Clough Proverbs Lesson 40
Chastening Due to Trouble-Making in Congregation –
Proverbs 6:12-19
Proverbs 6 deals
with the pitfalls to the believer operating in Satan’s world, operating against
spiritual opposition and we have found so far that in Proverbs 6 we have seen
he first pitfall that the father has told his son about and the second
pitfall. These are warnings given by the
father to his son about what he will encounter in life. The first five verses deal with the problem
of losing your freedom to serve that Lord by becoming in bondage to
organizations. This can be done and it
is probably most clearly meant in the first five verses financially, becoming
in bondage through extreme deficit financing and so on, to various organizations
and finance systems. This, of course,
restricts the believer’s freedom because in the Old Testament the rule is to
have a maximum amount of freedom for the believer in order that he might
function under the first divine institution, which is volition. And since volition requires freedom to move
in order to follow the calling of God, it necessarily follows that any
restrictions or barriers that you tend to throw up by becoming over obligated
to various non-Christian agencies and organizations and people the less freedom
you have to exercise your volition in God’s service. So the first pitfall warned of is in verses
1-5.
The second one,
last week, was verses 6-11 and it was also the disruption of the believer’s
calling by a certain mental attitude toward work and labor. And the point made in verses 6-11 was that
you can destroy your calling by laziness, the mental attitude of laziness. And this carries over into the Christian
life; this is not arguing for sanctification by works, please notice; it is
simply saying that mental attitude of laziness is something that destroys the
first divine institution because the first divine institution was labor, or is
labor, it still functions. Work is
something that preceded the fall, not followed it.
Now beginning in
Proverbs 6:12-19 we have the third pitfall that the father warns his son
about. This particular pitfall has a
more extreme warning to it than the first two and it is because of this
extreme-ness in the warning, the severity of the discipline against believers
who are involved in this kind of activity, that we must spend some time at the
beginning understanding the problem of man’s social life. Every thing that’s stated between verses 12
and 19 has to do with the believer’s social life or his relationship with other
people. And to do this we have to go
back and look at certain principles;
In particular we
have to look at two divine institutions, the third divine institution and the
fifth divine institution. The third
divine institution is the institution of the family. The institution of the family was basically
the original institution for the unity of the human race, for if Adam had not
sinned then Adam would have lived forever, and had Adam lived forever then
every person would have seen his father in Adam, or his great-grandfather, or
his great-great-grandfather and so on, would have been Adam. Adam would have had a geological living
relationship with all men. And so you
would have had one family of men on earth and you would have had a family type
of society on a global scale. However,
because of the fall you have disruption and you have a tremendous breakdown in
the third divine institution, so much so that if you’ll turn to Genesis 6
you’ll see one of the great results of the massive disruption that the fall
caused in the ancient world.
First let’s turn
to Genesis 4 and we’ll study the antediluvian civilization and the breakdown of
man’s social relationships, and the disastrous results that came there
from. I remind you that we take the
Genesis narrative literally in the first 11 chapters; it’s the only way to take
it; it is the way the Lord Jesus Christ took Genesis and if you do not agree
that Genesis can be interpreted literally, then you are in opposition to the
Lord Jesus Christ who interpreted Genesis literally. There are only two ways to go when you deal
with Genesis: either you must go with a literal creation or you must go with an
atheistic form of evolution; there is no middle ground, in spite of the fact
that many, many people, in fact the majority of people in our day are trying to
combine oil and water which are insoluble with one another, they cannot mix,
and yet we have people by the millions in this country thinking that you can
put areas of evolution and areas of creation together and come up with
something. You cannot do it, there’s no
way, and if you do this you will be a victim of massive delusion as well as
unable to defend that position, a position against any articulate opponent. There’s no way you can intellectually defend
the position of creation and evolution mixed together. You can defend creation and you can defend
evolution but you can’t defend both of them mixed together.
So Genesis 1-11 is
to be interpreted the way the Lord Jesus Christ interpreted it and that is the
way we interpret it. If we say that we
cannot take Genesis literally then, of course, we must say that Jesus did not
know what He was doing and we are greater authority in the Genesis text than
Jesus Christ. So we take this literally
and when we look at Genesis 4 we find the first great disaster inside the
family unit and in Genesis 4:4 we have the two offerings. “Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock
and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had
respect unto Abel and to his offering.
[5] But unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance
fell.”
Now to understand
the two offerings and why you have these two sons, Abel and Cain, remember Cain
is the firstborn, the first boy, the first member of the human race actually
that ever was normally born, the people before him, Adam and Eve, his parents
were supernaturally created. But Cain
was created by natural means; Abel was his later brother. Somewhere in between the family had lots of
daughters and so on so there’s no problem where Cain got his wife from, but
Abel is the Hebrew word which means vanity and it means nothing. And Eve named her son nothing, or vanity
because she realized that by this time the effect of the fall had become
obvious so that Eve knew that she would have to live in a period of history
which would go on and on and on until Christ redeemed. She had thought earlier that the redemption
would occur immediately and by the time this son was born she had come to the
conclusion not so she named him nothing, or vanity, or vapor. So that was the name of the son. Now vapor or vanity, it turns out, was a believer
who was on positive volition.
Cain may have been
a believer, we don’t know, but in any case he was on negative volition when
this occurred. Cain brought a sacrifice
that was non-living; it was minus nephesh. In the Bible all plants are minus life. As far as the Bible is concerned life is only
present when you have breath, and plants do not breathe in the sense animals
breathe and so therefore the Bible says negative nephesh. Able brought a
sacrifice with nephesh; nephesh is the Hebrew word for life or
soul. So you have one bringing a living
sacrifice, one brings a dead sacrifice.
God rejects the dead sacrifice because it’s not a sacrifice; a sacrifice
is to look forward to the future redemption of Jesus Christ on the cross. We know that the early people had known how
to sacrifice because in Genesis
So this is why in
Genesis 3:4-5 God did not have respect unto Cain and his offering. Cain violated the mandate of God; Cain
overthrew the authority of the Word and tried to substitute for the
authoritative word his own human viewpoint and he was rejected. This was one of the great cases in history
where human good was substituted for divine good. Divine good is available at the cross; Jesus
Christ provides perfect good at the cross and it’s free, it’s by grace. You don’t do anything to merit it and you
don’t do anything to receive it except by faith. But human good is what man insists on placing
in place of the cross; religion generally always has tendencies to go to human
good. This is one of the worst and most
satanic influences upon religion, is to substitute divine good by human
good. So Cain is substituting, in
essence, for divine good by human good, by substituting something that is
non-living. And the reason for this is
that Cain does not wish to rely upon grace, I want to do it myself.
Here American
culture is profoundly anti-Christian because in
Well, Cain had
this do-it concept and this is where it got him in trouble and here is where he
rejected God’s grace. As a result in
verse 6, God asked him a question: “And the LORD said unto Cain, Why you
angry? And why is your countenance
fallen?” This is the first place on
record where He is dealing with a sort of biblical psychotherapy and I want you
to notice how God approaches the problem.
Cain is manifesting a psychological disturbance over the rejection; he’s
been rejected; you might say he’s had his self-image hurt because he is now no
longer acceptable to God. And so God
says what’s the matter Cain, and he doesn’t blame Cain’s warped self-image on
Cain’s environment, please notice, because in the very next verse, verse 7, God
says, “If you do well, shall you not be accepted,” and the principle is… all
this talk about self-image, He says, “if you do well,” now what is doing well? Doing well means doing in accordance with
divine viewpoint so the conscience of the soul is satisfied. And God says Cain, if you would stop your
negative volition and if you would accept grace, that is doing well; that is
bringing a sacrifice that meets My standards and if you would do that then you
would be accepted.
So from this we’ve
got a very interesting principle. Do you
realize why some people’s self-image is so bad?
Because they’re so bad, they have a self-image that is lousy, probably
because they’re lousy. This is the way
the Scriptures approach psychological problems; behavior molds self-image. And it’s not the other way around. There are thousands of dollars being wasted
on psychotherapy that is just money down the drain because it is an attempt to
change one’s self-image without changing the behavior pattern and it’s
impossible; the behavior pattern determines the self-image and this is the
point of Cain. But that’s not where we
wanted to stay this morning.
We want to move on
and see the principles involved in the disruption of the family. And finally in Genesis 4:8, “And Cain talked
with Abel his brother:” and later on he killed him. Now the Old Testament doesn’t tell us how he
killed him but the New Testament does and if you’ll turn to 1 John 3 we have a
passage that is an additional piece of revelation on what happened between Cain
and his brother and this is a very interesting piece of revelation. In 1 John 3:11-12, John is talking about the
message of love, “For this is the message that ye have heard from the
beginning, that we should love one another, [12] Not as Cain,” now this is
where you will learn what that loving one another bit is in the New
Testament. Oftentimes it’s presented as
some emotional sentimental thing where we just love everybody, etc. etc. etc.
everybody has a part of the divine spark and so on. Now that is not part of the New Testament and
here is where you see the mechanics that will define what that loving one
another is about because here we’re going to learn by reverse principle. In other words, hate, or the opposite of love
is going to be pictured in its theological base.
“Not as Cain, who
was of the wicked one,” “of the wicked one” means that Cain at this point was
being influenced by Satan; “the wicked one,” singular, refers to Satan, and it
refers to the fact that during the Genesis 4 episode Satan was actually,
through Cain’s mind, putting human viewpoint thoughts in his mind. How could Satan put human viewpoint thoughts
in Cain’s mind? Simply because Cain was on
negative volition; when we are on negative volition our mind becomes a vacuum
and our mind sucks up anything that Satan would have in the immediate
environment. So don’t blame Satan, this
emphasis of the wicked one is not saying Cain was not responsible; it’s not
saying that. Cain was responsible but
the mechanics of the whole thing was that Satan was misleading him. Satan was leading him to destroy the typology
of the cross of Jesus Christ and when Cain rejected the sacrifice he was
essentially saying we do not need the finished work of Christ. And that has always been Satan’s line; he
will substitute anything for the finished work of Christ.
So, “Not as Cain,”
who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.” Now the verb to slay here is to cut with a
knife. And this tells us how Cain slew
Abel. He didn’t do it like in some of
the children’s Bibles where he went out and got a rock out of the field and
banged him over the head with it; that wasn’t how he did it. How he did it was he took a knife and the
particular knife he probably took was the knife that would have been used for
sacrifice. And then when we finish
reading verse 12, why did he slay him, “Because his own works were evil, and
his brother’s righteous.”
Now let’s put this
all together and look at the mentality of Cain for a moment. Cain went on negative volition at some point
in his life. Negative volition led to an
acquisition of human viewpoint which in turn led to further defiance and a
rejection of grace. When this process began
to set in, then immediately Cain’s behavior pattern changed. The behavior pattern began to shift and now
Cain refused to offer an living sacrifice.
When Cain did this he was rejected.
When Abel offered a living sacrifice, he was accepted. Now what is on Cain’s mind? Cain knew exactly the issue. It was not the case that Cain didn’t know why
he was having problems; Cain did know why he was having problems and he knew
the reason why he was having problems was that he was negative on grace and
negative on the cross. So apparently
what Cain did, and this shows you the defiance, it wasn’t just one brother
hating another brother. Now don’t look
upon this as just a family dispute; you are going to see something fantastic
about family disputes, in fact, all disputes, right here in this text, and this
text is going to show you the basis of hatred in the human race and how it
first began, that hatred is not just getting hacked off at somebody’s
personality, that is not the basis of hate in the Scriptures. In the Scriptures there’s another basis that
you will never hear discussed on any talk show; you’ll never see it discussed
in any magazine, and yet the Scriptures are insisting that this, and not just
irritation or incompatibility or something else is at stake; that’s not the
point. The Bible says that when hatred
exists between people it is basically because of the principles operating
between Cain and Abel.
Let’s look at this
more carefully now so we can understand.
Cain is negative on grace; Cain is negative on the cross. Now what Cain does, he goes and gets the
knife that was used to slit the throat of the sacrifice, and the sacrifice
would have been the living sacrifice of an animal, a lamb or something. And Abel, or Adam or Eve would have slit the
throat and let the animal bleed to death, showing a fore view of the work of
Christ. Now Cain goes out, in utter
defiance against grace and the cross and says all right, God isn’t going to
accept me and He accepts my brother.
I’ll fix God, He wants a blood sacrifice, I’ll give Him a bloody
sacrifice. Now this is a psychology
behind the first murder ever done in the human race. Cain is saying God, You want a bloody
sacrifice, I’m going to give you one, it’s going to be my brother. And so he takes the knife that was used for
sacrifice and he splits the throat of his brother and that’s how the first
murder began; that was the basis for the first murder in history. It was an attempt to defy God; it was an
expression of an inner mental attitude toward God Himself, and indicates in
terms of our diagram that we’ve drawn over and over, is that when you have
negative volition your next step up in chaos of the soul is a darkening of the
soul, or the blackout of the soul, (?) any more intake of doctrine, any more
understanding. The next step up is an
acquisition of human viewpoint which results in a faith shutdown. So the person is unable to believe. The next step up is an hatred and that fourth
step up in the sequence, hate, is basically not toward members of the human
race, it is toward God, the Creator of members of the human race.
And the reason why
Cain slew Abel was not because he was angry at his brother, primarily; the main
reason for the first murder was his hatred toward God. And secondarily his hatred to those who
reminded him of God. This is why murder
in Scripture is never condoned. Murder
in Scripture is an expression of an inner attitude toward God Himself and this
is why capital punishment is demanded in Scripture. It is not the question of society’s vengeance
on the criminal; that is beside the point; it has no relevance whatever to the
discussion. The issue is God’s justice
upon those who hate Him. Murder in Scripture
is looked upon as a fruit of an inner mental attitude hate toward God
Himself. And because other people are
out here… here’s the person who is on negative volition, here’s another person
in society, this other person in society, this other person has something
called a conscience.
Now the person on
negative volition may have been able to wall off his conscience and we become
very skillful at doing this, and he may have covered his entire conscience with
scar tissue so it becomes insensitive, so his mind doesn’t feel the pressure of
the conscience. But here’s the point, he
can’t do anything about the other man’s conscience and he knows he is condemned
by the other man’s conscience. So very
frequently, we have various defense mechanisms; one is isolation, people who
are in compound carnality seem to isolate themselves from others, particularly
other believers, and the reason is because they are condemned by the
consciences of other believers. It
follows as day follows night; over and over again in the pages of both the Old
Testament and the New Testament.
But another attitude
where this becomes overt is murder, where the person will murder another person
out of what they think is just hate for the person. And the Bible says huh-uh, you’re all wrong,
you have a very trivial, a very superficial view of hatred. That’s not the reason; the real reason is
because you hate God, and somehow, falsely or truly, but somehow the person who
is murdered reminds the person in some way of God; it’s somehow connected with
his spiritual defiance, just as Abel was connected in Cain’s mind to God; Abel
represented something to Cain, it represented the fact that Abel was accepted
and every time Cain walked out in the field and saw his brother, what did he
think of? Damn it, he is accepted and I
am rejected, and this thought went over and over and over. And so finally it built up an inner animosity
and so finally he just slit his brother’s throat. Now that is the attitude but the point to see
here is that the murder came out of a spiritual vertical dimension and then
later expressed itself horizontally to other members of the human race.
Now that’s the
principle that we’re about to study in Proverbs 6, but we have to see another
aspect of this and to see this turn to Genesis 6. We’re still getting some background for the
Proverbs passage. In Proverbs 6 is
necessary that we understand why God is so dogmatic in His discipline of
believers who get in this third pitfall.
Genesis 6:1, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the
face of the earth, daughters were born unto them, [2] That the sons of God saw
the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all they
chose.” Now the word “the sons of God”
looks in the Hebrew like this: beni ha
Elohim, the first word, beni, and
then ha, which is the article in the
Hebrew and then Elohim; beni ha Elohim means the sons of the God
and this is an expression which every other place in the Hebrew Bible refers
not to men, it refers to angels. This is
one of the most mysterious passages in God’s Word, but there is absolutely no
linguistic evidence to cite, to prove that beni
ha Elohim refers to a godly line.
And that the “daughters of men” in verse 1 refer to the ungodly line;
“the daughters” in Genesis 6:1, “the daughters of men” bath Adam, and the point
is that there’s a contrast in the Hebrew.
You have “the sons of God” referring to the fact that these are divine
people, and “the daughters of men,” these are human girls. And the emphasis in the Hebrew is on the
difference between Elohim and Adam, and therefore there is basically
very few Hebrew scholars today that would render this passage any other way
than the way it has been rendered down through the centuries of church history.
This is referring
to intercourse between angels and people and it’s mirrored, if you don’t
believe this, in the mythologies of the world.
Those of you who have had a chance in school to study the mythologies of
the world, how many times have you run across in the mythologies stories about
how certain people, like Achilles and others were born of joint unions between
the gods and people. Well, those are
just poor reflections of this passage in Scripture which tells us how the great
giants of the earth lived in that day.
This is why verse 4 says, “There were giants in the earth in those days;
and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and
they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men
of renown.” Now this is a long story
which we can’t get into but the particular angels that did this are not chained
in a place called Tartarus, according to 2 Peter. These were angels that God disciplined in a
very unusual way in that He did not permit them to go walking around the face
of the earth ever after this point. This
was one of the things that led to the catastrophe of Noah’s day; it was the
breakdown of the human line. Satan’s
attempt was to destroy true humanity by intermixing deity with it and if he
could dissolve pure humanity then he could also destroy Messiah. And it was a great satanic plot against the
human race.
But the point of
Genesis 6, apart from this spectacular thing that the human race was made (?)
to angelic beings, the point of chapter 6 insofar as we’re studying this morning
is that it was a case where massive social disruptions opened the human race up
to satanic assault. In Genesis 4 we read
Cain was of the wicked one; in other words, Cain was opened up to satanic
assault; here in the massive disruption of the human race of chapter 6 the
human race is opened up to satanic assault.
Verse 5, just to show you that the angels, just because the angels had
intercourse with member of the human race does not mean that they are to blame
because Genesis 6:5 puts the blame where it belongs, “God saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” a most powerful verse to
remind you that Augustine and Paul were not the first men in the world to think
of depravity; it’s back in Genesis 6:5 and this is a very powerful statement of
man’s depravity. These people, the
results and the fruit of the copulation came about because of negative volition
on a mass scale, so you had a massive social disruption and through it the
human race was almost resolved.
Well now you come
to Proverbs 6:12 and we’re going to see the same principle except it’s not
directed so much toward the human race here as it’s directed to the nation
Israel. God has set forth a nation and
He has twelve tribes, the sons of Jacob, it’s one family that has resulted in
twelve tribes. Within this family unit
there is to be a minimum of social disruption because every time you have
social disruption and hatred toward the neighbors it is a manifestation of
satanic activity. And so therefore
Proverbs 6, beginning in verse 12 warns the believer for the third pitfall in
life: how to destroy your freedom by becoming involved in social disruption of
believers. This is a third danger the
Christian faces as he grows up in the Christian life; the first one in verse
1-5; the second one in verses 6-11, now let’s the third one, verses 12-19; it
is a severe warning that the father gives his son: son, don’t let me catch you
getting involved in this, don’t you ever get involved in this.
Now there are many
different ways a Christian can get out of it.
If we gave you five minutes to think up all the ways you can get out of
fellowship you could probably generate quite a list. But it’s interesting that God’s discipline
upon various things in your life varies, and here’s the shocker; for a few
basic rough categories of sin, there are the sins that are most demonic, and
then you have the sins that we shall say are fleshly. Now the ironic thing is that the average
person, when they think of sins they think of something that is fleshly, they
think of adultery, they think of fornication, they think of drunkenness, they
think of something else, the “popular” (in quote) thing, the things that are
emphasized with sheltered people who haven’t lived much. And they emphasize always the fleshly
sins. But when God goes to discipline
the fleshly sins are not the ones He lays into believers for. The sins He’s lays into believers for are the
demonic-like sins and by demonic-like sins we mean those sins that the demons
and the angels can do that we can do, plus these sins they can’t do, they don’t
have any bodies, except apart from cases like Genesis 6 where they were able to
create their own. But basic demonic sins
would be sins of the mental attitude; mental attitude sin. Pride is a very demonic sin.
So you have mental
attitude sin and these are the sins that God lowers the beam on, much more so
than He disciplines for these other things, if you wonder why believers can do
this. Take two people in the
congregation; one believer is doing this, one believer is gets out of it doing
this; this believer seems to have a much easier time. You say well wait a minute, what’s going on
in the Christian life, here’s so and so and I know they do this, they do that,
they do this, they do that and God never seems to discipline them. Well, God is disciplining them by various
ways that we found in Proverbs 5. But
here we have somebody that on the outside looks very nice, comes to church all
the time, engaged in a good, moral, ethical life, and all of a sudden wham,
they get clobbered by God, either through severe illness, severe suffering and
they wonder what has happened, why is God clobbering this person. Because this person, though he has a lot of
human good on the inside has mental attitude sins that are very demonic. And so the third pitfall is the father
instructing his son to put first things first on a list of things to avoid, and
it’s a very important passage because this passage is how the father tells his
son to avoid human good and this kind of stuff.
He’s saying in
this passage, look son, if you really want to ask for divine discipline in your
life, just mess around with these and you will get it and you will get it fast,
and you will get it intensely. So this
is a passage that is to straighten out our priorities of sin. It’s very necessary in certain fundamental
circles because so many people have emphasis on the fleshly sins. Now we’re not condoning these; but generally
speaking, in the fleshly sins what God does is He just allows cause and effect
to take over and we see how promiscuity in Proverbs 5, in a very detailed
passage, how promiscuity always reaps its own results; you destroy the human
body’s ability to sexually respond, and you just let the cause/effect have its
course, and God is going to do this. God
has a restraining hand of grace and He’s essentially saying look, if you want
to go mess around, go ahead; if you want to ruin your relationship with your
right woman or your right man go ahead, blow it, you will, because I’m just
going to let cause/effect take over and you’ll destroy yourself sexually and
when it comes down to having a relationship with your right man or right woman
you’re not going to be able to have a relationship with him properly because
he’s messed up. Now that’s the way God
deals with these; He just simply lets cause and effect take over. But in these sins God doesn’t just let cause
and effect take over, He, in addition to the cause and effect brings in
powerful forms of discipline. And here
is where many, many Christians are miserable.
Let’s look at this
passage in detail. Proverbs 6:12-15 deal
with looking at the biography of this kind of a person. “A naughty [worthless] person, a wicked man,
walks with a froward [perverse] mouth.
[13] He winks with his eyes; he speaks with his feet, he teaches with
his fingers. [14] Frowardness
[perversity] is in his heart; he devises mischief continually, he sows
discord. [15] Therefore shall his
calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without remedy.”
Now (?) the key to
the passage is the first word in verse 12 and that’s the word which is a very
difficult word but it ties it to all this stuff I gave you about Cain and Abel. The expression in the Hebrew looks like this,
Adam, and this is beliya‘al, Adam beliya‘al, and it means
a man of, and we’ve got to find out what this next word is. What is this next word? This next word has been translated as
“without value,” “worthless,” oftentimes in the King James. Other times it’s translated more powerfully
by not just being worthless but being with it until finally, if you will turn
to the New Testament to 2 Corinthians 6:15 it refers to Satan. “What concord has Christ with Belial? Or, what part has he that believes with an
infidel?” This passage in 2 Corinthians
shows how a son, or a man, it doesn’t make any difference in the Hebrew, son or
man of Belial, as it’s transliterated from the Greek, son or man of Belial,
what is this kind of a person? One of
the factors of observing this kind of a person in action is by the parallelism
with the last part of verse 15 in this passage, “Or what part has he that
believes with an infidel?” An infidel is
one who can’t believe, so going back to our chart; the son of Belial has a
particular characteristic. First he’s on
negative volition, he’s had a darkening or blackout of the soul, and he has
acquired human viewpoint that causes a faith shutdown. And it’s the faith shutdown, or the inability
to believe that is one of the chief characteristics of this kind of a
person.
Now don’t get me
wrong, this kind of a person can be a believer; Cain may well have been a
believer, we don’t know. But the point
is that they have reached the state of apostasy and falling away that has led
to an inability to believe; it’s not just that they don’t believe, it’s that
they can’t believe any more. They have
gone on negative volition so long and have clouded their minds so much that the
area over which they can believe looks like that; whereas once they could
believe and trust God over a large area of their life, now they can only trust
Him over a very, very small area. And
this comes because of failure to use the promises on a consistent basis.
Now, why is this
so important and why does this relate to a son of Belial? The reason is this: that when a faith
shutdown occurs how does one appropriate grace?
Now grace can only be appropriated one way, by faith. If you shut the faith down how can the person
appropriate grace? They can’t. So here is where God, characteristic of a son
of Belial, comes forth. He is minus
faith, and since he is minus faith he is also minus the ability to appropriate
grace in his life, which is the next thing to saying he’s very much for human
good. So therefore this person, Christ
and Belial are contrasted with one who believes and an infidel. There’s the parallelism: Christ and Satan. What is Satan? He’s an infidel in the sense that he rejects
grace. So the chief manifestation of a
son of Belial is a person that has an inner hatred to grace and particularly an
inner hatred to anyone who is appropriating grace. The hatred toward grace is carried over in
their life, in their responses to people who operate on a grace basis. They cannot stand to be around people that
operate on a grace basis. This is one of
their chief characteristics.
Now let’s turn
back to Proverbs 6 and read further, this man who is described by the father to
his son. He’s warning his son that you
can wind up this way; you get on negative volition, son, and you can get right
in the this same trap, a man of Belial, “a wicked man who walks with a froward
mouth.” Now the walk is in a Hebrew
participle which means it’s characteristic of his life. All the verbs in verses 12-13 are
participles, meaning they refer to characteristics that go on and on and on and
on. He “walks with a froward mouth,”
this is a word which means a perverted mouth that destroys truth. And what is Satan’s chief aim? To destroy truth. And so this particular person is
characterized by … [tape turns]
… liberal
clergymen fall into this category because they speak from their pulpit with the
words of historic Christianity; they will talk to you about Jesus, they will
talk to you about Christ, they will talk to you about the resurrection, and if
you sit there you will very naively say
oh, there’s nothing wrong with them, see, that sounds nice. And many people in this country in the next
few weeks are going to be treated to Easter sermons and they’re going to have
all sorts of sweet little sermonettes for 20 minutes on the resurrection of
Jesus. And it doesn’t mean a thing. The only people that are being fooled are the
people in the pew who happen to be paying the salary of these clucks, because
what they are talking about… and I can show you this in professional
theological journals where these people do their writings, see, they write it
out clearly in the professional journals where they know you’re not going to
read those and so therefore they’re safe and they can really let their hair
down and express what they think, and you read the professional journals and
you’ll see what they mean by the resurrection; they don’t mean anything like a
physical resurrection.
And if you think they’re
talking about a physical resurrection you’re just reading it into their
words. They’re not talking about
physical resurrection; they’re talking about spiritual resurrection, sort of
(?) songs of new thinking or something and this is what they mean by
resurrection, and yet you watch it, you’ll see it on TV, you’ll watch it in the
papers and so on, all this talk about the resurrection on Easter. First of all, Easter is stupid anyway; Jesus
didn’t rise on that day and furthermore the name Easter is Ishtar and it’s the
goddess of love and sex. That’s why we
have the bunnies and the eggs; did you ever connect it up. That’s what they’re talking about, we’re
talking about orgies. That’s what Easter
is originally about, Ishtar, and they have all these orgies in commemoration of
Ishtar and when the church got under Constantine and so on they just trotted
over this ceremony, everybody was pagan and liked to exercise a little after
lent and so we have Ishtar and it became Easter and then we tie in a few words
about the resurrection, make everybody feel good and move on. Now Easter doesn’t mean a thing; it has
nothing to do with the resurrection of Christ, it’s a pagan feast. And of course we use it as a memorial to the
resurrection of Christ, very fine, but just don’t be snowed. All right, that’s one area, false
doctrine. This is a man who walks with a
froward mouth.
The second area of
the destructive communication by the froward mouth is misrepresentation between
believers. You basically will have in every
congregation or every Christian group somebody that specializes in
misrepresenting one believer to another believer. And they will go around and oh, did you hear
what so and so said, and so and so didn’t say it that way, but nevertheless,
that’s the way it gets around. And this
is one of the most dangerous things that can ever happen to a
congregation. And I want to show you
what the instructions are when we come across an individual like this; turn to
Romans 16. I’m showing you these
passages because I want you to see that Proverbs 6 is talking about something
that is very, very serious, and God lowers the boom, and it is an area where
you wouldn’t think God would be so serious.
That’s my point: normally you would not think God would be so serious is
this area, you’d think He’d be more serious about other things. But why does the New Testament, both New
Testament and Old Testament together, say no-no-no-no-no, you’re wrong, God is
serious about this and He’s not so serious about the sins that you’re serious
about.
Romans 16:17-18,
“I beseech you, brethren, mark them who cause divisions and offenses contrary
to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.” Now that was a specific instruction given to
believers, watch those who cause divisions among you. Why?
Verse 18 tells you why: “For they are such as serve not our Lord Jesus
Christ but their own belly,” now why does he refer to that? Again it goes back to our diagram, and how we
have a progression of chaos in the heart.
First we have negative volition, then we have darkness, which is a shut
down, the blackout of the soul, then we have the acquisition of human
viewpoint, the shut down of faith, then we have hatred. Now when you get up to here in the area of
human viewpoint and hatred we have compound carnality, and one of the
manifestations of this hatred, besides resentment towards people, is something
we noticed in the study of soul character, and that is that a person who has
reached this stage of development of compound carnality is negative towards
God’s authority but since he is created in the image of God he must have some
authority and so he bows to pseudo authority or idols.
Now those idols
can be of two sorts. Saul bowed down, in
one case, to the mob but in Romans 16:18 when you see the word “belly,” “they
served their own belly,” the word “belly” is stomach and it was used for
emotional patterns. So this is talking
about a believer in compound carnality who is bowing down to how they feel, so
they go trotting from one believer to another.
Here they meet believer A and they walk up to A and because this person
is ruled by their emotions, they have a certain emotional response to believer
A; believer A may not shake their hand just exactly the way they like it;
believer A might not look at them, believe A might be busy doing something else
and not have time for them right at that moment and so they’ve got a very
negative attitude toward believer A. And
so they go around, since their emotions have been offended, and since they are
victims of their emotions, they’ll go trotting along and they’ll come across
believer B, and they’ll say hey, believer B, you know this clod, believer A,
they were nasty to me today. Do you
suppose that believer A is a believer?
Maybe not, maybe they’re not saved.
And they’ll begin to spread stuff like this, or maybe they’ll say
believer A is on an extended carnality trip or something, otherwise known to
some of our college students as a toulie trip.
But believer B has had believer A misrepresented. So now believer B, thinking this was the
truth, he begins to respond to believer A and now you begin to have a split
between believer and believer in the local congregation. Who started it? This jerk, that was in carnality to the point
where they were ruled by their emotions, bowing to pseudo authority and they
are serving their own belly.
Notice what they
do in Romans 16:18, “but with their own belly, and by good words and fair
speeches,” do you know what that means?
Polite, courteous, oh, you never heard the courtesy of conversations;
these people would never drop a four-lettered word, wouldn’t think of such an
awful sin, and yet they are agents of Satan, because Paul says they have fallen
victims to their own emotional patterns and as a result who do they
deceive? They “deceive the hearts of
simple ones [innocent].” And since there
are always simple believers around you’ll always have people that will be
deceived by this. So Paul is saying
“mark them” verse 17, and “avoid them.”
Just tone out, and that’s a believer’s response to trouble-makers.
Now turn back to
Proverbs 6:13. This is a trouble-maker
and in verse 13 it describes how he looks to other people, he used particular
idioms in the Hebrew for insincere conversation. They were always used throughout the Old
Testament for insincere conversation, “winks with the eyes,” “speaks with his
feet, “teaches with his fingers,” probably they came to be this use because they
were nervous when they were talking to somebody.
Then Proverbs
6:14, “Pervisity is in his heart,” the word “perversity is an interesting
Hebrew word that comes off the root to revolt, and this connects up solidly
with what I said, that the result of this person or the basis for this person’s
behavior pattern is negative volition; it is a rejection of true authority, he
has turned from the authority of the Word of God to a pseudo authority. The Word of God is the absolute authority;
this is what should be used in your life to determine right from wrong, truth
from error, and everything else, and how you respond to people should be always
mirrored and measured by the Word; always the Word, the Word, the Word, the
Word. Whose Word? God’s Word.
And therefore the Word is the authority but this person has revolted
from true authority to pseudo authority and so they are responding to their
emotions. They’re responding to the mob;
they’re responding to somebody else out here, always responding to something
other than the Word of God. So this,
again characterizes this.
“He devises
mischief continually,” the word “devise” means to plow and keel, it means to
work the soil over, it’s an agricultural term used to continually cultivate the
soil so the point of verse 14, “devises mischief” isn’t just that he thinks of
it once; it’s the fact that he cultivates it; any time the truth begins to work
in it’s the analogy of the farmer going out preparing his fields and then he
has his crops planted and so forth and then there’s weeds grow and instead of
dealing with the weeds, in cultivation you deal with these things, with
chemicals or mechanically, this person, in this case the weeds are the words,
it’s reversed and the plants are pseudo authority or human viewpoint and every
time the word tries to sprout in between the rows of his error, he cuts them
off, he cuts it off, he cuts it off, he cuts if off, over and over and over
again. So the one who “devises mischief”
is the one who cultivates the error. It
is not just that he plants the error; he goes on day after day after day
carefully cultivating it.
And therefore
verse 15, “Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be
broken without remedy.” The word “break”
means to smash and it’s an extreme form of discipline used in 2 Chronicles
36:16 for the fifth degree of discipline; it is an irrevocable discipline that
God lowers upon a believer in this state.
It’s a very severe form of discipline; it could even be the sin unto
death, the sin unto physical death when God destroys a believer physically,
just removes him from the scene.
Now Proverbs
6:16-19 is a quick summary of the sins that the Lord hates, because after the
father got through teaching his son, verses 12-15 and he particularly got down
to verse 15 the son says now wait a minute dad, what’s the deal on this? How come I come down to verse 15 and you’re
talking about suddenly God’s going to smash the guy? Now you don’t read that anywhere in verses
1-5; there’s no speaking there of sudden crushing discipline on the
believer. You don’t read of anything in
verses 6-11, sudden crushing discipline upon the believer. Why then, all of a sudden, when you get into verses
12-15 do you have this sudden crushing, overpowering discipline? Why?
And so obviously
the son is going to ask: dad, why? And
so verses 16-19 are answers by the father to the son as to why God does what He
does in verse 15, because God hates these things. And he lists it in what we call an X + 1
form. This is a Hebrew device that is
used to emphasize a point. It can be 4
yea 5; six yea 7; 7 yea 8, it was used throughout the ancient world and when
you have poetry written in this form oftentimes it is that first term added to
the X that is the one that is the emphasis.
In other words, they’ll say 4, no I mean 5, and what they do there is
that the 5th one in this case in the series, suppose… well here
we’ve got six, “yea seven” things in verse 16.
All right, we’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, those are six things that God
hates, and then he says, “yea, seven, are an abomination to Him.” That is a signal that it’s that seventh one
that is emphasized in the text.
Now if you look
down the list, what is the seventh one?
It is “he that sows discord among the brethren.” Now what was the device mentioned in verse 14
that led to the discipline? “He that
sows discord.” So therefore we can
deduce immediately from this passage that the emphasis is on the results of
these sins and why God lowers the boom: because they spread discord among the
brethren. Now let’s look at these and
what an eye-opener this list is because nowhere in this list of things that God
hates will you find any of the big ones mentioned in evangelistic circles. Where do you find drinking in verses
16-19? Again, we’re not condoning it but
we’re saying on the scale of things that God hates these are not at the
top.
Let’s look at
these carefully. First the first three:
Proverbs 6:16, “These six” are divided into two groups. [17] “A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands
that shed innocent blood.” One thinks
again of Cain and Abel. And think of the
succession; what is a proud look?
There’s a progress here, mental attitude sin; there it starts with a
mental attitude, “a proud look.” Next,
“a lying tongue,” what is that? That’s
the mental attitude into the area of communication, very vital and very
necessary for the mental attitude to come out towards people,
communication. Only men, angels and God
can communicate with language. So you
have: “a proud look, a lying tongue,” in the area of communication, and finally
overt behavior, “hands that shed innocent blood.” Again think of Cain, mental attitude sin of
pride, rejection of grace, maligning and finally can’t stand it so we have
hands that shed innocent blood, murder.
Now Proverbs 6:18
starts off the cycle again. “A heart
that devises wicked imaginations,” so you have again in the second series
mental attitude sin, “A heart that continually,” and the word “devises” again
the word for plow and continually work on, it’s the same word used in verse 14,
it doesn’t mean just think up, it means to cultivate resentment and so on, over
a long period of time. “A heart that
devises wicked imaginations.” Second,
“feet that are swift in running to mischief,” this is analogous to the
communication and analogous to gossip, analogous to maligning because the feet
that run to mischief are people that can’t wait; this is a foot line to the
telephone. Oh, I can’t wait to tell you
something… see, and they didn’t have telephones back in the days of Proverbs
but they had various ways; you couldn’t dial a number and ring somebody, so
what they did was they just walked out in the streets and “the feet that be
swift in running to mischief” was one person going yak yakking to somebody else
about some gossip and some maligning. So
“swift in running to gossip” literally is the emphasis here. Again this corresponds with the second step
of the third series, and here you have in the area of communication.
Then finally, [19]
“a false witness who speaks lies.” Now
the false witness is one who is involved in a law suit and this is analogous to
murder, in this case, because it’s an overt activity and this is used in a
court of law. And it’s suing somebody;
the word “witness” is a technical judicial term that means this. “And he that sows discord among the
brethren,” that’s the X + 1 term in the list and this is the one that is the
critical one, and that is the emphasis of the passage. “He that sows discord” God hates. To back and look at verse 16 just for a
moment again, “These six things doth the LORD hate;” and they “are an
abomination unto Him.”
Isn’t the priority
of this list slightly different from the priority that is usually presented in
fundamental circles? This is a warning
for the third pitfall. What is the third
pitfall? Pitfall number three is don’t
get involved in the process of destroying believer’s social relationship; keep
your big mouth shut. The military has a
fine principle; it is called the need to know principle. And even though you can have secret clearance
or top secret clearance in the military that does not mean you have to know all
the secrets. When I was in the service I
had secret clearance of various documents and so on; it didn’t mean that I knew
all the documents, and we followed the need to know principle, if I didn’t need
to know that document I deliberately didn’t know the document, just avoided
it. What you don’t have to know is none
of your business. And you might use this
to measure your own involvement to keep you out of the third pitfall. Do you really have to know this detail about
the other person? In some areas, in
certain areas of prayer, sometimes it’s necessary; otherwise it’s not. Do you really have to know? Follow the need to know principle.
Shall we bow for a
word of prayer….