Clough Proverbs Lesson 23
Loyalty to God in all circumstances – Proverbs 3:7-12
In Proverbs 3 have
come to a section in this book that is the third in the line that we have
followed; you recall that the first group of proverbs, Proverbs 1:8-19 dealt
with getting the attention of a young person by pointing out the dangers of
affiliating with the wrong crowd. And
the last part of chapter 1 dealt with the urgency of getting wisdom. Chapter 2 dealt with the cause and effect
mechanisms for the opposition of wisdom and chapter 3 deals with the
exhortations to a particular kind of wisdom.
In this 3rd chapter we have the exhortation to divine
viewpoint wisdom instead of human viewpoint wisdom. There are two ways of looking at wisdom from
the Bible standpoint. The Hebrew word, chakmah, and this meant skill in living
or using faith for the glory of God.
That was divine viewpoint wisdom.
But there’s also
human viewpoint wisdom which would be just simply pragmatic cleverness. And this is the kind of wisdom which I showed
you some Egyptian materials and Mesopotamian materials, we mentioned the Greeks
and their concept of wisdom earlier, and so from all the other ancient
civilizations around Israel you had an emphasis on human viewpoint wisdom,
which may contain some very good things, all the way from how to brush your
teeth on down to various moral precepts, some of which we say are very good,
some of which we’d say we agree with.
But in human viewpoint wisdom they had then, and are still, some fatal
flaws and contrasts with divine viewpoint wisdom and Proverbs 3 is cautioning
us about just wisdom as such, and saying this book is not just about chakmah, it’s not just about wisdom in
the abstract. It’s about a certain kind
of wisdom, the kind of wisdom that comes by grace through Jesus Christ as He
was known in the Old Testament and as He was known in the New.
Divine viewpoint
wisdom is characterized, as James 3:13-18 point out, and we pointed this out
last week, it’s characterized by growth; pure wisdom, divine viewpoint wisdom
fundamentally is a relationship with God and there is a personal nature to
divine viewpoint wisdom that is lacking in human viewpoint wisdom. Mere pragmatism or simple cleverness tends to
be impersonal and we’ll see this very strongly in Proverbs 3. This chapter is very highly personal and it’s
saying that our relationship as believers is with a living personal God. And this is very hard to get over. All the time that we are going through Proverbs
3, whether you know it or not, you are, so to speak, taking on the whole
establishment, the whole intellectual atmosphere into which we’re bathed and
soaked. And so while we’re studying
divine viewpoint wisdom you have to do battle, mentally, to get out of 20th
century categories and back into biblical categories. And to do this we have to acknowledge the
fact that God, in the Old Testament, is a personal God and we know His personal
nature by what He does.
We’re going to see
some things that this personal God does to us in Proverbs 3. One of the things is that He loves us. Now a lot of people like the concept of a
personal God who loves but in our generation it has become nothing more than a
word symbol. People really don’t believe
there’s a personal God who really loves us.
There’s just a nice little thing you repeat 2500 times a day and you
hypnotize yourself, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe and
finally by evening you believe it. And
this is nothing more than auto hypnosis and nothing more than some sort of a
psychological gimmick. But in the Bible
we’re talking about the existence of a real, personal God. And one of the interesting things about this
personal God is that he not only loves but He hates; you can’t have one without
the other. Having just love without hate
is maudlin sentimentalism. You don’t
have love without the hatred for the opposing object. And so therefore, this God who loves
righteousness hates unrighteousness and again we’re going to see that as we
develop the passage.
But the idea
behind all this is that if we are personally related to such a God, ultimately
our loyalty is to Him, not even to what He has told us. What He has told us, that is, His Word, is
limited. Under any given point you can’t
tell that He might not illuminate you to more of the Word. And so last time we paused at Proverbs
3:5-6. Keep in mind that Proverbs
3:1-12, the first twelve verses of chapter 3 is one initial section. This initial section in the 3rd
chapter of Proverbs is an exhortation to loyalty to Jehovah, and then later
we’ll deal with the wisdom issue, but all these 12 verses have as a common
theme loyalty first to Jehovah. Said
another way, it’s just the first commandment all over again.
These verses are written
in couplets; verses 1-2 go together; notice the structure again, to refresh
your mind look at Proverbs 3:1, it is an imperative command, do this. Verse 2, because; verse 3, a commandment;
verse 4, then, a result; verse 5 a commandment, verse 6 in the last part a
result; verse 7 a commandment, verse 8 a result; verse 9 a commandment, verse
10 a result; verse 11 a commandment, verse 12 a result. So you have a series of couplets in this
section.
And we got down to
the couplet of verses 5-6 and here it says, “Trust in the LORD with all thine
heart, and lean not unto thine understanding.
[6] In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy
paths.” We concluded by saying that the
point here is to fight off a tendency that Christians have of distorting the
faith technique, that is, we’re used to applying faith and have our
relationship with God established on that basis but the tendency is after we
know a little bit from the Word of God is to run automatically. So here we have situation #1, situation #2,
and situation #2, and we move from one situation to the next one and we say
okay, we meet situation one by method A and so we come to situation 2 and we’re
going try method A on that, and we come to situation 3 and we’ll try method A
on that. Situation one might be some
business problem that you had in the office this week and it was very
frustrating to you and so as a believer you recognize that God has certain
promises, “Casting all your care upon Him for He cares for you,” “All things
work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called
according to His purpose,” and you begin to apply these promises in certain
specific ways to your business problem, and you might have been successful, and
might have had success in that department and so therefore you might have had a
problem in the home, so that’s your second problem. You found that certain things work in the
office so you come into the home situation and you’re going to apply the same
thing in your home that you applied in the office. And this is a problem because this means you
are static. You do not grow; you are not
sensitive to various situations.
Proverbs 3:5-6 is
a caution against this. This is why at
the end of verse 5 where it says “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and
lean not unto thine understanding,” the word “understanding” tebunah, is a word which is synonymous
with wisdom throughout the book of Proverbs.
As you look at 3:5b you look at that and you say doesn’t this refute the
whole basis of the book; over and over and over this book has said be wise, be
understanding, get understanding, do this, do all you can to get understanding,
and then we come to verse 5 and it says don’t lean on your understanding. Now doesn’t this undermine everything that
has gone before? No. What verse 5 is saying is that the wisdom you
have up to the situation is fine but don’t think that God is not going to
expand that wisdom in this present situation.
After all, isn’t it true that if we have a personal God He reveals
Himself, then He is going to perhaps reveal Himself in this situation giving
you new insight into the old doctrine.
So going back to the problem in the office, you may have worked that
out, fine; you come into the home situation be open minded, spiritually
speaking, enough to accept that God might work a little differently in your
home situation, in that problem, than the old problem you faced the previous
afternoon in the office. In other words,
verse 5 is simply saying be open to God’s personal leading in each and every
situation.
Now since most of
these couplets are parallelisms, and if we understand the last part of verse 5
as “lean not unto thine own understanding,” then the first part of verse 5,
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart,” must mean something parallel to the
meaning of the last part of verse 5. So
this calls us to find out what does it mean to trust the Lord with all your
heart. As we have diagramed the word of
the Hebrew and usage in the Old Testament by this chart, we find that “all your
heart,” the word “heart” usually means what we now call mind and
conscience. The “all your heart” means
that both of these are working together and it implies that if you lean on just
wisdom as of the moment they are not working all together.
Now let’s suppose
that you have divine viewpoint framework in the mentality of the soul and you
have developed insight into the way God works and you’re at the office and you
know this, and you’ve got +R learned behavior patterns, so all of this, you
respond automatically to some business pressure and you have peace about it,
everything’s fine. Then you go home and
since God leads through His Holy Spirit, through the conscience, the conscience
is giving you a nudge to pay attention to something; it says pay attention to
something. But you don’t accept the
nudge of your conscience, you go on the basis of what is in your mind and what
is in your mind is the same kind of thing that you used at the office. And so it’s kind of like you build up a
momentum; you solve it this way once, you’re going to solve it that way again,
instead of paying attention to the conscience that says well, in this situation
God has a little surprise here, or he has a little piece of [can’t understand
word] material that you haven’t noticed; pay attention, look here. And instead of doing that you just go boom,
60 miles an hour move into the situation the same way that you handled the
situation before. And this is not
trusting the Lord “with all your heart,” because what has happened here is that
you’ve got part of your heart, the mind, and that’s trusting, but the other
part, the conscience, isn’t. The
conscience has something going on here.
And so in the
Hebrew mentality looking at this it is impossible to trust the Lord with all
your heart and lean completely on your final mental understanding. Every time that we go into a situation with
faith it is the doctrine we have stored in the mentality of the soul plus an
openness to the leading of the Lord in the conscience, so you see the personal
nature. In other words, the Christian
life is not something that is always mechanistic and automatic. Now in some situations it is automatic; there
are going to be situations in many of your lives where adversity comes in so
fast, so rapidly, and with such great shock so that you are going to have to
respond automatically and in that situation you are sort of leaning on your own
understanding. There you can’t do
anything else but lean on your own understanding and those +R learned behavior
patterns, those righteous learned behavior patterns that you have developed by
application in practice, practice, practice, practice, practice and practice
are going to undergird you at that crisis moment. But this isn’t always the case, so Proverbs
3:5-6 is simply a caution, “Trust the Lord with all your heart,” pay full
attention to what He has for you this moment, and don’t lean to the
understanding that you’ve developed just up to now; be open to the fact that
He’s going to teach you some more in this situation.
[6] “In all your
ways know Him,” the word “know” in the Hebrew, yada, not acknowledge, but “know” means to seek out what He wants
in this situation. See, that’s why the
emphasis in the Hebrew in verse 6 is “In all your ways,” not just in the past
ways and then you sort of develop a momentum based on past performance and you
no longer bother to seek Him the way you used to seek Him. But this says “In all your ways,” even in the
present moment, seek Him the way you did before. And then verse 6 is a result, the last part
of verse 6, as always in these couplets, the first couplet is the commandment,
the second part of the couplet is the result.
The second part in verse 6, “then he will direct your path” so that’s a
promise. And the promise is valid, it’s
the universe, it’s structured the way the Bible says the universe is
structured. If the universe is not built
the way the Bible says it is built then this promise cannot work; but if the
Bible, if you grant a divine viewpoint creationist view of reality then this
promise can work.
Let’s look at the
next couplet, Proverbs 3:7-8. This is
parallel to the first one. “Be not wise
in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and depart from evil. [8] It shall be health to thy navel, and
marrow to thy bones.” Obviously you can
see the parallel between 7-8 and verses 5-6, speaking much the same thing. In fact you can begin to see now as we’ve
gone through these couplets, to see verses 1 and 2 really are related to verses
3 and 4. Doesn’t verses 1 and 2 say much
the same thing as verses 3 and 4?
Yes. So verses 5 and 6 say much
the same thing as verses 7-8. “Be not
wise in your own eyes,” repeats the warning against human viewpoint
wisdom.
“Be not wise in
your own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.” Now the word “fear the LORD” is the same word
used in Proverbs 1:7; if you look at Proverbs 1:7 you’ll see the foundation for
divine viewpoint wisdom is asserted once again.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise
wisdom and instruction,” the point being here loyalty. Remember Proverbs is written for a citizen
living between 1440 and 586 BC where you have the kingdom of God operating in
history and during the operation of this kingdom of God you had a certain
economy. This economy was grounded on
the citizen’s loyalty to the King of the kingdom. Since the kingdom is God’s, the King is God,
and since God is the King He wants His citizens to be loyal to Him. And that’s what the word “fear Jehovah”
means, it means trust Him, fear Him, be loyal to Him. This, then, is again repeated in Proverbs
3:7.
“Fear the LORD,
and depart from evil. [8] It shall be
health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones.”
The last of verse 6 promised a guidance; verse 8 promises health, and it
promises physical health. It promises
“health to thy navel,” the word “navel” was used in the Hebrew as a summing up
of the nutrition. They observed that the
body was… during the pregnancy period was fed through the umbilical cord so the
navel came to be the entrance of nutrition, and therefore came to be a symbol
for all that nourishes. And so when it
says “It shall be health to thy navel” it means it will supply nourishment to
you. And that is the promise.
Don’t get so hyper
spiritual and so allegorical about this; verse 7 is asserting physiologic
results from divine viewpoint wisdom.
And when you get older you will see this, that there’s a price people
pay for not abiding by wisdom. If God is
the Creator and He has structured us a certain way, then obviously it doesn’t
come by any surprise that we are built in a certain way and that at the center
of our brain is a place, the emotional center, and out of all this and how we
think, out of this flow all sorts of nerve impulses and chemical impulses that
affect various organs of our body. Now
this is not going so far as to say all disease is caused by this; this is
simply saying diseases are aggravated by how you think.
Verse 8 is saying
this; this is not just an ethereal promise; it’s saying if God is God and he
has built you this way, then you’re stupid if you think that by not following
His operating instructions for your body you’re going to escape. No you’re not; you’re going to pay the price
and you’re not going to pay the price spiritually, you will pay the price
physically, for violation of His operating instructions. And so on this chart some of the diseases are
listed, all the way from colitis to high blood pressure, that are aggravated by
this kind of thing. So you see how
people can be miserable; this is why the medical profession today, 60% of the
people that come to see a doctor actually have no problem whatever physically;
the problem is all above the eyebrows and how they are responding to life’s
pressure situations. This is simply what
the Bible’s saying. If you would respond
the way God ordained you to respond then you would have the health in your
navel and marrow to your bones.
But just as soon
as verse 8 ends we move to another verse; verses 9-10, and in verses 9-10 we
face a situation where we have a balance.
Now it’s true verses 9-10 are going to talk about the same thing that
verses 11-12 are going to talk about, so you see, we’ve had 1-4; 5-8, and now
9-12. So as we look at these next four
verses, think of what they are going to say.
They are going to balance what has just been said because people could
just stop with verse 8 and be left with a very false impression; they could say
yeah, look at this, this means in order to be physically healthy what I will do
is I will keep the Law of the Old Testament and I will grit my teeth and I will
discipline myself and then I will have physical health. Now that’s not the point at all. What Proverbs is saying is that if you have
[word/s missing] on God and to trust your personal relationship with the Lord
then these results will accrue, but also being loyal to God means certain
unpleasant things. Now you see, you
could stop at verse 8 and say why isn’t it pleasant to have this wonderful
personal relationship, things are so sweet in Jesus, and all the rest of
it. But now the next four verses are
going to show things are not so sweet with Jesus because sometimes they can get
downright miserable and tough. So let’s
look at some of them.
Proverbs 3:9,
“Honor the LORD with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine
increase. [10] So shall thy barns be
filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.” Verses 9-10 give us the specific; verses
11-12 the overall principle. Verses 9-10
are talking about one of the hardest things to do, part with material or
material wealth. That’s very hard to do. This is talking about honoring the Lord with
thy substance and not just by substance, this is talking about the first fruits
of thine increase. This is talking about
a man in business and for years the man struggles and struggles and struggles
to get his business over into the black and he knows, most of you working in
business know that it takes years when you start out to get into the situation
where you can get in the black. Then Uncle Sam comes along and you’re back in
the red. But you try and try and try to
keep things on the black side of the ledger.
Now after you’ve got there, what this says is that God expected you to
turn around and take your very first profit and give it back to Him. That’s the first fruit. And that is hard, and that doesn’t come easy
but that’s what God says, if you really honor Me then this is what you will
do.
And this is related
to the doctrine of labor in the Bible.
In the men’s fellowship breakfast we are going to discuss the doctrine
of labor and the Bible’s philosophy of labor and we’re going to see why the
modern communists in some way approaches the Christian view but in other ways
is exactly opposite to the Christian view.
But it’s only the communist that is left with any philosophy of labor
apart from a few Bible-believing Christians, but Americans at large today have
lost any idea of what labor is except for the fact of how you do the least of
it. So the Bible teaches that labor has
a divine function and it’s to be performed as unto the Lord and this is an
expression of the fact that we honor the Lord by taking that which He has
allowed us to produce and give it back.
In our country
what has happened? Briefly stated, we
have gone through three periods in our country as far as labor and labor’s
attitudes toward work. We started out with what was called the Puritan ethic,
much maligned by people who like to laugh at great people. Usually you’ll have some college professor
knock the Puritans. The reason why this
happens is because they recognize the Puritans are great people and small individuals
always have to malign big people. The
great people never have to malign anybody because they’re naturally great and
the Puritans didn’t; the Puritans stayed with it and produced a fantastic
civilization. And then we have some
little pimply faced college professor who comes along and thinks he’s got to
make his mark in reality and the way to do it is tear down somebody that’s
great; so this usually happens and the Puritans are usually singled out for it.
So the Puritans
started off with a work ethic in this country.
What did this work ethic say? It
didn’t say what most of you think it said.
The Puritan concept of labor was taken from Genesis 2, so let’s turn to
Genesis 2 and see what that Puritan concept of labor was. The first thing to notice about it is that
labor is developed out of Genesis 2:15: “The LORD God took the man, and put him
into the garden of Eden to dress [till] it and to keep it.” That is one reference in Genesis. The other reference in Genesis is Genesis
1:26, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon
the earth. [27] So God created man in
his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He
them. [28] And God blessed them” and so
on, and then he talks about what man is to do.
The Puritan ethic
saw work as the fulfillment of the first divine institution. The first divine institution is volition; I
have the freedom to do or not to do certain things. And the Puritans said then I have the freedom
to produce good or I have the freedom to produce evil, but notice the Puritans
said I do not have the option of not producing anything. And if you will stop and think, you are
always producing something; it is either something foul, it is some lazy
attitude or something, but you’re always producing something. The Puritans simply recognized this; that I
am always producing something. I have no
freedom to stop producing except drop dead.
And so since I do not have the freedom to stop producing what I do
produce will be for God’s glory. And the
Puritan recognized that God had planted man on the face of the earth to bring
forth fruit, back to God, and it was to be done as unto the Lord and therefore
this resulted in a fantastic attitude toward business and economics in the
early days of this country.
Now watch what
happens; the second and third generation from the Puritans lost the concept;
the fathers had it and their sons never got it from their fathers but their
sons noticed something about their fathers; they noticed, you know, dad worked
awful hard and we were quite wealthy. So
the second step in the decline was all right, we will work hard and this is the
hard work ethic. In other words, you just
work your fingers to the bone for the sake of acquiring material wealth and
security. And this has been interpreted
as coming from the Puritans but it isn’t, this is just skimming the fruit from
the original Puritan position based on Genesis 1 and 2. The original Puritan would never have worked
his fingers to the bone just to accumulate material wealth; he did it because
what he was producing was good; if he swept out a room he swept it as unto the
Lord. And if he was a carpenter he built
things as unto the Lord, and whatever he did he did them as unto the Lord. Here it becomes as unto man, I will build and
I will build hard and I will work hard and I will be very diligent and I will
build as unto man. And so immediately we have the worth ethic still preserving
the hardness and the discipline and some of the craftsmanship. This still was produced but for what
reason? For acquisition of material
wealth.
And then we come
to the third step, so prevalent in our day when people look at this and say why
work? And it’s a very logical question;
this is a very logical question, if that is all there is to work, why
bother? It’s an absolutely logical
question and the tragedy is that our country at the moment has no answer to it
apart from Bible doctrine, going back all the way to the source of the original
Puritan ethic when the reason was is because we do it as unto the glory of a
personal living God, that’s why. And
that’s sufficient. And if you’ve lost
that base, spiritually and theologically, you have no reason, we might as well
all to out and join the nearest hippie commune and mooch off of somebody else,
get food stamps.
Now there’s no
reason for mocking these people because they have simply taken the logical
conclusion of what they have learned from their parents. Their parents have taught them this, they
have watched while their parents have slaved and slaved and slaved and slaved
and slaved for what? Material security,
that’s what, and they say it is an insufficient goal and I’m not
interested. You should have been with me
when we had the rock festival out here and we went around and we talked to some
of the hippies. Do you know that all of
those I talked to, not one of them… not one of them came from a middle or lower
class family. All of them came from
upper class, not the kind of upper class family that has inherited wealth, they
came from an upper class family where apparently their fathers had done
fantastically well in investments, medicine and other fields, fantastically
well. And they saw it; so what, it
doesn’t impress me one bit. So how would
you answer somebody like this? You
realize you have no answer, you can knock them but the frustrated [can’t
understand words] average middle class Americans has no answer because he has
lost his base; he has lost his base in Bible doctrine that the Puritan
had.
Part of that base
is given here in Proverbs 3:9. The Bible
says “Honor the LORD with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine
increase.” Like Adam producing fruit in
the garden we are to produce fruit in our profession, whatever it is. Whatever your job is, your job is like Adam
in the Garden; God wants you to produce something that you can be proud of, you
can turn around and give to Him. And as
a result, verse 10, “So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses
shall burst out with new wine.” That is
a divine promise that when we do it God’s way we will receive God’s
blessing.
But Proverbs
3:11-12 are put in quickly as an even more intense rejoinder to give [can’t
understand word] to taking this to a false conclusion. “My son, despise not the chastening of the
LORD, neither be weary of His correction, [12] For whom the LORD loves He
corrects, even as a father the son in whom he delights.” In these two verses, verses 11-12, those of
you who read the New Testament will immediately recognize that they are quoted
there. But let’s study first verse 11,
then I’ll take you to the New Testament passage, then we’ll study verse 12 and
then we’ll go to the New Testament passage.
So we’re going to flip-flop between Proverbs in the Old Testament and
where this verse is quoted in the New Testament. And our objective is going to be to understand
the content of verses 11-12.
What does it mean,
“My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD; neither be weary of His
correction.” This explains that the
Puritans, going back and using this illustration, the Puritan man in business
did not take an automatic magical view of verses 9-10. Suppose you were a Puritan businessman and
suppose you were working and you had your business set up as unto the Lord and
you honored the Lord with your substance.
Very hard to do but when you finally made profit you would at least give
a portion of the very first to God, thank you God for getting me this far. Now supposing you had done this, and you had
a tendency to look down at verse 10 and say okay Lord, I’m waiting for the
barns to be filled. In other words, an
automatic type of magical thing. But if
you had been thinking correctly verses 11 and 12 come into this picture and
there is something rather unpleasant.
But it says, “My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD,” in other
words, there is going to be something that comes into the life that will be a
chastening. First of all it begins with benin, benin, my son, this takes us back
to the fact that this is taught inside the third divine institution.
There are four
divine institutions, sometimes known as creation ordinances. The first one is volition or responsible
labor. God has placed man on earth with
freedom to produce good or freedom to produce evil. Now there’s man’s basic freedom; all
political freedom comes from the first divine institution. The second divine institution is marriage;
marriage is not some sort of a socio cultural product of evolution; it is a
product of divine decree and mirrors the image of Christ and the Church. And
then we have family. Now we’ve noticed
several things about family here; one of the things that we’ve emphasized over
and over and I hope by this time you’ve caught the point, and that is that
education proceeds out of the third divine institution; this is why Proverbs is
a father/son context. Education does not
come from the state government.
Education biblically comes from the family. The parents can turn custody of this thing
over to professionals to do the teaching but biblically the authority chain
still goes back to the family and not the government. This is a fundamental biblical position and
cannot be compromised without compromising the Christian faith.
So now we come to
a second portion of this. Out of the
family comes education and out of education comes suffering. Now finals are coming up and all of you can
sympathize, you know what suffering but this is talking about a different kind
of suffering than just your kind, although your kind is included in this. This means that there will be suffering
inside this kind of a situation, underneath the third divine institution. God has used the second divine institution to
mirror Christ and the Church; in other words, if we study marriage and all the
docs contained in the Bible concerning marriage we will have a picture of
Christ’s relationship to the Church. But
here’s something you may not have noticed before. If we study the family we are going to
understand God’s relationship in the area of training to believers. So the family institution becomes a model of
how God Himself trains believers.
This is why we
have never had, and as pastor can testify to this and I know a lot of my fellow
pastors can; we have never had the number of believers falling apart,
complaining, going into hysterics and carrying on like we have today. Do you
know why? The family unit has broken
down so authority is broken and people aren’t used to this kind of training
that used to be available inside the family unit. And so the parents have let
their kids go out and do what they want to do, they have become very
permissive, and this is what we notice is happening now in the spiritual life. People become Christians out of a bad family
permissive background, I’m not talking dictators, but we have lost the
authority and so out of this we have believers, and so here come somebody and
we’ll put a halo on him because he trusted in Jesus Christ at some point in
time and becomes a saint, that’s what the word “saint” means. And so he starts moving on in the Christian
life and all of a sudden he comes into a big fat problem and what does he do? Up to this point daddy and mommy always
bailed him out and up to this time if he got a parking ticket his father would
go down and talk to that judge and he’d get him off. And if he got in trouble somewhere else in
school, mamma would come down and get him off the hook.
Now look what
happens, he comes to a problem in his Christian life and do you know what? God doesn’t get him off the hook any more,
and he can’t figure out what’s going on, God’s my Father, why doesn’t God let
me do what I want to like my parents let me do what I wanted to. It doesn’t work that way. So therefore we begin to have all sorts of
problems crop up in the Christian life and this is why these two verses are
very important and we will spend the rest of the time today on them and next
week we’re going to come back to verses 11-12.
They are two of the most critical verses in the entire book of Proverbs
because they attack directly one of the great problems I see happening right
here in Lubbock and I see it all over the country, the breakdown of the third
divine institution is causing and having a tremendous overflow reaction in the
spiritual life of believers.
The word
“despise,” “My son, don’t you despise the chastening of the LORD,” let’s get
some background on the word “despise.”
Despise is a word that is used for general hatred; it involves the idea
of choosing to reject something. In
other words, the first word, “despise” here, means to reject; it means to go on
negative volition, it means to be faced with the person you love and say no I
am not going to do it. Now God, You’ve
asked too much, I’m not going to go this far, this is ridiculous. That’s what it means, “despise you not.” In other words, don’t you get on negative
volition, when there’s a problem come this way and God wants you to go through
it—nope, not going to do it, and I dare You to bend my will God! He will! But “despise” equals negative volition,
that’s the flavor of the word. Now the
other words used and synonymously with it is the word “be weary of His
correction,” so let’s forget the word “chastening” and forget the word
“correction” and get these two verbs down so we understand what’s
happening.
“Despise” means
the believer, this is not talking about the non-Christian who hasn’t accepted
Christ, this is talking about someone who has already accepted Christ and gone
on in the Christian life, and faced with a problem that God has [can’t
understand word] and he says NO, I am not going to do this. And the second word, “be weary” has to do
with the emotional aftereffects of this kind of a decision. Turn back to Genesis 27:46 and we’ll see a
case in point [can’t understand word] what the word “weary” means. There are many words in the Hebrew for weary
and we’re concerned only with one this morning and this one word occurs in
Genesis 27:46. This refers to the
attitude and the emotional overtones.
The first word it means through volition reject; the second word refers
to the mental attitude that accompanies this.
Now look where Rebekah is, verse 46.
“Rebekah said to Isaac, I am weary of my life because of the daughters
of Heth; if Jacob takes a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these who are
of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?” In other words, this is weariness to the
point of contemplation of suicide, I can’t go on. I’m at the end of my rope, I can’t go any
further. God will give you enough rope
to hang yourself on if you want; God always has plenty of rope so you’re never
at the end of your rope. Never! But here comes some believer and they’re
coming into a problem and they think they’re at the end of their rope and the
word really means to just quit; this is the attitude of quitting, give up. This is what Rebekah thinks.
Let’s look for
another, more severe, type of illustration.
Numbers 21:5, another place this Hebrew verb to be weary is found. “And the people spoke against God, and
against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the
wilderness? For there is no bread,
neither is water, and our life,” soul, nephesh,
“our soul loathes this light bread.” Now
the word “loathes” is the same word to be weary of, and the light bread is manah [sp?], from which we get the word
“manna” which means what is it. Now this
is a fantastic illustration of this and if you’ll catch this it’ll make a lot
of difference in your Christian life.
The Jews are out in the wilderness; now it’s not the place you’d take a
vacation, granted. They have problems
out there; they do not have the normal things of life. God has taken them out into a severe boot
camp for forty years where they’re going to learn some basic theology because
basic theology comes [can’t understand word].
And so boot camp
goes on for forty years time and during that time they don’t have a normal
diet. But God has provided something;
every morning they’d go out and they’d scrape up this stuff off the ground and
they’d wonder, what is it, and so they called it “what is it,” because the
Hebrew word manna means what is it? So
they labeled this product “what is it,” and every morning they’d go out and
scrape up some what is it off the ground and they’d eat this stuff. And it turns out that this is material that
God has invested with perfect nourishment; it’s perfect nutrition. If modern medicine could find out what is it
they would have the ideal vitamin pill that you could take for your breakfast
every morning and you wouldn’t need to eat for the rest of the day; wouldn’t
that be fantastic. This was perfect
nutrition that God had provided them all during the forty years of boot
camp. Perfect nutrition! Now all the time that they took this they had
100% of their needs supplied and still we come to verse 5, “our soul is weary
of this provision.” And this is exactly
how believers have this attitude. It is
not that God hasn’t provided; it is that you don’t like what He has provided on
His terms, that’s what.
So therefore the
verb to be “weary” implies the same thing as the verb negative volition to
reject; it means a rejection of what God has graciously provided for you in the
middle of your pressure and your adversity.
You have turned your back on His way out. And if you despise, here’s the solution to
your problems and you don’t want it and so it’s the same thing as
rebellion. And so here we go.
Now turn to one
verse in the New Testament and then we’ll go back to Proverbs; 1 Corinthians
103, if it wasn’t for this verse in the Bible I would not know what I would do
in counseling. My Bible is worn at this
point. … [Tape turns] … This is why weariness and despising and the chastening
of the Lord is always an expression of negative volition toward him. 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, “There is no
testing,” temptation or testing, either way the translation is valid, “There
has no testing taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful,”
now notice, that sentence makes all the difference; if you do not have a
supernatural universe, created the way the Bible says it is, then of course
this is stupid. But if God is there and if he does do the things the Bible says
he does, then “God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tested above that
which you are able, but will, with the testing, also make a way of escape, that
you may be able to bear it.” Now I don’t
care what your problem is.
People come to me
all the time, tears about this problem, tears about that problem, carry on and
so forth. That’s all right, it’s part of my job, so just because there are
problems don’t feel embarrassed about it.
My point though is that I don’t care how difficult your problems, you
are never going to convince me that you’re at the end of your rope. Now I have 25 or 30 different kinds of
arguments presented since I’ve been here as pastor on why I’m at the end of my
rope and why I can’t go any further, and I haven’t bought one of them yet. But keep trying, some day you might get to me
with one, but none of you have gotten through to me yet. Do you know why? Because of this promise. What does it say? I don’t care what excuse you have, you can
sit out there and think up for two months some excuse that will try to convince
me that you’re at the end of your rope and you have absolutely no solution to
your problem; you’re still never going to convince me, I’m not going to buy it. You’re all out to lunch as far as I’m
concerned and my job is to straighten you out.
I don’t handle you like a lot of counselors where you come and I
non-directly give you advice, the non-directive approach to counseling, where I
sit there and oh, I see you have a problem; hmm, and we go on like this and
finally after half an hour something drops out of the pot. We don’t use that, we go directly to the Word
of God and we tell you what’s wrong.
That’s called directive counseling and that’s the way the Bible does it.
Now here is the
basis for it. I can tell you directly
right off the bat that we’re so far out in the tulles when you walk in and you
say to me that I am at the end of my rope, you’re out of it right there. And
what do I tell you? Yes, but I’m going
to cut 1 Corinthians 10:13 out of the Bible.
I’ve attempted to have a Bible out, an old one somebody’s left around
here just in case it happens some day and take a scissor and say will you just
cut that out because obviously it isn’t in your Bible and you don’t want to read
it and you don’t believe it so just cut it out of the text; be honest. Now 1 Corinthians 10:13 is your guarantee
that there’s never going to come anything that you can say I’m at the end of my
rope.
Back to Proverbs
3:11, “My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD, neither be weary of His
correction.” Now the next two words we
want to study in verse 11 are the word “chastening” and the word
“correct.” The word “chastening” is
taken from yatsar, yatsar [?] in the
Hebrew and this word means to severely train.
This means physically training, and don’t tell anybody, sometimes it
even involves corporeal punishment.
Don’t go out and tell the educators that; they might have me arrested or
something, cruelty to animals. yatsar, it means to strongly train
involving corporeal punishment if that is necessary. And this is again the breakdown of discipline
in the service, it’s associated with that.
The people I feel sorry for are the training officers in the
service. They have had to accept every
kind of goofball imaginable going into the Army and the Navy,
particularly. And now with the volunteer
service this is good because we can get rid of all the dead wood and at last
have something that is professional. But
we’ve had these clods go into the service.
Every once in a while at seminary we used to get this; some kid would
come whining in, oh, I don’t know whether I’m going to get my job [can’t
understand word] if I don’t pass the course next semester, and of course I’ve
been in the service and I said fine, why don’t you flunk out and go in the
service, it’d be the best thing for you for three years and come back. Oh, you don’t love me, this kind of thing.
Well, obviously this person needs some training. And the best kind of thing would be for some
strong drill sergeant to chew him up one side and down the other every day for
the next six weeks and it’d solve a lot of the problem. You know, a lot of psychological problems
seem to disappear in that kind of an environment for some strange reason.
But here we have
this correction that goes on and God is in this kind of business. Now I’m showing you this and of course we’re
joking about it but the point is that that is the same kind of training that
God runs in His family. And if you come
out of a permissive background you’re out of shape for the Christian life and
some of you new parents, you’d better get straightened out on how you’re
bringing your kids up because if you expect them to be led to the Lord and you
expect them to become strong Christian men and women then you’d better get some
strong discipline and authority going in your family unit. Now this doesn’t mean you have to be a bully
or unfair; we’re not talking about being dictators and Proverbs will give you
the balance. I’m just, right at this
moment, attacking the permissiveness because I see as pastor what this does to
people after they become Christians; it’s a sad, sad thing. We have a dozen
people or so right now in this congregation that are suffering and I mean
suffering, truly suffering in this department.
It’s not always related to the permissiveness problem but some of it is;
somebody didn’t do their job back when they should have done it and now the
price is being paid, and frankly, it’s no enjoyable task for the pastor to sit
down hour after hour and watch the kind of misery that I’ve had to watch since
I’ve come here. I don’t enjoy that, I
just pray that it will be over as fast as possible. And it will be, but the point is that it was
all unnecessary if somebody back a few years ago had done their job. But a lot
of people come waltzing into the Christian life and it’s Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus business and then all of a sudden they say Jesus isn’t a
very nice guy, He doesn’t let me get away with this. That’s right, He doesn’t.
The next word
here, again to show you the strength of the kind of training that God gives is
“correction” and do you know what this means?
This means He tells you that you are wrong, and He will insult you, and
He will lead you to a firm conviction that you are absolutely wrong and
completely out in the tulles. And it’s
humiliating but nevertheless necessary.
It is tokechah and it means to
correct.
Proverbs 3:12,
here’s the effect. Verse 11 is the
commandment; when you face this kind of thing in your Christian life don’t you
choose against it, either directly by rejecting or the pseudo way, oh I’m at
the end of my rope. Don’t you do that
because verse 12, “Whom the LORD loves He corrects,” and the word “correct” is
the Hebrew participle and the Hebrew participle is the motion picture tense and
it means He continuously corrects. It is
a continual process that begins at the time we are believers and terminates at
the time of death. “Whom the LORD loves
He corrects, even as a father the son in whom he delights.” Don’t you see it’s built on the third divine
institution? Now I know some believers,
I wish God would love me; now the clever ones are going to say that. Usually what happens is that they get into a
problem and they say God doesn’t love me, He loves all the other Christians
except me, He’s picking on me right now.
What does this verse say? He
loves you, and He looks on down the end on what you can be when you are
conformed to the image of Christ, when you have all the knots and kinks taken
out of the way you think and out of your soul and all the other things that
you’ve got jammed up there, and He drags them out of you one by one, sometimes
hard. Do you know why He does it? Because He wants you to be conformed to
Christ, all the way on down the line.
And you’re going to pain, you’re going to be dragging, screaming through
the door sometimes but He’s going to get you there. Now this is His way of doing it. But He does it, believe it or not, because He
loves you and cares for you.
Let’s turn in
conclusion to Hebrews 12 for next time we’re going to pick these two verses up
again as the New Testament handles them.
There’s an entire chapter in the New Testament devoted to these two
verbs in Proverbs and expanding them and applying them to the Christian
life. Hebrews 12:1, “Wherefore, seeing
we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay
aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run
with patience the race that is set before us.” Verse 3, “For consider Him that
endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied,”
same word, “and faint in your minds. [5]
And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaks unto you as unto children,
My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord,” now verse 3 is reminding us of
something. Do you realize that Jesus
Christ Himself had to go through training that wasn’t pleasant to Him?
Turn back to Heb
5:8 a moment. In Hebrews 5 we have the
person of Jesus Christ and you will notice here that “Though He were a Son, yet
learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” Do you know what this means? That Jesus Christ didn’t go along on
instinct. Do you remember back when I
introduced the Proverbs series we said the difference between man and animals,
we were discussing the differences, and what was one of the differences between
man and the animals? The animal has some
learned behavior patterns but most of it is instinctive behavior patterns. Man has very little instinctive behavior
patterns and very much learned behavior patterns. Man has to learn most of his behavior
including righteousness. And here in
verse 8 we have an incarnate, infallible, sinless human and even this human, in
His humanity, Christ in His humanity, who had to learn obedience. Why? Because He too had to learn. Do you think Christ enjoyed every minute of
it? Don’t you think He just loved those
40 days out in the wilderness, He just really rejoiced in this? You bet he did not; that was where He was
learning. Do you think He enjoyed the
Garden of Gethsemane, when the pressure was on?
He did not. Therefore, conclusion:
if Jesus Christ, who is sinless had to learn the hard way, how much more we,
who have the sin nature within us.
With our heads
bowed….