Clough Proverbs Lesson 55
DI #1: The Law of the Soul IV – The Law of
Psychosomatic Effect
Before we continue
in the book or Proverbs I’d like to answer two questions that were handed in;
the first one is that there is no fault mentioned in the letter to the church
at Philadelphia, this is in reference to my remarks last week, and this is
correct, however this lack of condemnation for the church at Philadelphia does
not imply that that congregation is perfect.
If it did we would have a problem because of the existence of the sin
nature, so although that’s correct, that doesn’t happen to change the point
that was made last week that there is no perfect congregation. The church at
The second
question was that most people I know that use the term “head and heart”
knowledge are referring to the difference between intellectual intake and application. Doesn’t the Bible make this distinction; it
seems in your terminology head knowledge would be the divine viewpoint
framework whereas heart knowledge would be fullness of God and love of Christ? Because there is this misunderstanding let
me just explain something. We go back to
what I said last week; there is no distinction in the two kinds of
knowledge. There’s only one kind of
knowledge ever granted in God’s Word and it’s very, very critical you notice
this. Knowledge in God’s word means personal
awareness of the truth. And there are no
different kinds of knowledge ever given in Scripture. All knowledge is one; the kind of knowledge
that is encountered in Scripture is exactly the kind of knowledge that 2 + 2 =
4. The kind of knowledge that men know
cannot be separated into kinds of knowledge; it can be separated into areas of
knowledge, math, science history, personal relationships and so on but it
cannot be separated into kinds of knowledge.
The reason is that all knowledge is grounded on two points, an empirical
base in history and rational base in the fact that it hangs together. Since all knowledge is bound by these two
things this means that there is only one kind of knowledge, and therefore there
is no such thing as head knowledge and heart knowledge. The difference that is referred to is the
difference between perception or true knowledge and obedience, but if we mean
by the difference in obedience and knowledge then we ought to say so and stop
using these terms “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” They are not biblically justified, they have
no place in God’s Word where they’re ever separated them this way and by
separating them in your own vocabulary you are creating a problem in that you
are intimating to someone that there’s a special form of knowledge, and that is
incorrect. And this is why
fundamentalism is in the place it is.
Shall we turn to
Proverbs 14:30, we are on a set of verses that has to do with the laws of the
soul and I’ve been able to divide these laws of the soul up as you asked last
week, so here goes the first major division of the laws of the soul; we’ll
finish this one and go on to a few more next Sunday. This first category of laws of the soul we
would call the psychosomatic effects; this means that it comes from the fact
that the human soul is made up of body and spirit, and because it is it’s a
joint product, first of the body and then of the spirit. What is called soul, s-o-u-l in Scripture is
not an immaterial thing. Now some of you
have debated this in classes, in college classes and so on, you’re using the
word “soul” in those discussions for the way the Bible uses “spirit.” The soul in Scripture is a byproduct that
includes both material and immaterial elements.
So when we say the soul we try to indicate on this chart as a mixture of
the two colors to get across the fact that the soul is a byproduct of both, and
since the soul includes the mind and has primary reference to the mind as well
as behavior, that means that the mind is open to effects on both sides. The mind is open to effects from the
conscience side; the mind is open to effects from the body side. This being so it means that your soul can be
affected both ways. You can be affected
spiritually and you can be effected physically.
Now the book of
Proverbs stresses how your soul carries the spiritual effect over to the body
so that you can affect your body by the way you think based on the influence of
the soul. So you can visualize two
circuits; you can visualize the fact that your body and how you take care of
your body is going to affect your soul and therefore your spirit, in this
diagram going from the left to the right, and you can also imagine how you
handle your spirit is going to affect your body, going from the right to the
left through the soul. So you’ve got two
circuits set up in you and it’s foolish to neglect either one of these.
As an introduction
to Proverbs turn to 1 Samuel
But the point is
that when your soul is under the influence of hormone imbalances and so on from
the body that is not a reflection on your spirituality. Unfortunately what usually happens is one of
two things. When somebody hasn’t taken
care of their body or they’re just having trouble or something they begin to
feel guilty about how they feel; they respond to these bad feelings with guilt,
failing to recognize the source and guilt is a mental attitude sin. So it starts out innocently as a physically
based problem and winds up with a spiritual problem because they don’t handle
their physical problem correctly the physical problem mushrooms over into the
mind, the mind feels guilty because it sees things going on over here that it
knows are wrong and the result is that it feels guilty about them. And guilt, as a mental attitude sin, puts you
out of fellowship and then you do have a spiritual problem. Or another way it works is that somebody
needs an excuse for carnality and so therefore they feel out of it physically
and then they just let go and get out of fellowship and go carnal and then
blame it on… well, it’s just what I ate or something. So it goes two ways; so watch this
effect. The body can affect your soul,
but that affect is not something for which you’re culpable or for which you’re
responsible. The Bible just simply indicates
that’s the way we’re built and this is the way we have to suffer in a fallen
world. So relax about the effects of the
body on the soul. This is why some
people can come up with hallucinations and they can come up with all sorts of
things and they say I’m demonically oppressed or something. And it’s not that at all, it’s simply
chemical imbalances in the brain. It has
nothing to do with demons or anything else, it just has to do with a poorly
kept body. So these things of the body
are important.
But the book of
Proverbs treats this whole question in the opposite direction. I’ve introduced you to 1 Samuel 14 to show
you there are both ways in the Bible: the body affects the spirit and the
spirit affects the body. But this is to
insure you against drawing false conclusions from the rest of what we’re going
to say this morning from Proverbs. What
we’re going to say this morning has to do with things that are in the spirit
affecting the body and I don’t want you to walk out of here confused thinking
that the body never works the other way too.
So this is just a precaution to balance you from 1 Samuel 14.
Now we’re going to
take up the verses in Proverbs that deal with the psychosomatic effects as God
has designed us. The first one is in
Proverbs 14:30. The following verses in
the book of Proverbs teach the psychosomatic effect: Proverbs 3:1-2; 8, 16;
Proverbs 4:10; 20-22; Proverbs 10:27; Proverbs 14:30; Proverbs 15:13, 15;
Proverbs 17:22; Proverbs 18:14. We’ll
just deal with the last part of those verses this morning.
[Proverbs 3:1, “My
son, forget not my law, but let thing heart keep my commandments.”
Proverbs 3:2, “For
length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.”
Proverbs 3:8, “It
shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.”
Proverbs 3:16,
“Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honor.”
Proverbs
Proverbs 4:20-22,
“My son, attend to my words; incline thine heart unto my sayings, [21] Let them
not depart from thine eyes; keep them in
the midst of thine heart. [22] For they
are life unto those that find them, and health to
all their flesh.”
Proverbs 10:27,
“The fear of the LORD prolongs days, but the years of the wicked shall be
shortened.”
Proverbs 14:30, “A
sound heart is the life of the flesh; but envy, the rottenness of the bones.”
Proverbs 15:13, “A
merry heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of the heart the spirit
is broken.”
Proverbs 15:15,
“All the days of the afflicted are evil, but he that is of a merry heart has a
continual feast.”
Proverbs 17:22, “A
merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.
Proverbs 18:14,
“The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit, who can bear?”]
Proverbs 14:30, “A
sound heart is the life of the flesh; but envy, the rottenness of the
bones.” Now in the Hebrew verse 30 is
written in reverse because of the emphasis.
What comes first is emphasized so it says in the Hebrew: “The life of
the flesh is a sound heart,” so therefore the way that’s constructed, since the
subject is “the life of the flesh” it means that this is what is emphasized in
verse 30, not “the soundness of the heart,” but “the life of the flesh.” And it refers to the maximum potential of
life. Life, as we have found in the book
of Proverbs is used four different ways.
It is used for physical birth, it is used for becoming God-conscious;
when does someone become God-conscious?
How can you tell when your children become God-conscious? You can tell when they begin to use language
with facility because when language is used with facility concepts are used,
conceptual thought is developing and therefore God-consciousness is developing. The third way in which life is used in the
book of Proverbs is to refer to regeneration or the new life that begins at the
point of salvation. A fourth way in
which life is used in the book of Proverbs refers to maturity or maximum
sanctification. These four ways are the
way that “life” is used.
Now the particular
meaning here is physical life, “the life of the flesh,” the emphasis is on the
physical at this point. Every verse that
we’re dealing with this morning emphasizes physical effect. “The life of the flesh is a sound heart,”
this means the essence behind all physical life comes from the spirit, and
again if we go back to our chart on the soul this is not hard to see, because
the body was first made, visualizing Genesis 2:7, God formed Adam’s body from
the ground, the ground called adamah
in Hebrew, that’s the Hebrew word for ground.
Adam’s proper name is Adam, Adam from adamah, so therefore the body of man, made of the ground, of the
dust of the earth, was made first, but after the body was finished there was no
life in it, just as after a woman completes her term of pregnancy there is
still no life in the fetus; the body has been developed in her womb and that’s
all, no human spirit there yet. And when
the baby is physically born God puts the human spirit in and at that point the
infant is a true infant and becomes a living thing. So at this point Adam, after he was
physically assembled, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and we
have life. Now what caused the
life? The acquisition of the human
spirit. So therefore what verse 30 is
simply going back to is the primary structure of how we are made, that it is
the spirit that gives life.
Now there’s a
particular condition that’s referred to, “a sound heart.” Now we have to emphasize and understand
“heart.” The Hebrews used the word
“heart” in a strictly physical way. Why? Because the word “heart” or leb, l-e-b pronounced like “v”, was used
of the physical organ that we call heart.
Why pick this one out for the center of people? Because the heart can sustain itself given
certain oxygen and food, the heart can go on beating indefinitely outside of
the human body. The heart does not need
the brain, but the brain does need the heart.
So the Jews were more correct than we are when we make man’s
physiological center the brain; we’re wrong, man’s physiological center is his
heart, it is the heart that causes the brain, not the brain the heart. The brain regulates the heart but the brain
does not cause the heart to beat; the heart beats in and of itself and the
brain can only slow or regulate it but the brain can’t start the heart and the
brain can’t stop the heart. The heart
stops and starts strictly by itself. So
therefore the Bible is much more accurate than we in the west who put all the
emphasis on the brain. The Jews put it
where it belongs, on the physical organ of the heart.
Now the way the
word “heart” is used by analogy with the spiritual life and it may be more than
analogy, someone asked last week, do you just mean an analogy and I said no, I
do not just mean an analogy, we do not know if the physical organ of the heart
may actually be the center of the human spirit; no way you can prove or
disprove it that I know of. So we can’t
say this is just an analogy; all we can say is that the human heart is very
important and there is an analogy and the analogy is that the heart represents
the functioning center… the functioning center of soul, actually body, soul and
spirit. It represents the functioning
center of the body as I just explained and it also represents the functioning
centre of the soul and spirit because the word leb is used for what we would call ego; it is used for what we call
mind, it is used for what we call conscience.
All three of those things; leb
is never used for emotions anywhere in God’s Word, from Genesis to Revelation
heart does not refer to emotions. And there’s on such thing as head knowledge
and heart knowledge, all knowledge is heart knowledge in the Bible.
All right, this,
then refers, “the sound heart,” to a particular kind of heart. What particular kind of heart? A certain condition of the heart translated
as “sound” but in the Hebrew it comes from the medical word. They had a medical word to heal, rapha (?), and when prefixed with a
Hebrew name it means a state of health, marapha
(?) and this noun means that the heart has health-giving power. It pumps life into the rest of the body. And so therefore when it says “sound heart”
in Proverbs 14:30 it is referring to a particular state of your functioning
center of your soul and spirit, such that that functioning center is sending
life into all parts of your system, including your physical body. Now as you grow and as you develop
spiritually the Bible says that Jesus Christ is formed in your heart, meaning
that Jesus Christ Himself was a type of perfect humanity, He was a type of
God’s will for the human race, and therefore as He is, so to speak,
reincarnated in believers, and as His nature and character are produced in us
through spiritual maturity, the filling of the Holy Spirit, then we have, as we
have indicated here a growing circle of faith and your circle of faith may look
like that, you may have as an early Christian life you may have the ability to
trust God in every area of your life but because of various things that will
come up in your life, maybe God has put you to test in some areas and not
others and after a while your Christian growth may look somewhat like
this. In other words, in some areas you
have the ability to trust Him a lot.
For example, you
may be developing a tremendous sense of responsibility before the Lord. You may be developing tremendous insights as
to the wise use of money, as to the doctrine of labor as it is given in
Scripture and so therefore in this area you’re growing very much and Jesus
Christ is being reproduced slowly but gradually in your heart. But then in other areas, such, as for
example, the area of the state and questions of law and punishment you still
may be very naïve; you may be one of these people who do not believe in war,
you think that elimination of war is possible in this age, and there you are
naïve, there you do not understand the techniques of history, you do not
understand the mechanisms of history and so you come up with very naïve ideas
about how history is to run. But
nevertheless, although you are weak spiritually in that area doesn’t mean you
can’t be strong in some other area.
And for all
believers this is an occupational hazard.
You may be strong in the areas of the first divine institution, somebody
else may strong in the areas of the fourth divine institution and then you
judge each other; why so and so is a weak believer because so and so doesn’t
measure up to me over here. Well, so and
so could turn around to you and say well, you don’t meet up to me over
here. So it doesn’t do any good to
compare your strong points to someone else’s weak points. We all have our weak points, we all have our
strong points and hopefully as God’s grace works in our heart we’ll have this
thing expanded.
Now that is the
effect of the heart; “a sound heart” will have a maximum impact in these areas,
so in Proverbs 14:30 when it speaks of a sound heart, let’s take responsibility
in labor for one; you’re on a job that requires tremendous labor, manual labor
and you have a positive mental attitude toward that because you do that job as
unto the Lord. Now you have a “sound
heart” with regard to that matter and so therefore your heart supports your muscles,
your heart supports your physical body, you don’t run yourself down on the job
because you like your job, because you’re doing your job as unto the Lord. You’re relaxed about your job, you’re not
tense about it, you don’t have vengeance and hatred and so on and so therefore
your body is actually edified while you work and while you labor in this
area. That’s an example of how a “sound
heart,” or how “the life of the flesh,” say in this area of your life, is a
sound heart or comes from a health-giving heart.
But then the last
part of verse 30, written in antithetic parallelism, says “but envy is
rottenness of the bones.” The word for
“envy” is not exactly like our word envy, it’s a stronger word than envy and
refers to certain things that go on inside the human heart. The word “envy” in the Hebrew looks like
this, qanah, and qanah is a word that means… it actually comes from an Arabic word,
it’s kind of an interesting one, the Arabic root for this word means red and it
was used for covering a cloth with red dye.
And then later on it came to refer to the color produced in a person’s
face by deep emotions. So the word “red”
then came to refer to emotions. You say
you “see red,” well, that’s literal because the physiological responses in
emotions do color your face, I’m not just referring to blushing, I’m being to
just being flushed in the face through anger.
And this word, qanah then,
because it originally meant red, then came to refer to emotions; getting red in
the face because of anger. So the word
means intense emotions; it can be good emotions or bad emotions.
Now since it is
used in Proverbs 14:30 in antithetic parallelism we therefore infer that it
refers to bad emotions. But the word
itself basically refers to the physiological evidence of strong emotions; we’ll
say bad emotions because of the parallelism in verse 30. All right, so “intense bad emotions is the
rottenness of the bone.” Now the word
“rottenness” was used in several situations in the ancient world, it was used
for cavities in the teeth, it was used for wood that’s rotten, and it just
simply means a breakdown in the general health of the body. To see how the word “bones” refers to you
generally, if you look at the back side of your bulletin, I’ve taken one of the
Dead Sea Psalms, an excerpt from one of the Dead Sea Psalms, that was written
around the time of Jesus Christ. Now
this is a psalm that is not inspired of God, but nevertheless accurately
reflects how people used words in Jesus’ day.
Now look at this psalm. “Near
death was I from my sins, and mine iniquities had (?) me to the grave; let not
Satan rule over me nor an unclean spirit; neither let pain nor the evil
inclination take possession of my bones.”
Now those last two clauses are parallel.
In the first clause, “Let not Satan rule over me” is in parallel, “let
pain not take possession of my bones.”
So that shows you that “my bones” was simply another way idiomatically
of saying me, myself.
So then, going
back to Proverbs 14:30, “but intense bad emotions are the decay of me” or “of
my body.” And the bones, (?) they are
used to stand for the person, why do you suppose they use “bones”
sometimes. What nuance? Obviously they would use the word “me” if
they wanted an exact parallel; the poet doesn’t want an exact parallel, he uses
the word “bones.” Why do you suppose he
uses the words “bones” to replace “me?”
What do bones do in the body?
They give it form; they give it strength. Imagine if you were just a pile of muscle,
you’d have to be shoveled through the door, just one big glob of jelly, that’s
all it would be if you didn’t have bones.
So bones give form, bones are the basic structure. So when bones are used for the person they
refer to that which is the basic person; the root of the whole person’s strength. So this verse is obviously teaching that bad
anger over a long time period will destroy you physically. And this is one of the physiological
manifestations of this law that we’re studying in the soul. You can destroy your body on emotional revolt.
The envy, or the qanah here, refers to a person who looks
like this; they have a conscience, they have a mind and they have
emotions. Now here’s what happens; the
conscience has judged the mind and so you understand this is wrong; the mind
understands it but the ego says no, I’m on negative volition, I don’t want to
listen to the conscience right now. So
therefore the mind is now in active revolt against the conscience and you have
produced a state of mental revolt, when the mind does understand but nevertheless
it still doesn’t want to submit to the rule of the conscience. Now this is a hint when you have a person
that’s in deep trouble psychologically, most people really do know the source
of their problem because David said “my sin is ever before me.” And in most situations you have the mind
actually does know, it just doesn’t want to know but it does know what the
problem is, it’s in revolt against the conscience on some issue.
Well, no sooner
does the mind begin to revolt against the conscience than it weakens
itself. You see, somebody who is in
revolt against a superior can never command the respect of those under
him. And so therefore if the mind is out
of line with its superior, the conscience, then obviously it can’t commend the
respect of an inferior which is the emotions, and so now the emotions begin to
get all bent out of shape and they revolt against the authority of the mind and
you have a neurotic or psychotic state, and that’s called emotional revolt. So the emotions revolt against the mind when
the mind revolts against the conscience.
Everything is fouled up; chain of command is destroyed inside the
person.
Now, the envy, or
the qanah, in verse 30 refers to this
situation, when the emotions are all bent out of shape, they are not responding
properly. But please don’t draw the
wrong conclusion; nothing I have said teaches that we should do away with our
emotions. Emotions are there; emotions
are how you appreciate Jesus Christ.
Mind itself doesn’t appreciate anything.
All you do in the area of your mind is understand but you don’t
appreciate with your mind. It is your
emotions that appreciate. The best
illustration of emotions, the difference between emotions and the mind
appreciating something is if you’ve ever done any advanced work in
mathematics. When you work with
mathematics and you see a beautiful proof, a beautiful form, something that
starts out with beautiful logical structure, it is very, very aesthetically
appealing, and you can experience a tremendous emotional response to this kind
of thing. It’s hard for some who have
trouble adding two and two and getting four to appreciate this. But when you have a thing in advanced
mathematics that is done with great rigor, with great finesse, with great
efficiency, it actually has a beauty that you can appreciate. Now there your emotions are going into action
and it’s a good example to remember because those emotions are not affecting
your mind; your mind is what turns on the emotions, the emotions react to
what’s on the mind.
Now in emotional
revolt something happens; the mind is all screwed up because it’s so busy
trying to fight the conscience down, and therefore the mind is weak, and so
therefore you begin to respond to feelings, and your emotions have nothing to respond
to in your body so what do your emotions respond to? Your physical feelings. Actually you begin to get a vicious cycle
here. The emotions that are built to
respond to the mind don’t respond to the mind but they have to respond to
something and so you have some feeling, maybe you ate too much last night or
something, and your emotions, you don’t feel good, and so your emotions
actually begin to go around in a circle because actually your emotions are
partly physical too. So your emotions go
round and round with your body and pretty soon you just are one big quivering
mass of emotions. And the more deeply
you get involved in this the harder it is for you to break out.
This is why so
many people in Lubbock are so antithetic to Bible doctrine. The people that you watch in this city that
are against Bible doctrine are people who are in emotional revolt, people who
say the Word of God is too dull for me, I would rather be doing something for
Jesus than studying God’s Word. Now it’s
nice to want to do something for Jesus Christ, but you’ve got to be sure it’s
Him that you’re doing something for.
Furthermore, you’ve got to know what it is that He wants you to do and
what it is He wants you to do is explained in Bible doctrine. So therefore where you find people
antagonistic to Bible doctrine you will inevitably find people in this
condition; if you watch them long enough, they’ll fool you for a while and
they’ll put on a great show of spirituality and you’ll be very impressed. We’ve had a fellowship people in our
congregation that have been impressed with these kinds and they got to know
them after a couple of months and they began to see why this isn’t what they
said it was at all; it is correct that those who are antagonistic to teaching
of God’s Word on a systematic basis hour by hour by hour, are actually in
emotional revolt and they’re going to pay a price spiritually and as verse 30
says, they will pay a price by “the rottenness of their bones.” It will begin to affect them physiologically.
Turn to Proverbs
15:15 for a further verse on this point.
This explains, incidentally, how you can have legitimate healing by
illegitimate means. Now there’s a
fallacy going about today; because so and so healed somebody in Jesus’ name,
that means that that person has a particular special gift. Now first of all, apart from whether there is
such a thing as a spiritual gift of healing operating today you can be healed
by all sorts of things. People can go to
idolatrous shrines in Europe and be healed.
What are you going to do about that one?
Are you going to say therefore we should worship the idols of the shrine
where these people got healed? Is that a
legitimate conclusion? You see, if
you’re going to operate this way there’s a flaw in the way you operate. You can’t operate that way consistently so
don’t walk around saying because so and so healed somebody so and so has a
spiritual gift. It doesn’t prove a
thing. Because so and so went and got
healed in such and such a place, that proves something. No it doesn’t.
Every case you can quote I can quote somebody that went to an idolatrous
shrine and got healed, and I mean medically authenticated. What does that prove? It doesn’t prove anything, because it just
proves that God is a God of common grace and God may heal people under any
situation, and these principles which we are learning from the book of Proverbs
shows you why some of this healing occurs.
It occurs because whatever happens the person’s mental attitude get
straightened out and as a result it affects them physically. Now you should be perfectly able to accept
that, of course people can be healed this way and you don’t have to go to a
healer to do it. That’s the wonderful
part about it, all you have to do is know the law of psychosomatic effects and
you can produce it yourself by getting with it spiritually.
Proverbs 15:15 is
preventive medicine; this is dedicated to everyone that feels like he got a raw
deal, and you’re letting eat, eat, eat you up, and this is going to be
something that you can write down on a card and stick in front of you, some of
you housewives that feel sorry because you have to wash dishes all day and dust
and pick up dirty clothes and so on, this is dedicated to you because you can
take this verse and apply it in your own situation. “All the days of the afflicted are evil, but
he that is of a merry heart has a continual feast.” The word “afflicted” means afflicted by
poverty, disease, persecution, the adversities of life; “all the days” means
this is a continual pressure on the person from the outside. See, all housewives qualify.
“All the days of
the afflicted are evil,” this is a statement of the objective state, and we’re
getting great nods of assent all over the congregation. So this means that the pressure is real, it
is on the person, now what is the person going to do about it. “But he that is of a merry heart,” now notice
this doesn’t say “a merry heart,” I want to point that out, because the way
this is constructed in the original language it is a clause of exclusion. What it is, it’s saying look, there may be
five or six people here that we will call the afflicted one, really afflicted,
no joke about it, they really are afflicted.
Now of those some are going to be on positive, some on negative volition. “He that is of a merry heart,” refers to a
believer who is not just a believer but one who is in fellowship daily with the
Lord Jesus Christ and therefore has a spiritual maturity about him that is
called “a merry heart.” The word “merry”
is tov, it’s the general Hebrew
adjective for good, and refers primarily to that which is pleasing to
someone. The word “good” in Hebrew would
better be translated “pleasing.” This is
why it says David was good of face, now you never say somebody is good of face
today, what does that mean in the Hebrew.
It means that David had a handsome, attractive face. Why do you think all the ladies came out and
danced for him when he came back from battle?
David was a very handsome man.
And so he was good, or tov of
face, he was beautiful to look at.
So the tov of heart refers to a believer who
can take pressure by applying promises.
This refers to a particular person whose pressure is above
circumstances; he has his eyes on the Lord Jesus Christ in the middle of the
affliction. The affliction goes on and
on and on and on, daily, over and over and over, day after day, week after
week, month after month, and this is a believer who doesn’t cop out. The first thing about a person who has a
merry heart obviously he has to know something; he can’t be like the usual that
runs from dedication service to rededication service to rededication service to
revival to rededication service. That’s
not the way to run your Christian life; forget it, we don’t have rededication
services here, it’s ridiculous. When you
trust the Lord daily by taking in the Word of God that’s how you dedicate your
life to Christ. And it’s something
private; it is something you do as unto the Lord, not unto a group of people
and somebody that needs to send in a report that we had 55 people come
forward. We don’t need that kind of
stuff.
The “merry heart”
is someone who knows Bible doctrine, somebody who takes it in on a daily basis;
somebody who spends hours a week taking in the Word of God. The “merry heart,” or “he that is of a good
heart,” that’s maturity, “to him” it says, “life is a continual feast. Now for some of the more delicate let’s go
into this easy and hold your seat belts on because this is one of those words
that has various insinuations. The word
which is translated “feast” means a drinking bout. It comes from the Hebrew verb, shatah; shatah means to serve
drinks. And that’s the verb and when you
add a mem, which is a Hebrew “and” in
front of it, mem shatah, it is the
place or the occasion for serving drinks.
And so what this verse is saying is that the person may be afflicted, he
may be under continual pressure, but if he has a merry heart his life is like
one continual drinking bout. Now all of
you can’t understand by first hand evidence what that is like, but
nevertheless, imagine what it’s like.
And what it refers to is the same thing, and this by now should ring
bells in your mind, can you think of a New Testament passage that’s saying the
same thing? Ephesians 5:18, “Be not
drunk with wine wherein is excess but be filled with the Spirit.” Why do you suppose the wine is brought in
there again? Because in the ancient
world the wine was used several ways; many ways parallel the way it’s still
used. And one way it was used is to make
you relax, you come back from a hard day and so you’d take a drink of wine to
relax, because you can’ if you can’t you shouldn’t do it but wine was used to
relax people. So that’s the first
connotation of a drinking bout, is that you are relaxed. A second connotation is that for the time
being you’re just occupied with something else other than your problems, and so
somebody that’s in a drinking bout is preoccupied, shall we say, to put it
nicely. They’re preoccupied and
relaxed.
Now those are the
two characteristics of a mem shatah,
that the author of Proverbs is telling us.
See, Solomon wrote this, he had lots of drinking bouts in his
palace. In fact, toward the end of his
life, according to Ecclesiastes, he had quite a few; he had big parties,
parties that would be equivalent to anything that they’d have in New Orleans,
Houston, or New York. Solomon had some
pretty wild ones in his time and he knew what he was talking about. So when he is saying this is a continual
drinking bout he refers to these two characteristics. This verse teaches the same thing as
Ephesians 5:18 in the New Testament, it’s the Old Testament Ephesians
5:18. “He that is of a merry heart,”
regardless of the pressure, he is relaxed and he’s preoccupied with Jesus Christ. That’s the teaching. He’s relaxed and preoccupied and the best
thing about this particular kind of drinking bout that is mentioned here is
that there is no hangover; there are no Monday mornings. And that’s the beautiful thing about the
filling of the Holy Spirit, absolutely no hangover. The only hangovers that we have spiritually
speaking are hangovers from prolonged times of carnality. When you come out and you’ve been out of
fellowship for months and months and months and years and years, there will be
withdrawal symptoms. But that’s about
the only withdrawal symptoms mentioned in God’s Word. Everything else has no withdrawal symptoms
because it’s real.
Now what are two
things, so far we’ve had two verses, 14:30 and 15:15 that deal with the law of
psychosomatic effects? Now how does this
verse teach it? Well, if a person is
relaxed and preoccupied they won’t do certain things. Let’s see some of those certain things that
you can avoid. The first thing suppose
you have a person here that’s afflicted, he’s on positive volition, the
pressure is really crunching him, he has business reversals, maybe he’s a man
on the job, he has business reversals, or maybe he’s one of the men that we’ve
had in this congregation that has woken up to the intense evil in this
city. This city is very interesting; it
has a particular character about it which the more you probe around the more
you begin to see. Lubbock on the surface
has a very nice moral and ethical climate, very religious, lots of churches and
so on, and we generally talk of it as a conservative culture. But underneath, you don’t necessarily have
any gross forms, although we have it here and there, Lubbock doesn’t have any
real gross forms of what you’d call gross immorality. But what it does have is a very sinister and
evil pressure against those who would articulate the Word of God. And we have had some men in this congregation
that have stood up for Christ on the job and they’ve been shocked at what kind
of a reaction they get. Now this is to
be expected living in Satan’s world, but what makes it interesting around this
area is that there’s such a nice sweet façade about Lubbock on the surface, and
underneath don’t you be surprised if you kick the bucket and a bunch of worms
come out. Now that’s the structure of
how it is around here and there’s a very sinister evilness, that’s not immoral,
it’s just antithetical and very fiercely against anyone who would stand up for
Christ. And you can just put your hand
in the plug and get quite a charge if you’re not wise in this area.
Well, one way you
can do, you may be one of these men who may be afflicted, under continual
pressure, and if you don’t follow this, if you don’t have a tov leb, or a good heart, and you don’t
have the continual relaxation and preoccupation with Christ, what is going to
happen is you can get mental attitude sins of bitterness. That’s one way, and that’s going to affect
your body, ulcers and so on. That’s one
way that can be avoided by following and applying this rule intelligently to
your life and during the week. Another
way that you can have… some people do this, take the housewife for example,
after 9:00 she’s gotten her husband out, she’s gotten the kids to school and
then she thinks about all the dishes she’s got left and all the ironing she has
and this and that and everything else, this room was vacuumed last night and
everybody walked through it so now she’s got to vacuum it again, and she’s got
about 25 things that’s she’s got to do before lunch time or something, and she
may start feeling sorry for herself. And
so she’s under tremendous pressure. Now
what does she do in this thing? She’s
the afflicted one; she’s the one under pressure all the time, all the day. What is she going to do? Well, she has the same tools that her husband
has on the job; she can trust the filling of the Holy Spirit and have the
relaxation in the middle of the pressure or … [Tape turns]
… and so the thing
goes wrong and it murders you. And so
you feel out of it and you feel naturally defeated and a bad attitude. All right, what Satan does is he’ll keep you
thinking about this thing, he’ll keep you preoccupied, see, you failed, you
failed, you failed, you failed, you failed, you’re going to be defeated in the
next trial around. And he gets you so
shook and has you so psyched out that when he brings up just a little problem,
bang, you’re falling apart already, like Pavlov’s dogs, ring the bell they salivate. All you have to do is have a little pressure
and you fall apart. Now you don’t have
to, and that’s your first way of getting out of that kind of bondage. The first way to get out of that kind of
bondage is to realize you don’t have to, you’ve been trained to react that
way. And if you’ve been trained to react
that way you can be trained to react the opposite way. That’s the glory of it all, you don’t have
to, you’ve been trained to be that way, you’ve been trained to respond to
pressure in that way, and you can train yourself by God’s grace to respond to
pressure exactly in the opposite way.
And as all training it takes time; it does take time. But the “beaten spirit” is an attitude or a
lack of power of the will. It just means
that you have no confidence whatever; that is the “beaten spirit.” You’re beaten before you even start.
Now let’s look at
Proverbs 15:13 since we’re studying the law of psychosomatic effect, obviously
this beaten spirit has tremendous repercussions. The first part of verse 13, “The merry heart
makes a cheerful face,” the word “face” is (?) for the whole body, just like
the bones were, and “the merry heart makes a cheerful” (?) in other words, the
merry heart, what is the heart? The
heart is the functioning center, it’s the ego, it’s the mind, it’s the conscience
together, the functioning center of spirit and soul, and does that
produce? It produces a tremendous
healthy effect on the body. Now this is
not Norman Vincent Peal-ism or The Power
of Positive Thinking, it’s something else.
This is talking about genuine fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ and
the filling of the Holy Spirit. And when
this goes on then there will be a cheerful countenance.
Except, this word,
“cheerful” isn’t there, actually it’s part of the main verb and the verb looks
like this, tov, there’s the word tov, you’ve heard the word for beauty, this is
the verb form and it’s a hiphil stem, which means to make tov, or to make attractive, or to make pleasing. So this means that it’s actually the filling
of the Holy Spirit has a health giving effect physiologically. Now by all means don’t walk out of here and
say well, because this has a physiological effect, therefore I’m going to stay
in fellowship. Huh-un, that’s not the
motivation. You stay in fellowship
because you submit to God’s will in your life.
This is just pointing out various after effects.
The next part of
this verse, the first part is quite easy to see, a “merry heart,” one who is in
fellowship, one who is mature, has a health giving effect on the body, “but by
sorrow of heart the spirit is beaten.”
“Sorrow of heart,” the word “sorrow” means pain and what is the pain in
the functioning center. Here’s the ego,
here’s the mind, and here is the conscience.
Where would you get a pain in the functioning center of the soul and
spirit? What would be happening? Let’s draw the functioning center again;
here’s the mind, here’s the conscience?
Where would be the pain? The pain
would come from a confrontation between the mind and the conscience. So how do you get a pain in the heart, you
get a pain in the heart because the conscience has judged the mind and the mind
has rejected the conscience and so therefore there’s a tug of war between the
two and that is the pain in the heart. And
this will cause, by a pain in the heart, or by a pain in the functioning center
of the soul, the spirit is broken.
Why is the spirit
broken? It goes back to the basic
understanding of how we are made. Let’s
look at it once again. Here’s the chart,
body, soul and spirit. The spirit over
here has certain things about it, one is power for service. If the conscience is violated and there you
go, something’s been pointed out, you begin to get this kind of a problem. You begin to develop a negative attitude, and
so your mind turns off your conscience but when the conscience switches off or
is switched off by the mind, what’s it going to do? It acts like… visualize the spirit here as a
battery, it’s constantly giving a small current into the soul. When the conscience switches down it cuts down
the flow of energy from your spirit to your body and that’s the beaten
spirit. And so after this occurs you may
try to drum up something on positive volition and it doesn’t work. Why?
It’s not getting any juice.
Why? Because the human spirit has
been beaten down. And this is one of the
dangers, you see, of compound carnality over a long time period. You can be out of fellowship for weeks and
weeks and weeks and months and months and finally what’s going to eventually
happen is that your human spirit will be very, very beaten and it’ll take you
weeks and weeks to pull out.
This same doctrine
is taught with more emphasis on the physiological effects in Proverbs
17:22. “A merry heart,” notice this same
expression, here we are this third time this morning we’ve found it, except
here it’s not the tov heart, this is
a word for gaiety, it basically means the same thing though, “a merry heart
does good like a medicine.” Now here we
have a verb which means… actually it says “makes good the healing.” Now there’s no extra charge for this verse,
but this verse can save you some doctor’s bills some time. The healing referred to here is a physical
healing; it refers to something wrong in your body, nothing profound spiritually,
just a normal old physical healing problem.
And when it, in verse 22, is linked to a hiphil stem, this verb is
causative, the Hebrew verb system has various stems and this is a hiphil stem
and the hiphil stem is always causative.
It means it makes the healing a good healing.
What makes the
healing a good healing? “A heart of
joy,” what is the heart of joy? Going
back to the drinking bout, it is one that is relaxed; it is one that is
preoccupied with Jesus Christ. Now, what
this first part of verse 22 is saying that under conditions when your body is
worn out, when your body is in the situation of extreme adversity, when you
body may be injured severely, you may be in a
hospital flat on your back, one way to promote healing is the filling of
the Holy Spirit. It will promote, all
other things being equal of course, somebody with exactly the same kind of
situation as you, out of fellowship will heal slower and have a poorer healing
than you. “A merry heart causes the
healing to be good, but a beaten spirit,” here’s the word a beaten spirit, one
that is the result of prolonged carnality, of rejection of the conscience by
the mind, “a beaten spirit dries the bones.”
Now we want to understand what drying the bones means. This doesn’t mean you hang them up on a
clothes line and let them dry, but it refers to something that is quite
specific. Turn to 1 Kings 13:4, here’s
an instance of how that idiom is used, watch it and watch what it means so that
we can be precise in the understanding of God’s Word. “And it came to pass, when King Jeroboam
heard the saying of the man of God, who had cried against the altar in Bethel,
that he put forth his hand form the altar, saying, Lay hold on him. And his hand, which he put forth against him,
dried up, so that he could not pull it in again to him.” Now if you were making a dictionary of terms
of the Bible and you read verse 4 and I asked you look, I see this thing, it
says his hand dried up, could you explain to me what it means? You’d have to go to the context, what do you
think it means based on what you see there.
Look at the last expression, “he could not pull it in again to him,”
what would that connote in every day English?
Paralysis.
Turn to Psalm
22:15, another occasion of the drying of the bones. This is the psalm the Lord Jesus Christ said
on the cross as He was dying for yore sins and mine. “My strength,” Jesus Christ said, “is dried
up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; and thou hast brought me
into the dust of death. [16] For dogs
have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, they pierced my
hands and my feet.” Incidentally, please
notice verse 16 is written one thousand years before Jesus Christ.
Now in verse 15,
“My strength is dried up,” what does that mean?
It means that on the cross Jesus Christ, His body became so weak that He
couldn’t move it, the point is that He just couldn’t move it any more. Jesus Christ was physically exhausted on the
cross. Jesus Christ had carried the
cross, which few people had carried; He carried that cross after sustaining a
tremendous beating inside a courtroom.
This made Jesus Christ’s trials illegal; I always have to laugh at
people against capital punishment, well gee, you know, if we have capital
punishment somebody might get killed who’s innocent. Big deal, God the Father, who instituted
capital punishment knew His own Son would die in a court that would be unjust
and yet He went ahead and instituted capital punishment. How come?
Because it’s important, it’s the basis of the fourth and fifth divine
institution. So here Jesus Christ has
suffered brutality in a court system and His strength is ended, so the
expression “to dry up” simply means that He can’t move, it’s paralysis to the
fact that he’s so exhausted He just can’t move your body.
Lamentations 4:8,
this is a slightly different nuance but it’s the same kind of thing as dryness,
to render lifeless. Jeremiah is
describing a national disaster because the nation Israel went headlong into
idolatry and was judged by the Babylonians as they came in and destroyed
Jerusalem in 586 BC. “Their visage is
blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaves to
their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.” You listen to the POW’s and some of them in
their accounts describe how they would get so weak that they couldn’t even
stand up in prison. And so that kind of
a thing would be expressed in the Hebrew as their bones dried up.
Let’s turn back
and finish this verse in Proverbs, Proverbs 17:22, what does it mean, this
business of drying up the bones.
Proverbs 17:22. “A beaten spirit
causes the bones to become dry,” that means that, “a beaten spirit,” perhaps
the best thing to do is look at our chart on the soul once again. If your human spirit has been turned off so
many times to your carnality that it becomes a beaten spirit it lacks
power. If your human spirit lacks power
this verse teaches that eventually over here your body will not be able to
function, literally, will not be able to function. A person who beats down their spirit by
perpetual disobedience to their conscience is going to pay a price that is
awesome to behold, just in this life, not in the next one, this is not talking
about judgment, this is talking about today, here and now.
One final verse, Proverbs 18:14 teaching the same principle, the law of
psychosomatic effects in the soul. “The
spirit of man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit, who can
bear?” The spirit of man, again
referring to physical sickness; “the spirit of man will sustain,” an
interesting Hebrew verb, we don’t have time to go into the background of it
except that this word means to hand out by a dish, it means to feed something,
like a baby, you take a spoon and you feed a baby. It means to feed water and bread; it means
therefore to nourish or to sustain, “the spirit of man sustains his sickness,”
literally, the word “sickness” again is physical sickness. So it’s stating a principle that with a
strong human spirit you can endure tremendous physical adversity. “The spirit of man will sustain his
infirmity,” so you can have a spiritual victory in the middle of physical
disaster. Here you have physical
disaster but you can be sustained out of the power of your human spirit.
Now the last part
of this verse asks a question that’s never answered because it can’t be; and so
the answer is obvious. It’s a literary
method of exaggeration, “but a wounded spirit, who can bear?” Now literally it is a beaten spirit, the same
expression that we have seen in the previous two verses, and “who can bear” is
in a niphal stem, it doesn’t mean somebody bearing the spirit, it means and
understood by it, “who can be borne,” in other words, who can sustain himself
with a beaten spirit? You can sustain
yourself with a broken body by means of the human spirit, as great martyrs of
the Church have shown down through years and years of persecution. Men have taken tremendous things, awful
things down through history but because they have had a strong spiritual life
they have been able to take it. Some of
the strongest people you will ever meet spiritually are people who are very
weak, who have had to cope all their lives with physical adversity. There is a lady that I knew at Berachah
Church and she’s had, for at least ten years, seven fatal diseases. And every single Bible class she gets wheeled
down the aisle and she sits there and she takes it in. And she never misses one Bible class; she was
there twice on Sunday, she was there four times during the week. People have to carry her out of the car;
people have to carry her back in the car, she has heart trouble, she has
diabetes, she has anything you want to name she’s got it. And doctors have kept telling her you’ve got
so many weeks to live, so many weeks to live, and she just laughs at them now,
they’ve been telling her that for ten years.
The reason is that she has a tremendous human spirit; she’s one of the
greatest prayer warriors I’ve ever seen.
So that was an obvious case of where the spirit of man nourishes his
weakness. But, if you allow your human
spirit to be beaten the game’s all over because you have no resources to cope
with life at all; its effects will be disastrous.
Next week we’ll
deal with another law of the soul.