “trust” in the Hebrew
looks like this, batach, hard “ch;”
batach was a wrestling term and it was used to pick up somebody and throw them
down. And the idea is a helpless state;
it means to be face down on the ground; that’s batach and that is the Hebrew verb trust God.
If you want to see
an instance of batach, turn to Psalm
22:9, you’ll see how the Lord Jesus Christ was taught how to batach and where Christ was when He was
taught how to batach. “For you are he that took me out of the
womb,” this is a psalm written 1,000 years before Jesus Christ that predicted
perfectly His resurrection and also His death on the cross. Notice the first verse, “My God, My God, why
hast Thou forsaken Me?” This was quoted
by Christ; notice verse 16, “They pierced My hands and My feet.” Those of you who are absorbed in a
naturalistic framework, work on this for a while, see if you can explain how
1000 years before Christ died you have a complete portrait of His death. Verse 9, “Thou art He that took me out of the
womb, Thou didst make me batach when
I was upon my mother’s breast.” The idea
is extreme helplessness. There is the
infant; he can’t even feed himself, this is why it’s connected with his
mother’s breast. He can’t even feed
himself, he is totally and completely dependent, and in that state he was
taught to batach. Now that is the flavor of the Hebrew verb to
trust: batach.
It’s this, then,
in Proverbs 3:5, batach in Yahweh,
“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart.”
Now this is another thing that refers both to being in fellowship and
Christian maturity. Let’s take one,
being in fellowship with the Lord. As
believers we are put in union with Christ at the point of salvation. This never changes. When you become a Christian you are eternally
secure, and the reason why you are eternally secure is because God has
regenerated you, God has predestined you and He can’t change His own
decree. Now there’s another side to
eternal security and this is a side that a lot of people don’t ever see. The other side of the coin to eternal
security is that we are locked in God’s family forever. Like for example, you may have a little brat
in your family and unfortunately he’s a product of you. And he can go out here and get arrested and
you can be thoroughly ashamed and you can wish he didn’t have your name, you
can wish you could change your name so you wouldn’t even be associated with
him. But I’ve got news, no matter what
you do he has your genes and he is in your family, no matter what happens.
Now that’s eternal
security. And when we are born again we
are put into God’s family and the same thing is true. But, there’s a catch, and that is something
called discipline. Being in God’s family
means that God is a perfect Father. We have a new Father and He has a big
paddle and He takes care of disobedience.
And this is why Hebrews 12 says if the Christian goes out and raises
hell and gets away with it and seems to have no problem he’s a bastard, to
quote Hebrews 12. Those are not my
words. So what is this saying then? It is saying we are “in Christ,” we are
disciplined. Now when we are out of
fellowship, we’re out of this bottom circle; in the circle we are in
fellowship, when we’re disobedient we’re out of the circle. Out here we can’t believe with all our
heart. Here’s why?
An adversity comes
into your life, some pressure, in your business, in your home, in your marriage
and you’re out of fellowship. Do you
know what happens? It’s as though you come
to God and say now God, I’ve got a problem over here and it’s as though yeah, I
know you’ve got a problem but you’ve got another problem, you’re out of
fellowship with Me, now get that straightened up first and then we’ll talk
about the other problems. And every time you try to go to the Lord about your
problem He says yes but… we’ve got our first problem to deal with and that is
that you’re out of fellowship. Yes but
Lord, I’ve got a problem. But you’re out
of fellowship. But you’ve got a problem
and this goes back and forth. And this
is why prayer becomes disagreeable to you when you’re out of fellowship. The last thing you want to do when you’re out
of fellowship is pray; right? You know
what I mean. So when you’re out of
fellowship prayer just dries up.
Why? Because of this battle; God
says I want you to deal with this. But
Lord, I want to deal with…. I want you
to deal with this! And this goes on
until we straighten up the problem and this is why we can’t satisfy the
condition of verse 5 out of fellowship.
You cannot trust the Lord with “with all your heart.” You can go through the motions with part of
your heart, that is the mind. But what
happens? You have two things going in
your heart; you have the mind and you have the conscience and this thing, you
can fool anybody with your mind. And you
can go through the motions, oh yeah, I claimed the promise and all the while
your conscience is saying you phony. And
so you’re not trusting the Lord with all your heart, you’re out of it. And you’re never going to trust the Lord with
all your heart until you say all right Lord, I’ve sinned, 1 John 1:9 and deal
with it.
Now the second way
you can’t trust the Lord with all your heart is going to be in the area of
growth. Again using our two circles, we are in fellowship with the Lord for
eternity but also this bottom circle, the circle of fellowship with the Lord
changes with time. As you grow older in the Lord this circle gets bigger and
the bigger it gets the more you’re going to be able to trust. So as a baby Christian you may not be able to
trust certain things; you may not literally be able to trust God for something;
so don’t worry about it, when you get older you will. So this expression, “Trust batach in the LORD with all thine heart”
has to do with in fellowship and it also has to do with maturity.
“…lean not unto
thine own understanding, [6] In all thy ways” know Him. Now this last phrase of verse 5 is a very,
very critical phrase and I am going to introduce a special terminology to
describe the end of verse 5 as the status quo heresy. Here’s what the status quo heresy is: the
status quo heresy says I am rocking along fine in the Christian life, and I
come along to some problem. Now up until
I hit that problem I had this much Bible doctrine; I knew that much of God’s
will for my life and everything was fine, I knew all the promises and so on,
and I come up to this situation. The
status quo heresy is I believe, it’s just a mechanical thing of claiming the
promise, moving on and I’m not going to be changed after the trial; I’m not
going to be different out here.
In other words,
suppose I have plus 40 units of Bible doctrine coming into trial; what this is
saying is look out for the fact that when you come out of the trial you may
have plus 41 units. In other words, you
will be changed in the process of trusting.
Trusting never is a status quo operation. Every time you trust something is going to
happen that kicks you on further in the Christian life. This is why it says don’t lean to your own
understanding. Now “understanding” is
the same Hebrew noun used over and over again for the desire of the
believer. We are to gain this
understanding. So why do we say after gaining the understanding, all of
chapters 1 and 2, get understanding, get understanding, get understanding, then
we come to the middle of Proverbs, don’t lean on the understanding. Why is there a shift in verse 5? Why is there this tremendous, almost like
it’s colliding with everything else in the book of Proverbs? The answer is because no matter how much
wisdom you have accumulated you haven’t reached your goal yet and so don’t rely
on the past; always keep (quote) “open-minded.”
And this means open-minded in the true sense of the word, open-minded to
something that God is going to teach you in this trial. And a lot of Christians are not claiming the
promises because they’re in status quo heresy, they think it’s oh I just claim
the promise and roll on and forget the Lord Himself.
What does it says
here? Verse 6, “In all thy ways,” the
word “acknowledge” means “in all thy ways know Him,” “… know Him,” not
acknowledge Him. This means it takes a
little determination in that new situation to find out what is God doing here. It’s like this: in your mentality you have
collected some of this divine viewpoint framework and you have knowledge of
this particular situation. You have your
conscience over here with God-consciousness.
That measures your growth. All
right, you walk into this situation and you’ve got the divine viewpoint
framework. You may never even open the
Word of God; this thing may come up during lunch hour; it may come up in the
afternoon; it may come up in the morning; it may come up sometime when you’re
driving a car. It may come up sometime
when you don’t have any time to consult the Word, but you’ve got it in your
mentality, here. Now what happens? You put these two things together and you
begin to act on it by faith. This is batach, you trust the Lord. And as a result of this you are open, Lord,
do you have something new that I do not see in this situation? I’m not just going to blindly say oh, I’ll
trust the Lord. No, I’m going to look at
the situation and say Lord, do you have something that You’re teaching me in
this situation here. That’s what this “lean
not unto thine own understanding” is.
Don’t be super confident that everything you’ve learned up to the moment
is all that God has for you. Don be in
status quo heresy.
And then finally
the promise, “He will direct thy paths,” and He does this by one way and we do
it by three ways. Let me in conclusion
demonstrate these ways. Here’s the
problem. Here are three ways we
encounter the problem when we do it our way.
We have a problem and that is we go around it; that’s one way we have a
human viewpoint solution to the problem. We pull a fast thing around the end;
that’s one way of handling the problem.
The only trouble is, it leaves the problem there and we wind up
stumbling over it again.
Now another very
clever one, if you’ve used this about a thousand times eventually you’ll
graduate and you come up with a new tactic and this one I’ve seen a lot in the
counseling situation. A believer comes
waltzing up to a problem and he sees it and he doesn’t want to deal with it so
what does he do? Oh, you know, pastor my
real problem is over here. So they’ve
got an artificial problem they create and boy, they really madly work on this
one, the only problem, over here’s the problem.
But they create a pseudo problem and say well this is really my problem. So that’s a second gimmick for handling a
problem.
Then the third
gimmick is a real honest one and that is just shelve it and move on. Now when we deal with this, “Trust the LORD
with all thine heart … and He will direct thy paths,” here’s how He handles
it. We have a problem and He says here’s
my path, it’s direct, the word means straight, and it doesn’t mean there’s any
deflection. This is the Hebrew word yashar and it means straight through
it. And that’s how God deals with the
problem; He moves through the problem, not around it, He doesn’t create a
pseudo solution, and He doesn’t back off, He moves right through it.
Next week we’ll
pick it up at verse 7….