Clough Proverbs Lesson 27
Wisdom in Interpersonal Relationships and Economics –
Proverbs 3:21-25
Of all the early
chapters in the book of Proverbs, chapter 3 is the one that most clearly shows
the difference between divine viewpoint wisdom and human viewpoint wisdom in
that as we have said time and time again, divine viewpoint wisdom is
characterized by a personal element.
Divine viewpoint wisdom is knowing how the personal God has constructed
creation and how the personal God runs His creation. Human viewpoint wisdom, by contrast, is just
a set of principles, abstracts, often impersonal and have no personal God to
back them up, to work with them in any way.
So when we start with verse 13, as we’ll do today, we have finished with
two sections in this chapter.
The first section,
verses 1-12, dealt with an exhortation to loyalty to Jehovah, and goes back to
a fundamental principle of the Old Testament that we covered several years ago
when we dealt with Deuteronomy, and that is that God is the Great King and the
Great King has made treaties with His vassals, the vassals being the twelve
tribes. And this means that the
fundamental issue of the kingdom is an issue of loyalty. So when we look at our divine viewpoint
framework and we understand the various phases in history we can characterize
the phase of the book of Proverbs as that time period when the
After this,
beginning in 1400 BC we have the era of the
So that whatever
we learn in this section of Proverbs these are not disconnected good pieces of
good advice. They are, rather, a
concerted, coherent program that God has revealed as the wise mode of operation
in history.
Beginning in
Proverbs 3:21 we come back to this fundamental of all questions and that is the
source of wisdom. “My son, let not them
depart from thine eyes; keep sound wisdom and discretion.” Verse 21 takes us
back to the instructional kind of literature.
You’ll have to remember that various parts of the Bible are written in
certain styles and you’ll get more out of your Bible reading if you will
understand this; namely that that there poetic portions and there are prose
portions and you don’t read the poetic portions as though it were prose and
visa versa. Also, within the prose
sections there are different sub-types or sub categories of styles and the
particular style that we are studying in the first 9 chapters of Proverbs is
what we call the instruction style.
Instructional literature is characterized by three things. First, there
will be a set of imperatives and the imperatives deal with the command to the
believer. That’s the central section of
instructional literature. The book of
Proverbs after chapter 9 and through the rest of the book is proverbial
literature; proverbial literature has no imperative in it. Proverbial literature is always indicative
mood; do this and this will follow; this happens this, this follows this, this
leads to that and so on. That’s all indicative, there’s no command there to do
it, it’s just advice given.
But in Proverbs
1-9 it’s characterized by an instructional piece and that includes the
imperatives, it also includes circumstances sometimes. In other words, it’ll be said when something
happens, then you do this. So it will
give you a circumstance in which the command should be applied. And then the
third part of an instruction is the motivation; the commands are not just given
naked without any kind of covering; the covering here is the motivation, that
is to stimulate the hearer to apply the commands to his personal life. By the way, this shows you how commands
should be given normally; they should be given with motivation.
So in Proverbs
3:21 we have the command. Then in verses
22 through the rest of this chapter we have a sequence of motivations. No circumstances in this particular section;
we just have part 1, imperative; and then part 2, the motivation. Verse 21 is the imperative and then verse 22
and following are all motivations why that is critical. Of course later on we have another
section. Correction on the outline;
verse 21 is the imperative; verses 25-26 are the motivations, and then in verse
27 we have another series of imperatives.
But verse 21 is the imperative of the first section.
The first section,
Proverbs 3:21-26 deals with an exhortation to have wisdom in every area of
life; this is a blanket exhortation, comprehensive exhortation to apply these
principles to every area of life and to all the details of life. And it begins with “my son.” “My son” shows that the fountainhead of all
teaching authority is the third divine institution. Divine institution three is family; the other
divine institutions are one, responsible labor or volition; divine institution
two is marriage; divine institution number four is government. But this shows that all true instruction
flows out of the third divine institution.
Now this has a
number of vital lessons for us today. First
of all it shows you that a marriage, for example, applying it the first
section, that a marriage can’t be successful without some instruction and it
also shows, therefore, that you have to be instructed in the family before the
marriage occurs. And this is why some
marriages fall apart because there’s never been any instruction because the
instruction was never given before the kids were old enough to get married, and
still are not old enough to get married because they don’t have the right
instruction. So instruction comes out of
the family situation always in God’s Word.
Today we have a very peculiar situation in this country as I have noted
before and that is that we have a group of people who are in charge of the
education of our country who have got the idea that the government is supposed
to do the education and this is a great mistake that is being made.
I talked to some
of the people in our congregation who teach school for a living and they tell
me that if you ever have a group of kids and you can’t get cooperation from the
home, no matter how good the public school is it’s not going to do a thing
until you have cooperation from the home. Why?
It’s simple; the Bible could have given advice on this centuries ago,
and the reason is that when you try to say that the government, through state
education bears the sole responsibility of education you are wrong. And whenever you go against the divine
institutions you are going to pay a price.
These divine institutions can never be eradicated. I don’t care how powerful a social movement
you may conceive, I don’t care what kind of mechanics you think of, you will
never eradicate the divine institutions without paying a tremendous price. The price for the eradication of the fourth
divine institution is anarchy, both international anarchy and anarchy at
home. This is why people who are always
knocking the military and people who are always attacking capital punishment,
which is the foundation of government, are people who will always promote
anarchy in the final analysis…always! And it’s the same thing with other
things; whenever we try to replace the third divine institution, family, with
government we are never going to get education.
And there’s a very
good reason why, because no teacher knows the child as well as the parents know
the child. For this reason, therefore,
teaching should be by majority in the home and obviously the family is going to
hire specialists through schools to do what the family is not qualified to do;
that’s fine, I’m not arguing that all education, mechanically, has to be done
in the family; we’re arguing that authoritatively it is the parents and not the
government that determines the quality of education biblically.
And so therefore it doesn’t say in verse 21, O
citizen of our land, let them not depart from thine eyes. It doesn’t say that, it says “my son” because
it’s given inside a family institution.
“My son, let them not depart from thine eyes; keep sound wisdom and
discretion.” Now there are about seven
words used over and over in Scripture for wisdom. Most of these words that are described here,
“sound wisdom and discretion,” have to do with practical wisdom or wisdom in
the details of life. So this is not the
theoretical wisdom that is mentioned in verses 13-20, the creation wisdom, the
theoretical structure over all, here we have the fine little details. That is
what is meant. And this is what is so ironic about this passage. It looks like it’s going to draw a grand… and
does, conclusion but it’s interesting that the passage starts out with an
imperative command to the believer to apply wisdom in all the teeny little
details of life and then out of this application of wisdom in all the teeny
little details of life comes some very, very large results. Let’s look at how it goes.
Proverbs
So in verse 22
when it says “they shall be life unto thy soul” what is he talking about? “They” refer to the commands to appropriate
wisdom in the details of life with the result that life will come to the soul;
but the soul is used as a synonym for life. So we have to study a little bit
the difference between soul and life and why there seems to be taught in the
Old Testament very, very funny doctrine and that is the doctrine of degrees of
living.
Let’s look at this
doctrine, the degrees of life. The Bible
uses the word in the Old Testament, “life,” for a variety of phenomenon. It uses it in one sense, let’s start down at
the bottom for the most primitive level, it means breathing. If you’re not breathing then there’s no life
present whatever and nothing else can go so this is the lowest level of
life. This is sheer existence, and there
must be present the human spirit in order for breath to occur, because as we
said in our introduction to the Proverbs series that the Hebrew mind is not an
abstract mind. It doesn’t conceive of
the soul in some sort of Greek philosophical abstraction; it doesn’t define it
philosophically at all. The spirit to
the average every day Hebrew is simply breath.
And what he sees as the phenomenon of death is the spirit; it is tied in
one to one relationship to an observable empirical phenomenon. That’s the first way life is used: the
presence of life is the presence of breath.
But it’s used in a
more significant way; it is used of what we would call the awareness of God or
God-consciousness. This is the second
degree of life. A baby, for example, let’s
start out with a baby and we’ll take his life and watch how this
increases. Breathing—the baby is alive
physically. The baby is not alive and
the baby is not a living soul in the womb.
Some of the attacks that have been recently made that are being
published around Lubbock against Bob Thieme’s teachings, most of them are
written by ignoramuses, by the way, to start off my critique, and the second,
those that are not ignoramuses are professionally jealous people who have for
ten or fifteen years wanted to get back at Bob Thieme and now they see a few
things that they think that they can jump on and they’re doing it. So most of the attacks are of that
order. However, one of the interesting
things that’s sort of a laugh, I’ve laughed at is that they accuse him of
favoring abortion because it teaches that a person is not a living soul until
physical birth and it’s very interesting, it’s as though he was the first one
to teach that. That teaching has been an
honorable position in God’s Word down through the history of centuries of Bible
interpretation. And when a person says
that Bob Thieme made it up, what they’re really saying is that I am such a
stupid student of church history that I never saw the interpretation
before. So that criticism simply betrays
the ignorance of the criticizer. This
concept goes all the way back to Genesis 2:7 so you can criticize Bob Thieme or
somebody else but just criticize the author of the text. This is the way God revealed it, that a
person does not become a soul until there is breath, and obviously there is no
breath in the womb of the baby, in the womb of the mother carrying a baby;
there is no life there.
So the soul begins
at the time of physical birth, not at the time of conception. Second, after the baby grows he attains
God-consciousness. Now when the baby
attains God-consciousness… people often ask me, well when does my child gain
God-consciousness, is there some way I can tell whether my child is conscious
of God or not, and I think there is.
Generally we can make the statement that a child will become
God-consciousness when he is able to use language; God-consciousness is
starting to develop when he is learning how to use words and connect words with
thoughts. When that process, which is
said by philosophers to be one of the greatest intellectual feats that man ever
made, and no psychologists and philosophers can ever explain to you how it
happened. Why is it that a child can go
up and suddenly he connects sounds with concepts? That is one of the most profound intellectual
feats ever accomplished by any man and it’s usually accomplished within the
first four years of his life. But when
that happens there is conceptual thought present. That is, the child is able to think in terms
of categories and absolutes. When that
happens he is on the way to God-consciousness.
So
God-consciousness, say from 4-6, somewhere in there, probably much earlier than
that, maybe 4-5 but God-consciousness is the second level of life. Here life becomes more full according to the
Old Testament. And then the third step
occurs not only when there is God-consciousness but the gospel is presented,
how Christ has died for our sins, He is our Savior, we are to believe on Him
exclusively as our only Savior; then at that point the person is regenerated
and he enters into, so to speak, a third intensity of life. And then finally, the fourth step, which is
meant here in Proverbs, is when you have the believer enter into a status quo
of maturity. And here he is able to
appropriate the Word of God in ever area of life and he is no longer a baby at
the third level, he is a mature saint and this is what it means when it says
“son, so shall they be life unto thy soul.”
In other words, the commands of wisdom will be life and allow you to
live a more full life.
Now let’s take
this back to make sure you catch the overall plain here. When the Bible speaks of life unto your soul
it is going to say that when the Word of God, we have God-consciousness on the
conscience and we begin to have divine viewpoint framework develop in the
mentality of the soul, there’s going to be an explosive result that will affect
your body as well as your spirit. So
when it says “life unto your soul” he was not just talking about some hyper
spiritual thing; it’s talking about something that can affect you
physically. Now in a small way some of
you have had the remarkable experience of watching someone truly converted; you
have watched that person and watched the change in the facial expression on the
individual. And I am sure that there are at least a dozen people sitting here
that could give testimony to the fact that when the Word of God takes hold in
the life it literally changes the exterior of the person. Now that’s what the Bible is saying; it will
affect you physically as well as spiritually.
“So shall they be
life unto thy soul, and grace to thy neck,” refers to the character building;
that is, it refers to the fact that this person who has wisdom will have a
depth of character that is developed, a person who will not be swept off their
feet by the details of life, a person who will have that solidness, that
solidarity and the stability to move into all the details of life without being
swerved out of the way by all the pressures.
And this is what it means; the word “grace” means attractiveness and it
means that even the people who are unbelievers will turn around and say this
person has a very attractive nature; this person has something that I admire,
this person has something that I know when the heat is on they always seem to
move through it. Now why is it? What have they got? This is what they’ve got, “grace unto thy
neck.”
Proverbs 3:23,
“Then thou shalt walk in the way safely,” now beginning at verse 22 we have
each verse in a stair. Now here’s how
you want to conceive of these verses.
They’re erected on a staircase; verse 22, verse 23, verse 24, verse 25,
and these stairs represent stages in the positive and negative results of
positive volition and negative volition.
In other words, here at verse 22 we have a relatively mild result; we
have a relatively mild result if we reject if; in other words, the opposite of
verse 22 is if you don’t would be that you have less life in your soul, less
grace in your neck and that is less character.
So we might say that’s a mild result.
But when we move
to verse 23 we have a more intense result, both ways. This is a two-edged sword that cuts both
ways. “Then thou shalt walk in thy way
safely, and they foot shall not stumble.”
The word “stumble” is a word that means to walk and to hit your toe on
something without seeing it. So the
stumbling here is a blind stumbling. It
is a stumbling that has to do with a lack of awareness of what’s going on. It can refer to a person who is moving
through life and they go on and all of a sudden a little human viewpoint clicks
in, they don’t notice it because they don’t have a big enough divine viewpoint
framework, the divine viewpoint framework is the thing that identifies human
viewpoint and they don’t have it big enough, effective enough, not used to
using it and so they have human viewpoint flips in and the first thing you know
they begin to make business decisions that have a wrongness about them.
They begin to make
national decisions that are wrong. They
begin to, for example, get influenced by the human viewpoint idea that freedom
and peace and the global scene comes about through compromise and conferences
instead of through military victory. And whenever this happens you have the
influx of passivism, disarmament and other apostate anti-biblical ideas in
leaders. And so with that we have a lack
of national resolve and as a result we have [can’t understand word]. This has always happened in the history of
man and will continue to happen. So this
is a result of human viewpoint that has infiltrated our leaders; the National
Council of Churches and liberal clergymen have largely promulgated this idea
and it’s had its effect on people in high places.
So this is the
stumbling; this means that because of human viewpoint, because of abandonment
of the principles of divine viewpoint wisdom you don’t see the obstacles until
bang, it’s too late, we trip over it and flatten our face. That’s what the word “stumble” here
means. That’s the second stair; this is,
we would say, the question of misfortune, or fortune, used in a Biblical sense,
not change; blessing or lack of blessing, accident, so to speak.
Proverbs 3:24, the
third stair, here it will be the more intense.
In verse 24, “When you lie down, you will not be afraid; and you shall
lie down, and your sleep shall be sweet.” The emphasis here is that rejection
of wisdom will result in insomnia through guilt, and you’ll have a definite
psychosomatic problem as a result of abandoning the Word of God. Over and over notice the physical, I want to
get you away from the spiritualizing business; look at how physical it is in
verse 24, that is talking about a good night’s sleep which is obviously
physical. And that physical good night’s
sleep can be affected by guilt. People
who are on negative volition, who are not relaxed, who are not trusting the
Lord, who are always in an upheaval with human viewpoint, they pay a
price. The national consumption of
tranquilizers and sleeping aids is a disgrace on America today, an absolute
disgrace. There are times when you’ll
need some of this, obviously, but the wholesale consumption of tranquilizers
and sleeping aids today is nothing short of a national disgrace and it’s a sign
that Americans are so weak and have so fouled up on human viewpoint that they
have no way to go; they have no stability, and they’re paying for it, and here
is the third stair, psychosomatic results of guilt and negative volition toward
the Lord.
Proverbs 3:25-26,
finally we come to the last [stair] which is even more severe. Verse 25, “Be not afraid of sudden fear,
neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it comes; [26] For the LORD shall
be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot from being taken.” Verses 25-26 together refer to catastrophes,
refer to judgments that God racks in history upon both individuals that are on
negative volition and nations that are on negative volition. An example of this would be how God judged
Tibet a number of years ago by the Chinese communists. Tibet was the center of occultism; in Tibet
you had the famous red-hooded monks who were the promoters of the most intense
anti-Christian form of religion known on the face of this earth. Missionaries that have dealt with the
red-hooded monks of Tibet know that it’s practically… just frankly impossible
to move into the area. Now after the
Chinese communists have gone in and destroyed that culture, which they have,
and it was very cruel the way the Chinese marched into the Himalayan kingdom of
Tibet and leveled it, and enslaved its people.
But in so doing God was working through them and as a result of smashing
up that particular culture it has now loosened up to the point where the gospel
can penetrate and so can the Word of God.
So we have these peculiar features of history and these are the
judgments that are referred to here.
And the point we
made is that the person who is wise, the person who applies wisdom in every
detail of his life, the Lord “will keep his foot from being taken.” Now how in practice would that work out? In practice that would mean that the believer
who is on positive volition, first of all he’s going to see the disaster
coming. That’s the first think he is
going to see it coming and therefore he is going to take precautions. The believer is going to be able to think
ahead and he will see not only that he must take certain economic precautions
and other precautions but he also knows that he’s going to take spiritual
precautions and it means that he is going to intensify his intake of the Word
of God while there is freedom left to do it.
And he is not going to wait until the disaster comes and gee, I should
have spent more time in studying the Word; I should have spent more time in
prayer; it’s too late now. So this is
how the Lord will work in that particular situation.
So we’ve got these
five stairs, four stairs of judgment against the individual or for the
individual. Notice the personal nature
of verse 26 which is the conclusion of this first section, and that is it is
not the functioning of the set of physical laws; it is the functioning of a
reign of a personal God; it is the Lord personally who will not allow your foot
to be moved.
Beginning in
Proverbs 3:27-35 we have the second part to this section and here the exhortation
is not to wisdom generally speaking but here the exhortation is to wisdom
specifically applied to people, so that from this point forward wisdom is
applied to interpersonal relationships.
Now why should this be? Obviously
it goes back to the doctrine of the foundation or that is creation. In the doctrine of creation, God, who is the
personal Creator, makes man in His image.
Since man is made in the image of God it means that animals and man have
a barrier between them; an absolute barrier, an absolute and total
discontinuity in that men have an image of God and therefore think in terms of
absolute truth. Animals have thought but
they have thought that is perceptual not conceptual. And this is a great difference.
This is the
difference, by the way, people are always wondering why I make such an issue
out of evolution. If you believe in
evolution you’re not going to have any difference between man and the animal,
it isn’t there. But in the doctrine of
creation that gives man his uniqueness and makes man worth something that he
cannot possibly be on an evolutionary basis.
On an evolutionary basis there is on real reason, except social habits,
why you should not shoot men along with shooting animals. Now it’s not a facetious statement I’m making;
this is not a facetious statement. I
would challenge anyone to show me, given the truthfulness of the evolutionary
view, why it is wrong to shoot people and right to shoot animals. There’s no way you can answer that question
on an evolutionary foundation yet in practice everybody observes this, which
shows you the insufficiency of the evolutionary worldview.
So in Proverbs
3:27 we can start talking about interpersonal relationships because the God who
is personal, who has made man in His image, now tells us how to handle the
situation. Verses 27-28 deal with one
attitude that corrupts, the mental attitude of selfishness. Verses 29-30 deal with the mental attitude of
hatred; both these mental attitudes are behind all interpersonal problems,
whether it’s in the home, whether it’s in the family or some place else, on the
job, in your company, or wherever it may be. These are mental attitude sins and
each of these mental attitude sins are discussed in these passages through the
use of over behavior patterns.
Let’s look at
verse 27, “Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the
power of thine hand to do it. [28] Say
not unto thy neighbor, God, and come again, and tomorrow I will give, when you
have it with you.” Now by itself that sounds
like a good piece of advice totally disconnected with the rest of
Scripture. To avoid you getting that
impression I want to turn back to Deuteronomy 24:10; here is one of the
evidences that the book of Proverbs was written after Deuteronomy because this
particular passage in Proverbs is built off of one particular passage in
Deuteronomy.
Let’s look at the
theory. Here we have the Great King over
his kingdom; here’s vassal number one and here’s vassal number two; these are
two people. Where do personal rights
come from? This is another unresolved
question on an evolutionary foundation, there aren’t any personal rights. You don’t get personal rights on an
evolutionary basis; man is nothing more than a more mature and apes don’t have
rights; there’s no such thing as human rights; human rights are only defensible
if you’ve got a lawgiver that gives them.
And man himself is not the sufficient lawgiver for human rights. Human rights are non-existent on an
evolutionary basis and Hitler said so.
Hitler said that he intended to follow the evolutionary foundation out
to its logical conclusion; Jews and Negroes are the missing links he said; and
obviously he slaughtered Jews by the millions, he made lampshades out of their
skins. Why? Read Mein
Kampf if you want to see evolution carried to its logical conclusion. People always say oh Clough, you’re to
theoretical, it’ll never happen; read Mein
Kampf, it happened once. That’s a
real historic situation of evolution taken to a logical conclusion, but on the
basis of creation all men have the image of God and there’s no such thing as a
superior or inferior man. That
proposition is completely contrary to the doctrine of creation. Now here’s why; look at the basis for human
rights, it’s given to you in Deuteronomy.
In Deuteronomy you
have the Great King; the Great King behind the rights of a vassal, so here’s
this person; this is you and you’re about ready to clobber this individual, the
individual is V-2, you’re V-1. You clobber
this individual; that person has a set of rights that has been given to him by
the Great King. All this may seem like
a lot of Bible school stuff and Sunday School stuff but I want you to see
something; there isn’t any civil rights unless this proposition is true and
don’t let anybody try to get you around this argument. Don’t let someone take you out on a limb
here. Watch it; the logic is very tight and very, very wonderful when you see
the whole thing. But what protects that person is the Great King’s
definition. Illustration of this: you go
out here and kill somebody on the street; against whom do you sin? The person or the State of Texas? Do you realize legally you do not sin against
the person you kill; you can sin only against the lawmaking body which is the
State of Texas, and therefore, if the lawmaking body is not there, no sin has
been committed, and don’t let anybody try to sell you short of this. If God is not there and you are a desert
island and there is no government over that island you are free to do anything
you want to to the other person and it’s sinning against absolute no one
because there is no frame of international law.
Now, let’s take
this back down to the area of personal rights.
How did the Jews solve the problem?
The Jews solved the problem… by the way, the only ancient civilization
ever to solve this problem, the rest of the nations had laws but they could
never ultimately justify them; it was always the Shamash as he comes to
Hammurabi out of the clouds some place.
But never do you have a personal God who defines human rights and here
you have a personal God who says this person, he too is valuable because I say
he’s valuable. And then he who attacks
person V-2, vassal 2, then you are attacking Me, I am the lawgiver and you
sinned against Me. This is why David,
when he rapes Bathsheba and murders her husband, what does he say in Psalm 51;
he says, “Against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned.” “Thee only...” Oh no David, no-no… you’ve got
it all wrong, David you sinned against Bathsheba and against Uriah, her
husband. No, David says, I sinned
against God who told me not to do that; that’s who I sinned against. I made it uncomfortable for Bathsheba and
Uriah but I didn’t sin against them because they didn’t make the law. Now maybe some of you never thought about
that before but I think a lot of you would bear a lot of thinking about it
because apart from the Word of God there isn’t any basis for human rights. None whatever, yet nobody ever seems to see
this. Nobody ever seems to see it, they
just go crazily on merrily, wondering why have all the problems and somebody
points out why should we obey the law.
Oh you’re being too theoretical.
No I’m not being to theoretical, why should I obey the law; give me a
reason. Well you just should. Why?
Social habit, that’s why, that’s ultimately what it winds up to. It’s more comfortable to obey the law than
not to obey the law; maybe sometimes it isn’t then what do you do? What happens to your reason then?
Ultimately here’s
the answer why you obey the law whether it has to do with marijuana, whether it
has to do with anything else; whether it has to do with drugs, whether it has
to do with out social behavior, we obey the law not because we like the
establishment, necessarily; we obey the law because God has authorized it,
period, under the fourth divine institution and disobedience to the law in that
regard is disobedience against God.
It’s as simple as that; that’s why.
Now watch how it
works out in Deuteronomy 24:10-13. Here
we have… we have broken into a whole series in chapter 24 but this particular
set of verses, these four verses deal with freedom from economic oppression…
freedom from economic oppression. There
are economic rights. In this case, with
vassal-2, he’s got economic rights. Now
this deals with money and most of you are worried about paying bills; economics
should be something that at least is halfway familiar with your thinking today
so let’s look at it. Verse 10, “When
thou dost lend thy brother anything, thou shalt not go into his house to fetch
his pledge. [11] You will stand outside,
and the man to whom you doth lend shall bring out the pledge abroad unto
thee. [12] And if the man be poor, thou
shalt not sleep with his pledge. [13] In
any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun does down, that
he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee; and it shall be righteousness
unto thee before the LORD thy God.”
Now let’s watch
and see what this is to make sure we understand what the illustration of
economic freedom is. The vassal has to
give a pledge; you are the lender but here’s a case where V-1, the first vassal
or the lender, you are the role of the lender, you’re making a lend to him. The pledge is collateral on the loan and so
the point is in verse 11, “Thou shalt stand outside the house,” means that you
give him the right to pick something for collateral which will not lead to his
total enslavement. He is to have the
choice. Now in the other countries of
the ancient world this is not the case; the lender could walk in and he could
pick his wife, his kids or anything else as collateral, where here the idea of
the lender standing outside the house, waiting outside the door of for the man
to walk into his house and pick out something for collateral which would not
totally enslave him, is only true in Israel.
You say well doesn’t this allow the lender, doesn’t this put the lender
in a tremendous problem. Yes it does and
this is going to be answered in the passage.
[12] “If the man
be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge.
[13] In any case you will deliver him the pledge again when the sun goes
down,” obviously a poor man would have nothing for collateral except the clothes
on his back and he would give these as collateral, but even then, the person
who accepts, who is the lender, is not to keep that pledge overnight; he is to
allow him use of his collateral because not to would be to deprive him of the
fundamentals of life. So the argument in
these verses, in one small area of human rights is that no man is ever to be
totally economically enslaved; there is a certain minimum under which it is
absolutely contrary to God to take away the material possessions of that
person. Communism has never understood
this. But the Bible defends the right of
private property. You only have economic
freedom with private property. The Bible
is for capitalism and is against socialism in this regard. Private property is always the basis for
freedom and this has a certain minimum and in Israel every citizen had the
right to a certain minimum private property; if it was the clothes on his back
it was his property and it could not be taken away.
You say well then
the lender would have no guarantee about the loan. That’s why the last promise
is given in verse 13, “it shall righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy
God.” In other words, at this point we
go back to the big picture and V-1, you, the lender, you answer under the Great
King and what you’re saying here is that the Great King has told you to handle
V-2 a certain way, if you handle that vassal the way the Great King tells you
to the Great King will take care of your needs.
Here’s where we have the application of the faith technique. These are not business loans in here, this is
loans in cases of personal problems and so on; these are what we would call
relief, that’s what’s mentioned here.
But the idea of giving V-2 his minimum economic freedom comes because
ultimately I stand under the sovereign God and ultimately isn’t it really a
test of selfishness versus the faith technique?
Because ultimately it’s a test whether I am going to trust the Lord for
my possessions materially or whether I am going to insist with my grasping selfish
greedy little hands on my own. And that’s the contest between how much I grasp
my possessions and how much I am willing to use them underneath… underneath the
Great King. Of course, if you’re an
evolutionist and you don’t have a Great King all this just goes out the
window. This is utter foolishness to run
your life on this principle if the Great King really isn’t there an does the
things that He’s doing.
Let’s turn back to
Proverbs 3:27 This is the atmosphere in
which verse 27 is given; I want to take you to the theological atmosphere or
you’re going to walk away from here this morning and say well, isn’t that nice
and sweet; isn’t verses 27-28 give you nice sweet pieces of advice. That’s not
the point at all. Verses 27-28 are
utterly stupid if God is not there.
That’s the point. All of these
verses are…[tape turns]
… “Withhold not good to them to whom it is
due,” the word “due” here means legal debt and refers to the second vassal.
Again, here is God, V-1 is you, V-2 is the other person. V-2 has certain minimum rights and the word “due”
has to do with those rights. If you owe
it to somebody, either legally, which would be the narrow definition of the
word “due,” or in a larger sense morally, then don’t withhold it, “when it is
in the power of thine hand to do it.”
Because if you do, you are violating the circle that God has drawn
around V-2. That person has a circle,
visualize it as a circle; maybe this will help you apply this rule in your
life. Think of a sphere, or a bubble
that is around the other person. The
bubble has been put around the other person by God’s decree. If you come through and you break the bubble
against whom are you sinning? Against
the one who put it there: God. Proverbs
3:28, “Say not against thy neighbor, Go, and come again, and tomorrow I will
give, when thou hast it by thee.” It’s
the same principle re-echoed again.
Now Proverbs
3:29-30 deal with the second mental attitude sin, “Devise not evil against thy
enemy [neighbor], seeing he is dwelling securely by thee. [30] Strive not with a man without cause, if
he has done thee no harm.” Both verses
29 and 30 go together; both of them have the attitude of mental attitude of
hatred and treachery. We would rather
express it a bullying attitude because the person in verse 29 is dwelling, it’s
a participle. The Hebrew word participle
means continuously dwelling. “He is
continually dwelling securely by thee,” in other words, he is trusting in you,
and you take advantage of his trust. And the word “strive” in verse 30 is the
word that means lawsuit; don’t take a man to court without a cause “if he has
done thee no harm.”
Now some of you
will immediately ask well does verse 30 collide with the New Testament junction
that believers shouldn’t take another believer to court and so on. That was given in Corinth and is a special
exception to this general rule. The general rule is given here; do not sue a
man without a cause if he has done thee no harm. It’s the simple idea of bullying, pressuring,
and getting your own way, particularly toward people who are trusting in
you. We might apply verses 29-30
nationally and internationally. Vietnam is a wonderful illustration of this,
where you have a regime in North Vietnam that wants to take advantage of people
dwelling securely by them in South Vietnam.
They want to insist on military domination of the south and they are in
violation of this biblical principle here.
And this is why they’re being bombed; don’t shed tears because the
B-52’s are bombing Hanoi; the tears are to be shed about the recalcitrant
leaders of the north who refuse to abide by biblical principles of justice;
that’s where the tears should be shed, not against the bombers. And Nixon isn’t the mistake and the problem;
everybody all over the world, up in arms, but they never realize the fundamental
principle. If the other side would abide
by this simple principle of verse 29, let South Vietnam dwell securely by you
in peace, that’s all it would take, the bombing would stop tomorrow. But now, they don’t want to submit to this
and so they must submit to bombing.
Now both verses 29
and 30 again involve the same problem of Vassal-1 and Vassal-2. Vassal-2 has this bubble of right built
around him by God’s sovereign decree, and to penetrate that bubble means to go
against God who gave it.
Proverbs 3:31 and
following are a set of pieces of advice that’s given, “Envy thou not the
oppressors, and choose none of his ways.” The final command, verse 31, for the
rest of them are motivational clauses, beginning in verse 31 we have a series
of verses that have to do with discouragement.
It is very easy if you’re trying to apply verses 26-27 and 29-30, it’s
very easy to get discouraged. It’s very
easy to say well I am not going to do this any more; I have gone out of my way
to run my business along divine viewpoint lines and every time I get it from
cutthroat competition. When I am an
officer of this particular social group I have leaned over backwards to deal
with this situation and I’m through with it now; they put on their gloves, I’m
putting on mine. And so the last
imperative given in Proverbs 3 is the imperative against discouragement. A person who adheres to the divine viewpoint
and doesn’t see any results, the tendency is to be envious of the oppressor,
and the tendency is to choose finally his ways.
And so this
closing word of exhortation gives four points on the motivation of why you
shouldn’t adopt a bully-boy’s tactics, even if they are cut-throat competitors,
even if they are these things, there are reasons why you should not choose the
way. Verse 32 is the first one: “For the
froward [perverse] is an abomination to the LORD, but his secret is with the
righteous.” Verse 32 is packed with Old
Testament imagery and to understand it properly we must understand some of
these words. The word “froward” is a
word that means apostate and refers to one who first knows the truth. We’re studying the word froward: who is the
froward man? He is one who knows the
truth. Secondly, he is one who has gone
on negative volition toward the truth; so it’s not the question of an innocent
person who is just naïve and stupid.
This is an apostate who has gone against the truth.
What are some
illustrations of the froward? All men,
first of all, in a general sense are froward because of God-consciousness. All men know God is basically there and all
men since the fall have turned against him.
So in that sense all men are fallen.
But this is talking about a particular kind of person so it doesn’t
refer just to all men. It refers to a
particular kind of man and this is the person who in the nation Israel had
access to Bible teaching and turned against the Word of God. So we have here an
apostate who probably is a believer, one who has had exposure to God’s Word and
who has turned against it. And it is
this person that you are to “be envious not” it says in verse 31. The “oppressor” is defined in the context as
a believer who is operating against the Bible doctrine and they can be the
worst thorn in the Christian’s side; nobody will give you a pain like another
believer out of fellowship. Unbelievers
won’t give you half the trouble that believers out of fellowship will; not half
the trouble. If you haven’t had the
experience cheer up, you will. So don’t
be shocked when it happens, but you will be hurt in your life by believers more
than you will ever be hurt by unbelievers.
Ever!
So we have, then,
the froward, the believer who turns against truth “is an abomination to the
LORD,” the word “abomination” only occurs here and in Deuteronomy. And therefore is a technical expression that
harks back to the Great King; the concept that God, the Great King, has defined
the human rights of Vassal-1 and the human rights of Vassal-2 and therefore in
this situation, this person who would attack the second vassal, who is on
negative volition, the froward, here V-1 would be the froward person, the
apostate who’s gone against the Word of God, who attacks this second person, is
basically attacking God Himself. And
that’s what the word “abomination” is; it is a technical word in the book of
Deuteronomy for something that particular hacks God off. That is a particular sin of rebellion against
His authority.
But then, the last
part of verse 32 promises a very, very beautiful thing for the person that will
stick it out, and will be patient, and will not get off the track by saying
well I’ve had it, I’m at the end of my rope, I can’t go any further with this
divine viewpoint way, I’m going to slip over into my human viewpoint
patterns. Here is a promise given. “…his secret is with the righteous,” the word
“secret” again is a technical word that refers only to prophets and the
prophet’s vision. It is called a sid, s-i-d, long I, actually pronounced
like an “e”. And the sid is what the prophet would see in his
vision; it was a vision of the angelic council.
So “secret” should not be translated “secret” here, it should be
translated “council.” It refers to the
angelic council that in the Old Testament ran the universe, and occasionally
prophets, like Micaiah would be sitting and God would open up their vision and
they would see the Lord sitting down with all of the angelic council around
them as sort of a forum.
You see this, for
example, in 1 Kings 22, and the prophet walks in and he watches the council
debate and finally the Lord says it will be done this way, and the angels go
ahead and carry out their cosmic assignments to carry out the will of God. And the prophet after he had seen this would
walk back to the people and he’d say “thus saith the Word of God,” dot, dot, dot,
dot, dot, and he’d give his message.
What he gave was a revelation of what he had seen in the inner angelic
council and so it came to be that out of the council, c-i-l on the end came the
counsel, s-e-l; the content of the decision of the counsel. And so when God uses this word sid in verse 32, “the secret is with the
righteous,” it means not just God is whispering in your ear something; it’s
rather more magnificent than that. What
this promises the believer is that the believer will be up for consideration
before God in the great cosmic plans of history. Don’t you see how personal this gets; how the
fact is that God in His very cosmic decisions will remember the righteous
person.
This is ultimately
the answer of why Christian ethics are not nonsense. Now I’ve been in several debates on this
point and always in the discussion it comes out this way: well, Christian
ethics are nice and though I accept the supernaturalness of the gospel, whether
I believe in miracles, that really doesn’t matter because I still like those
good old Christian ethics. And why I
always turn around, I never let the conversation end here, I always turn around
and say your Christian ethics aren’t worth a thing if you don’t have the miraculous,
and this verse proves it. Wouldn’t it be
stupid, wouldn’t it absolutely be stupid for you to run your business or your
home and make these little concessions here and there because of grace, because
you’re intent on defying divine viewpoint, wouldn’t it be stupid to do that if
there wasn’t on the other hand a God who ran the overall show so that you would
be protected as you did this and were faithful to Him? Wouldn’t that be stupid?
Turn to a passage
in the New Testament where Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians
15:32. That’s foolish for people to say
they like Christian ethics but they don’t like the Christian supernatural. I wouldn’t spend two minutes with the
Christian ethics if I didn’t have the supernaturalness of Christianity. Paul lays it on the line, and Paul draws the
conclusions even if the maudlin sentimentalist doesn’t. “If after the manner of men,” and that means
if there is no supernaturalness in history, if there is just the natural,
without any miraculous intervention, “If after the manner of men I have fought
with beasts at Ephesus,” that is, the price Paul paid; in other words, Paul
didn’t have to fight with beasts, did he? What’s Paul’s argument? The only reason why I’m in the ring fighting
with a beast is because I got there because of my Christian testimony, that was
stupid for me to sit there and suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer because
I insisted on adhering to the Word of God if the Word of God isn’t true.
So, “if after the
manner of men I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth [doth it
profit] it me, if the dead rise not?” In
other words, if there’s nothing to Christianity why bother with the ethics that
always get you into trouble. It take
trouble to stand up for divine viewpoint.
This is why we have so many people in the academic world that are
chicken to stand up for divine viewpoint.
It’s not the question they have low I.Q. or high I.Q. it doesn’t have
anything to do with I.Q. or academic degrees.
It has to do with one thing; they have no spiritual guts; that’s the
trouble. They are afraid that the
chairman of their department might not like it. Well the hell with the chairman
of the department. Who are you wanting
to please, the Lord or the chairman of the department? Obviously you’re going to do as good a job as
you can with the chairman of the department, that’s part of you job as unto the
Lord, but when the chairman of the department and the Lord want two different
things, who do you choose to please?
That’s the point. But obviously
it’s not being made, that’s why we have Christians who have been evangelized
and this revival and that revival, we’ve had all this witnessing on the campus
and we still have yet to have aggressive faculty members. We have some, we don’t have anywhere near
those that we should, just to cite one nearby example, and it’s simply due to
this point. Everybody is afraid of what
Mr. Big is going to think. And this is
where the Christian finally has to say I don’t care what Mr. Big thinks because
I care what the Lord Jesus Christ thinks more.
Now isn’t that a costly decision?
You bet it’s a costly decision.
It’s a costly
decision and that’s what Paul’s making here, it was a costly decision to go
around the eastern Mediterranean preaching this gospel and then get thrown in
with the lions; it was costly. And Paul
says now look, if there’s no supernaturals in this thing and I don’t really
have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ who is risen, who now bodily is
at the Father’s right hand, then what am I doing going around getting myself
knocked out? I am really the chief
fool. And that’s why he says, “If the
dead rise not,” and what is his alternative in verse 32; what’s the alternative
there: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.” And that’s the point; that’s why Christian
ethics are foolish if at the same
time you don’t have a supernatural universe with a supernatural God who comes
to your aid to protect.
As we work our way
back to Proverbs let’s stop in Romans 12:19, there’s a similar principle found
there. Our tendency is when you get
crossed is to take the matter into your own hands. What does verse 19 say, “Dearly beloved,
avenge not yourselves but, rather, give place unto wrath:” and if you just
stopped there it would be foolish; it that’s all you had as your Christian
ethic, I agree it would be absolutely foolish but the verse doesn’t stop there,
it goes on and says, “for it is written, Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith
the Lord.” Why is that tacked on there? Because Paul knows that no person is going to
follow the ethic of verse 19 if the last part of the verse isn’t there; if
there’s no God who ultimately sees that right is done then you are foolish to
stand up for right when it means you are going to get hurt doing it.
Now we can go back
to Proverbs and finish the passage. I
wanted to show you the connective thought Proverbs… it’s not just some little
tidbit in Poor Richard’s Almanac or
something. These are all propositions
that are ultimately plugged in to a big divine viewpoint framework. All of them make no sense otherwise.
Proverbs 3:32,
“For the apostate,” the one who’s turned against the truth, and that would be
the believer who gets upset and finally rejects the Bible doctrine he knows
because he wants to make a shortcut in his business, he wants to make a
shortcut in his home, he wants to make a shortcut somewhere else, and he’s
apostate because he knows he shouldn’t be doing that and he’s turned against
the clear Word; he’s “an abomination, but his secret,” that is his private
counsel and his supernatural decrees, “are for the righteous. Same thought as expressed in Romans 12.
Proverbs 3:33,
“The curse of the LORD,” again a technical word used in Deuteronomy 28, “The
curse of the LORD is in the house of the wicked, but He blesses the habitation
of the just.” In verse 33 we have a
particular mechanism that God uses to discipline and I want to stop a minute
because this clues you to how God does His judging work, even today. The clue is given by the word “house.” “The curse of the LORD is on,” literally,
“the house of the wicked,” and the word “house” and the word “habitation” are
used synonymously and both refer to the family.
Now, this says that when God begins to discipline the main target area
that He picks out is in the family. Now
if you don’t have the divine viewpoint perspective and you’re just there as an
objective observer, you’ll look upon this person; suppose this person is out of
it, he’s gone on human viewpoint after knowing divine viewpoint, he’s known it
and rejected it, switched over to human viewpoint, going to run his life this
way. What happens? It’s an abomination to God; God begins to
curse. The word “curse” means discipline
of the covenant people, so this is not curse and send to hell or exclude from
salvation; the cursing here is a disciplinarian cursing.
And so when the
cursing begins to be applied, where is it going to show up? It’s going to show up in a rupture of the
family structure; that’s what it’s going to show up as. “His curse is on the family of the wicked, and
He blesses the family of the just.” Now
if you’ll turn to Exodus 20:5, the Ten Commandments, even back in the Ten
Commandments God made this very point.
This is a person who would be a froward person, turning away from the
living God to an idol, and He says, “…I, the LORD thy God, am a jealous God,”
and what do I do? I “visit the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation [of them
that hate Me].”
Now that is not
just some little Hebrew quirk; that has been found to be empirically valid; let
me give you the modern illustration. One
of the great researchers in psychic phenomenon is Dr. Kurt Kock; Dr. Kock has
studied psychiatry and he’s also a Lutheran evangelist. His specialty is in the area of psychic
phenomenon and he has dealt with this in his book, Christian Counseling and Occultism.
No man I know of has done the depth of research that Dr. Kock has done
in tracing this modern spiritist thing, and he notices a very interesting
thing. Where you have spiritism in a
family unit that starts with the father or mother, that spiritism will
generally will occur in the second and third generations, possibly the fourth,
but after this either the family, if it persists in the spiritism, in other
words, the child and the grandson will have to voluntarily want to engage in
it, it’s not a denial of volition, but if they engage in it they will have a
strongly developed spiritism that gets stronger and stronger until finally it
gets so strong that it wipes the family out after four generations. They’ll
either be childless or die in an accident, something will happen, and you’ve
got about forty cases of that listed in his book. And he doesn’t even tie it to Exodus 20; he
just observes it as an empirical fact of observation. Now why do you suppose that happens? Because
that’s the way God made the family. God
has made the family with a built-in self-destruct device; the families will be
destroyed from history who engage in this.
If you want an exciting story to do this historically some time study
the Herod’s; Herod’s family and you will see how Herod’s family was destroyed
in history because one man, Herod the Great, turned against what he knew of the
temple of the restoration, turned against it and brought doom on the whole Herodian
family line in the third and fourth generations. So we have ample empirical evidence that this
is not an empty threat.
So when we come
over to Proverbs once again, “The curse of the LORD is on the house and the
family of the wicked,” that means it, and it means right here, by ruptured
family relationships as in David’s case, remember how God disciplined
David. How was it? In his family. Remember what the sins were that David
did? Adultery and murder. What were the sins of his children? Adultery and murder. What happened to David’s family? It disintegrated. God’s judgment is on the family of the
wicked. This verse is a tremendously
powerful verse because it reveals to us the disciplinary mechanics of God.
The final
conclusion, Proverbs 3:34-35, “Surely He scorns the scorners, but He gives
grace unto the lowly. [35] The wise
shall inherit glory, but shame shall be the promotion of fools.” The emphasis here is one on positive volition
will appropriate grace; the one on negative volition will bypass it and result
experience shame.
Father, we thank
Thee…..