Clough Proverbs Lesson 56
DI #1: The Law of the Final Mystery
Before go to
Proverbs this morning I’d like to take time to answer some of the questions
that have been handed in on the feedback cards.
One question is: If as you say the heart is the center of being, then it
follows that you must be against heart transplants, lest a Christian receives a
heart from a lost person. I don’t know
if this particular person isn’t listening too carefully but in this particular
congregation, since we are affiliated with the Christian faith we are not
materialists and so therefore I think the question is rather beside the point,
since obviously the physical heart of a person is not the person’s soul. If the materialist philosophy were true then
I would be concerned, but since we’re not materialists obviously the question
doesn’t bother us at all.
The second
question: In the light of teaching regarding the broken spirit, which we had in
the book of Proverbs last week, would you comment on Psalm 51, especially verse
17 because David seems to be having most of the somatic effects Proverbs leads
us to expect but how are these to be understood as a sacrifice. The answer is in the original languages there
are two words, the beaten spirit, which is mentioned in Proverbs, it looks like
this, (Hebrew word?) and it means one… it emphasizes the passivity of the human
spirit. In other words, you have the
human spirit that has been cut off by negative volition repeatedly, in that the
person has gone against their conscience.
Therefore, the human spirit is rendered and caused to exist in a state
of passivity. Now the word that David
speaks of in Psalm 51:17 is the same word we’re going to encounter in Psalm 34
and this word in the Hebrew looks like this, (shabar?), and shabar has
more to do with the orientation of the human spirit toward grace; it means it’s
been turned rather than broken. “Broken”
there is a poor translation of shabar
in this context. So the answer there
with those words you read in your bibles about broken spirit it depends which
word has come over into the English translation as “broken.” There are two states in conclusion; one,
(Hebrew word?) state which means what we discussed in Proverbs, that it’s
broken down by repeated violations of the conscience. A second word translated also “broken” refers
not to passivity but refers to reorientation to grace.
The third
question: A person on a drinking bout is
relaxed and preoccupied but he’s also careless and uncaring about family and
financial responsibilities; why not give a full clear picture of a drinking
bout. Well, the exposition last week was
not on drinking, it was on the principles of the book of Proverbs. And so therefore I thought the two remarks
were pertinent and summarized it. The
preoccupation, obviously of a person on a drinking bout leads to that kind of
thing; we’re not condoning drinking, we’re just using it as an
illustration.
And then there are
two cards that deal with questions on Scriptures other than the book of
Proverbs, one in Revelation 8:1 and 2 Timothy 2:24-26, but these are not in the
book of Proverbs so therefore we will save those for whenever we get on those
passages.
Shall we turn to
Proverbs 14; we have been going on the laws of the soul and beginning last week
we were able to summarize some of these verses in Proverbs under certain laws,
certain specific laws. The one we
studied last week was the law of psychosomatic effect, the idea that the human
spirit can influence your physical body,
something that most people think has just recently been discovered; not at all,
it’s thirty centuries old at least because the book of Proverbs expounds
it. To understand the law of
psychosomatic effect we could break it down into four parts, just by way of
review so you’re clear on this one.
The first point of
the law of psychosomatic effect is that the heart, which is the functioning
center of mind, conscience and ego, exercises strong control over the
body. So you have the heart, which
exercises control over the body and it gets its power from the human
spirit. This is illustrated physically
by the way we’re built. God made our
bodies in a very wonderful way and by looking at our bodies we can actually understand
a lot of things about our soul. And this
is why I’m a great believer in staying with the natural vocabulary of
Scripture. And if you look at the way
your body is made you find that the heart exercises, the physical heart
exercises influences over the body through pneuma
or breath, which provides oxygen. So the
heart influences the body by pumping oxygen to all the cells. So similarly the functioning center of mind,
conscience and ego influences our body through the ministry of the human
spirit.
The second thing
about the law of psychosomatic effect is that when carnality starts chaos in
the heart, when you have negative volition and you have the mind at odds with
the conscience through negative volition, you begin to have chaos in the heart,
particularly in connection with worry, disappointment and despair and when this
happens the human spirit reacts by going into a beaten state, or a passive
state, and that was the beaten spirit that we dealt with last week. It’s just a sense of spiritual lethargy when
there’s just no energy left. It’s like
oxygen starvation; when you have heart trouble one of the problems, the
physical symptoms of heart trouble is that you have certain pains in your
extremities. And some of the other
symptoms are similar things that are related to oxygen deprivation. Your body is being deprived of oxygen because
your heart is not able to deliver the oxygen from the lungs to the cells of the
body. So similarly, when you are in
carnality and you have chaos in the heart spiritually speaking, the heart is
unable to control the human spirit as it should and so the human spirit goes
into a passive, feeble state. That’s the
beaten spirit in the book of Proverbs.
The third thing to
remember is that the physical results of a beaten human spirit are utterly
devastating. And this is the
psychosomatic situation. People can
destroy themselves by a beaten spirit.
You can give up living, you can lose all desire to live and actually
die; you can actually commit suicide without using any poison, without using
any weapons, without using any kind of a medicine or chemical. You can do it by simply losing your desire to
go on, losing your desire to live and you can die of give-up-itis. That’s the same thing Proverbs is talking
about, a beaten spirit.
And the fourth
thing to remember about the law of psychosomatic effect is that when the heart
is under the filling of the Holy Spirit, then you have, as it is physically,
you have the heart then able to control the body through the power of the human
spirit, and you have a tremendous result in the body. So the filling of the Holy Spirit has
psychosomatic effects. The violation of
your conscience has psychosomatic effects.
In fact, one of the leading evangelical thinkers in the area of
counseling pointed out that when a person sins they feel it physically, and
it’s because the conscience triggers off certain physical symptoms in the
body. And we gave you the verses that
dealt with the law of psychosomatic effect last time.
Today we’re moving
to a second law of the soul, and this is the law of mystery. We touched on it two or three Sundays ago,
now we’ll develop it in full. This is
the law of mystery, one of the most important laws of the soul because it was
ignorance of this law that has led to two great theological errors in our own
generation. In fact, it has led to great
areas down through the centuries. But
I’ll state the law first, give you the verses, and then we’ll show you the
applications of the law. The law
actually can be stated in three parts.
The first part is
actually found in Ecclesiastes 3:11 which we dealt with a few weeks ago, and it
is man’s heart sits on the boundary of time and eternity. Man’s heart is actually on the boundary of
time and eternity, which means that although man is finite his heart is the
nearest thing that comes to being infinite, in the sense that the heart has a
crying out or has a desire, or has a capacity for tapping in on absolutes,
infinite absolutes. It’s what makes a
man God-hungry, that man is not built for time; he is also built for
eternity. So the heart lies on the
boundary of time and eternity. The Bible
reference is Ecclesiastes 3:11, God has set the (ionos?), the eternity into the heart of man.
The second point
under the law of mystery is that since man is limited mentally, he therefore
cannot know his heart wholly. In other
words, because man has mental limitations he only has partial knowledge of even
his own heart, a very important point which we’re going to apply in a moment. Man can know some of his heart but he cannot
know all of his heart. You cannot know
all of your heart; you will never know all of your heart, even in
eternity.
The third point of
the doctrine of the mystery is that therefore every man must depend on God’s
omniscience and holiness to evaluate himself.
Every man needs an external absolute of judgment; it can’t be
subjective, it has to be external and objective. It has to be outside of the heart because we
cannot know our heart; we cannot jump out of our heart and turn around and look
at it; no way you can. Men have tried
it, in the history of philosophy Descartes was one, he tried to get down to the
absolute center and as it has been shown by recent Christian philosophers he
never made it. Man, because of the
mystery, must always depend on an external authority and his external authority
is God who has two divine attributes (He has many but two come into play here
very much) and that is His omniscience and His righteousness and justice
combined which makes holiness. So God
has the standards of omniscience and holiness, and these are the two external
objective non-emotional standards by which you are to evaluate your own heart.
Bible verses in
the book of Proverbs that teach the doctrine of the mystery: Proverbs 3:5-7;
Proverbs 14:8, 10, 12; Proverbs 16:2, 25; Proverbs 20:9, 27; Proverbs 21:2;
also Proverbs 12:15. Now there are two
applications, very important applications down through history. Basically the doctrine of the mystery shows
that divine viewpoint, not human viewpoint, is the only way to proceed. Human viewpoint is man trying to work out
from himself and the doctrine of the mystery undercuts the whole area of human
viewpoint. Divine viewpoint is that I
rely upon God’s revelation.
Now, two application; the first application has to do with something that
historically developed after wisdom literature in the Old Testament. The wisdom
literature of the Old Testament was well aware of man’s mental dependence upon
God’s omniscience from outside. This is
developed in great finesse in the book of Ecclesiastes and in the book of
Job. So therefore the wisdom literature
of the Old Testament, or we’ll put Israel, would have saved the world many,
many centuries of intellectual grief because in the book of Proverbs is a
carefully balanced presentation, along with Job and Ecclesiastes, of the fact
that man’s mind cannot understand even himself, totally. And if this had been adapted then the Greeks
that came along later, who tried to elevate the mind into a god would never
have made their mistake, if they had only realized what the Jews had developed
so carefully in their wisdom literature, is that man’s mind cannot even know
man, and so it would have cut off at the very start all attempts at human
viewpoint philosophy of man trying to work out from himself and build some sort
of knowledge, all by himself, without help from outside.
The second great
application and the second great error that has crept into the West and into
the East in cultures as a result of the violation of this law of the soul is
that Christians today are completely screwed up in the area of
sanctification. Whenever you have an
area of perfectionism, and this goes under many, many forms today in
fundamental evangelical circles, whenever you have any idea that somebody has
perfect perfectionism, usually this is associated with some great hyper
emotional experience, such as the so-called baptism of the Holy Ghost which is
not the baptism of the Holy Ghost because that occurs at the point of
salvation, it’s something else, it’s is associated with I have arrived; at this
point in time I have achieved perfection.
Now that’s the doctrine of perfectionism and it’s wrong. The reason it’s wrong is because you don’t
know all of your sins, therefore you can never deal with all of your sins,
therefore you can never be perfect in phase 2.
So it would completely shoot down all concepts of perfectionism if
people had understood just the doctrine of man itself.
Let’s look now at
this law of final mystery, or the law of mystery of the heart, and to do this
I’m going to do it in three steps, to make it very, very clear what this law is
saying. It’s a very critical law to
understand about yourself. The first thing
part of the law of mystery that we’re going to deal with is that simple statement,
man cannot know his heart fully. This is
taught to us in three verses.
The first verse is
Proverbs
Now, it says,
“There is a path way in life that seems right unto a man,” and the word for
“right” is a Hebrew word used for righteousness, yashar and yashar is also
used for a straight path. And it also
has the connotation, then, of a shortcut, a straight path, or a straight
highway. “There is a way through life
that seems straight and short and attractive, but,” and here with the
conjunction of contrast we are face to face with two limitations that man
faces. Let’s look at this and why that’s
invalid.
Man looks at his
experience, but you in your experience are limited. You’re limited two ways; you’re limited in
your perception of time and you’re limited in your perception of space. No matter who you are you cannot observe
things beyond a certain size and you cannot observe things smaller than a
certain size. No matter who you are you
cannot observe history beyond your lifetime and you can’t observe things that
occurred before your lifetime. So finite
wise you are limited to this box. Every
conclusion you come to has to come out as data inside this box. So man is limited and using all the data at
his disposal he thinks something looks right to him, but since he is limited,
since you are limited, since I am limited, therefore that is a delusion. So the first way we are limited, we are
limited as creatures in space and time.
We cannot know absolutely over the whole realm of area, that is in case,
unless something happens, revelation from God of course.
Now the second
part of man’s limitation is his sin and this is one that is not
recognized. But if you are born with the
capacity to have this much potential, that much perception, that much area of
life to deal with and to live in, as you violate the truth which is sin,
negative volition toward God’s revelation, your areas of perception get cut
down and get smaller and smaller and smaller.
So the more sin, the more negative volition an individual has the less
perception they have. This is why
carnality ultimately always in a person results in a violation of something we
call common sense. You have a person on
prolonged carnality and eventually their common sense goes, they lose it, like
David lost it when he went to Gath, as we see Sunday evenings; wound up in
Goliath’s home town with Goliath’s sword trying to disappear and be inconspicuous. And obviously anyone with common sense should
realize that’s the last place to hide and to disappear. But David momentarily lost his common sense
because of carnality; his perception was dull through sin. So we have two areas of limitation then,
limitation by creation and limitation by sin.
And that is why in
verse 12 it says, “There is a way,” or path, or decision “that may seem right
to you but,” because you are limited “the ends thereof are the ways of
death.” The end means the result of the
cause of choice; “the end thereof are ways of death,” notice plural, and this
is (Hebrew word ?) meaning there are many things, so you have the idea that
there’s a road, you think the road takes you some place and all of a sudden the
road forks into about five or six different roads and every one of them leads
to death, to death, to death, to death, to death, to death, all of those roads
lead to death. You have a choice on
which way to go but they all lead to the same place. “There is a way which leads to death.”
What are some of
these ways? Well, you can have various
ways, you can end such as Adam; Adam died because he ate of the fruit, “the end
thereof was the ways of death.” You can have
a person choose a way which seems right and he is disciplined under the fourth
divine institution, capital punishment; its “end there of is the ways of
death.” You can have a person who wants
to start a revolt, who wants to believe that he can force changes in various
governmental structures by armed insurrection toward a just government, and his
life could end in civil violence. You
can have a person decide that they’re going to raise all the hell they want to
as a Christian because they think well, once saved, always saved so that lets
me off the hook and I’ll do what I want to, forgetting, of course, there’s
another little fine print in the contract that says there’s discipline
associated with certain activities in the Christian life, and therefore you can
end in the way of death through disease brought on by discipline, such as 1
Corinthians 11. You can have a person go
on negative volition, violate their conscience and the psychosomatic effects of
their sin on their body will lead them to death. So there is another end thereof are the ways
of death. You can have a person go on
negative volition toward their conscience and they will wind up in despair by
being sidetracked from God’s best plan for their life and all through life
they’ll be bitter and resentful because somewhere along here they made a
critical choice on the road and now they’re down to the end of their life and
they are resentful that they ever made that choice of negative volition to
violate God’s plan. God had a wonderful
plan for their life and they blew it and now they’re at the end of their life
and they’re resentful and bitter, blaming God for allowing it to happen and all
the rest of it, and eventually dying this way, in despair.
So there are many
ways at the, “the end thereof are the ways of death.” At the first it always seems right. Now the phrase, “the ways of death” in the
Hebrew, that expression is borrowed out of a mythological background in the
ancient near east. In the ancient near
east… the Hebrew word for death by the way, to get the death across, looks like
this; it’s (?) and that’s the Hebrew word, it’s a Semitic word actually, it
occurs in several languages, it’s the noun for death. Well, one of the gods of the ancient world
was Mot and Mot was always pictured as having a big mouth that insatiably
swallowed everything that came his way.
He was never satisfied, he was always hungry: “The end thereof are the
ways of death,” the steps go down to Mot, and so Mot was pictured with a great
gaping mouth and the idea being that death is never satisfied.
So in Proverbs
14:12 we have the first part of the law of mystery, that there can be ways
which right to you but if you are going to be one of these believers that
operates on the basis of your emotions, oh, I just feel this is the right
thing. I just feel the Lord would have
me do this. I just feel… and you go on
and on and on, on the basis of feeling.
This verse should warn you about coming disaster. You cannot feel your way through the
Christian life. Your job isn’t to feel how
you like this path or that path and judge on the basis of that. You can’t do it. Always remember this verse; every time you
come up with “I feel” something is true, or I feel the Lord wants me to do
this. “There may be a way which seems
right, bur the end thereof are the ways of death.” And how do you know this isn’t one of the
ways; we’ll get to that in a little bit.
Proverbs 16:25 is
a repeat of Proverbs 14:12, just to show you that the Word of God repeats
itself, for obvious teaching reasons. And
then the third verse in the chain is Proverbs 20:9. Every once in a while we have somebody, you
know, that they hear something repeated about 45 times, well I’ve heard that
before. Well, it’s very interesting but
often times, and you may not be aware of the fact of how much repetition there
is until you are in the middle of situation or a crisis in life and then all of
a sudden all that repetition pays off.
And we’ve had several believers note that, that they were bored and they
heard this before, and they sat there, they didn’t take notes or anything else,
but yet when they were in a disaster type situation and the chips were down,
it’s funny what they remember, the thing that was repeated the most. Now why is that? Because repetition is of the Lord; that’s how
the Holy Spirit teaches, by repetition.
In Proverbs 20:9
we have another statement of the same principle that man cannot fully know his
heart. “Who san say, I have made my
heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” Now
this word is very interesting and we’ll take it nice and slow because verse 9
is a critical verse among the chain of verses in the Old Testament. There are four other places in God’s Word in
the Old Testament where the same doctrine is taught. The next time somebody walks up to you and
says well Paul invented the idea of the sin nature, or Paul came along in the
New Testament with the idea that men are inherently sinful and cannot change,
that sin is inevitable, etc. etc. etc., that was all Paul’s idea, that’s
something the New Testament changed, back in the Old Testament they didn’t have
that concept of sin. Not so. Again it’s the case of somebody with a
kindergarten introduction to Scripture teaching a class some place.
Here are the verses in the Old Testament that teach the absolute totalness of
sin in man. Job 15:14; Job 25:4; Psalm
51:9 and Ecclesiastes 7:20, plus this verse.
All of these verses teach that the Old Testament was well aware of the tremendous
depths of sin in the human heart. It’s
not the true the New Testament changed, added to or enlarged the teaching; this
is not new to the New Testament.
“Who can say, I
have made my heart clean,” the verb to “make clean” is a verb to mean make like
fire, make bright, and refers to moral perfectionism, and this verse denies
that it is possible; moral perfectionism is impossible in this life. Therefore
no one can become a Christian by first becoming morally perfect. If you still have the idea after all of this
that you are gaining credit with God by being good, and that is going to get
you through the pearly gates you are absolutely mistaken. What are you going to do with this verse;
this verse applies to you, and there is no way you can get away from it. You are stuck. The only way you can be perfect is external
outside help; it doesn’t come from yourself.
And get rid of all the yoga, and all the rest of the oriental influences
we’re having, this idea we’re going to attain a certain state, nonsense. Thirty centuries ago, before yoga and other
oriental procedures originated, the wisdom literature of Israel had completely
destroyed the concept. Moral
perfectionism is an impossibility.
All right, “Who
can say, I have made my heart burn like fire,” or be morally perfect, “who can
say I am pure.” Now the word “pure” means
ceremonially pure and it’s the idea of justification. It’s the word that comes over later on in the
New Testament for justification. And
what this is saying, that no man can ever attain justification at all…
none! Nowhere! Ever!
So the first thing to remember is that you cannot be saved by works; no
way! I’ll give you a nice illustration;
bring it down home because I still think some of you don’t see this point. There are certain people today, right in the
city of Lubbock, who say that if you are baptized therefore this qualifies you,
this puts you over a certain boundary into regeneration. Now just a minute, this would imply that that
was a pure act on your part… a pure
act that caused this to happen, but this teaches there is never a pure act, not
even when we’re on positive volition.
Not knowing the depths of our heart there may be other motives
involved. Now there’s an area over which
we’re conscious, where the Holy Spirit fills us of course and that is pure, we
do it as unto the Lord. But just because
we are doing things as unto the Lord with a (quote, end quote) “pure
conscience” does not mean that there are not, unknown to us, other motivations
behind it. There’s no such thing as a
100% pure act; never! So if you hope to
ever be saved by some act, giving money, joining a church, doing something
else, you’ve got a long way to go as far as understanding the Word of God, both
Old and New Testament.
The second area
where this pertains is not just to justification but it pertains at sanctification. You see, your conscience, let’s look at the
area of knowledge. Your conscience is
limited by your mental finiteness, or your mental limitations. So here’s your conscience here; you may have
a 100% conscience in that you have dealt with everything you know of, but just
because you have dealt with everything you know of doesn’t mean that there
aren’t things under there, like an iceberg, like I taught last time, that you
don’t know of. And you all have had this
experience, in growing, those of you who are believers, who have gone on with
the Lord over a long time period, you’ve had the experience of gradually this
area of your conscience starts to increase and you begin to see areas in your
life that you once were unaware of but now recently you have become aware of,
particularly new believers.
Now this is just
a… no extra charge for this but this is just a little footnote for some of you
who work with new believers a lot. Watch
out for a little shock. After somebody becomes
a Christian, about three or four months later this starts to happen, their
conscience begins to enlarge and they become aware of areas of sin in their
life they never dreamed existed, so they start in and here’s how it goes. They start out and they become
Christians. So one month later, if they
have been taking in the Word of God and their understanding has enlarged
through the intake of the Word, now their conscience is like this. And now all of a sudden they discover, my
goodness, look at this, I’ve got –R learned behavior pattern here, I’ve got –R
learned behavior pattern here, and they become discouraged because they notice
all these areas of sin that before they were Christian they didn’t even worry
about. Now they can always take that,
and Satan would always twist it to discourage the new believer.
And actually, if
you understand this principle you should be encouraged when this happens. Why?
Because it shows that you’re growing.
The very fact that you are now aware of things that you weren’t aware of
before shouldn’t be a source of discouragement, it should be a source of
encouragement because the Holy Spirit is teaching you about those things. That’s why you are discouraged; that’s why,
actually, you’re aware of those things.
It shows the Holy Spirit’s taught you and you’ve learned. So it should be an area of thanksgiving. Though very few believers, when this first
happens, are ever prepared to give thanks for it, they always wind up
counseling with somebody or something.
Don’t be discouraged by this; this is something tremendous that’s
happening to you. It’s just the Holy
Spirit enlarging your knowledge of yourself.
Now here’s what
happens; one of the reasons why you become discouraged when this happens is
because you’ve already made a doctrinal mistake. Now here’s the mistake you are making if you
fall into this category this morning.
Here you go in the Christian life; your area of understanding has
enlarged. Let’s take some particular
sin. Just to be facetious, bubble
gum. I don’t want to get too personal. So before you became a Christian this wasn’t
an issue for you; now all of a sudden it’s a big thing. God, you may (?) chew bubble gum, and the
Holy Spirit’s been convicting you of something and so on and you’re aware of
this now. Now here is a challenge to
your doctrinal understanding and however you react is going to determine
whether you’re going to be encouraged or discouraged.
Now let me show
you the mistake many believers make.
They go… so far everything’s okay, the Holy Spirit has done His work,
you’ve learned His lesson, you are well aware that this is a sin, that God is
not pleased with this in your life. So,
so far you have learned a lesson, but there’s what you do. You come to this thing and you realize, this
is a sin that separates me from God. All
right, so you take the word “separate” in your mind, whatever your vocabulary
word is for separate, but this is a thought, and you begin to confuse
justification and sanctification; you begin to confuse phase one and phase
two. So what you really are discouraged
with is that I am not acceptable to God now because I chew bubble gum. I am not acceptable to God, God is against me
now and your faith goes down the drain because you have no confidence to claim
the promises any more and you become a full basket case, spiritually speaking,
because of this thing.
Now look what’s
happened to you; you made a mistake in the way you thought this thing
through. What happened was you started
out in the right place, you started out aware that the Holy Spirit wanted to
change something in your life, but when you started to think about it you were
deceived and you made a mistake and forgot what happened to you when you became
a Christian.
Turn to Romans 8,
you see there are two ways of looking at these exposés, we will call them and
as the Holy Spirit makes a few exposés in your soul you can treat it as a legal
problem or you can treat it as a family problem, and if you are discouraged
this morning as a Christian because of this you’ve made a mistake and you’ve
started to handle this back in the old legal way. Now to do it and handle your problems way
means that you have forgotten phase one when you became a Christian and in
Romans 8 there is a tremendous verse, Romans 8:33, “Who shall lay any thing to
the charge of God’s elect one,” singular.
That refers to you this morning if you are a believer; you are an elect
one. And what does it say? “It is God that justifies.” Except the force in the Greek isn’t like
that; the force in the Greek is “God is the justifier.”
So, God justifies,
He is the justifier of you, and when was He the justifier of you? Now, when you discovered about bubble
gum? No, He was your justifier back when
you accepted Christ as Savior; that was when God was your justifier and that
was when all of your sins, including bubble gum, was declared onto the cross of
Christ and off your back, legally. So at
this point all legal aspects of the sin of bubble gum have been removed from
you and transferred. That was done
months ago, when you became a Christian.
So as you walk through the Christian life and as you are exposed to
these sinful patterns of behavior and as the Holy Spirit enlarges your
conscience to see these things don’t become discouraged by making the doctrinal
mistake of forgetting justification.
You’ve forgotten it, you’ve forgotten everything that happened to you in
phase one and now you’re all moping around with this bad mental attitude and
it’s all due to the fact that you’ve completely neglected a whole area of doctrine.
Now, on the other
hand, here’s the way to handle it. You
go over here and you say all right, I remember justification, so therefore I
now that the legal basis of bubble gum is completely taken away by God’s
decree. God made that decree in court,
in heaven, when I became a Christian.
That was a legal decree that He made.
And by the way, He didn’t make it in your heart; this is a transaction
that has nothing to do with your heart; this is a transaction that has to do
with the doctrine of justification, it has to do with heaven, not your
heart. It’s not subjective, it’s
objective, something that happened outside of you. Now in the family situation if you remember
justification, then you come and the Holy Spirit today unravels and reveals to
you some sin in your heart of which you were not aware before, now you go back
to justification and you say well, I am not going to allow Satan to trip me up
here because I know that I have been justified, past tense, period, over and
out. So legally it is not a problem with
me any longer.
However, it is a
family problem between me as a father/child relationship and you transfer the
bubble gum problem from the area of a courtroom and a judge over to the area of
a father and a child. And that’s the way
you handle the problem. So the Holy
Spirit leads in your life and He teaches you something like this, you take it,
that the Father has exposed something in you and you’re perfectly acceptable
because legally you’re bound into His family so He can’t kick you out of the
family for it. He may, like some parents
wonder why He ever got you in the family, but He can never get you out of the
family; He’s stuck with you and you’re stuck with Him so you’d better make the
best of it. And that is treating it in a
family way, that the Father will work in your life to straighten this problem
out. But that’s a far cry from handling
it this way, and as I have talked with believers who have made this mistake,
(?) over and over and over and over and over again and it’s a doctrinal
mistake, and it’s the same doctrinal mistake that many, many people are making
many, many times. So I just point that
out, it’ll save you some grief.
Let’s go back to
Proverbs 20:9, “Who can say I have made my heart clean, who can say I am
justified from sin?” In other words, by
your own efforts; you never got there in the first place by your own
efforts. Oh, I feel so terrible, God
pointed this out in my life and now I’m a flunky, and now can never do anything
for God. Well listen, you never were
justified in the first place because of something you did; it was something God
did. [Tape turns] …independently of whether you knew about it
or didn’t know about it, it’s all done, finished, over and out. Grace.
Now, when you see
verse 9 you should remember that, that you never justify yourself and you
couldn’t if you tried because you don’t know all the things that are in your
heart. Now look at this for a moment,
just for a graphic illustration. Suppose
you became a Christian, say in June of 1973.
Now, you go on living the Christian life until September 1973 and you
die in an automobile accident. You have
been a Christian for part of June, July, August, part of September, at the most
three months. In those three months
could you ever have possibly dealt with every sin pattern in your life? Negative.
You didn’t even come close. Are
you perfectly acceptable to God? Of
course, you’d go to heaven, face to face with the Lord, to be absent from the
body is to be face to face with the Lord; does that work for you? Of course!
All right then, then no person can ever be 100% perfect in phase
two. And your status, legally, in the
family of God has nothing to do with whether you’re 100% perfect or not. So just relax.
Now let’s go to
the second part of the mystery of the heart.
We’ve dealt with the first… these first three verses deal with man
cannot know his heart fully, and that should destroy any concept that I can
completely sanctify myself. Now a second
series of verses which build on the first series. If the first series of verses, 14:12; 16:25;
20:9, taught that man cannot know his heart fully, then the second series of
verses teach that therefore the Lord is the only true judge of your heart. The Lord is the only true judge, and the
verses on this: Proverbs 16:2 and 21:2.
Therefore the Lord alone is the judge of your heart.
Now let’s look at
Proverbs 16:2, there’s a missing part to this verse that’s understood and it
occurs before the word “all.” There should
be a word, “Although,” now it’s not in the original, it’s not in the English,
it’s a correct translation, but I’m just giving you the syntax, the
understanding of the sentence. It’s an
antithetical parallelism here. “Although
all the ways of a man be clean in his own eyes, the LORD weighs the
spirits.” Now let’s look at this in
detail; “the ways of a man,” here we have derek
again, same concept, it’s the pathway through life, so it refers, plural, to
the very fact that you have many men, “a man” here is mankind in general, and
you have many men conducting various pathways through life.
“Though in
mankind’s eyes all the ways are clean,” in other words, to their limited
understanding, to their limited knowledge, they say we conform to what we think
is true, what we think is right. Though
this may be true, “the LORD weighs the spirits.” The word “weighs” is a Hebrew word, takan, it’s an unusually word because
this word refers to measuring something with a measure. It’s used in the Old Testament for measuring
wheat; you measured so many firkins and so on.
There are various measures of the Bible; we say bushel, barrels and so
on. But it means to measure, and
obviously what do you need in order to measure something? You need a standard to measure it by. All right, so when it says “the LORD weighs
the spirits,” it means the Lord measures.
What does He use to measure us?
It goes back to His essence. God
is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient,
omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal.
All right, God has His standard of righteousness and that is the
standard that is used to measure our heart.
Is it an infinite standard or a limited standard? It’s an infinity standard; we can’t know all
of that infinite standard. God alone
knows His infinite standard and therefore God alone is the One who judges, or
weighs, or measures “the spirits;” “spirits” refer to the human spirits of
men. The reason that “spirits” is used
in this particular verse is it’s just a shift of emphasis.
Go back to the
physical illustration. To what does the
human spirit correspond physically? It
corresponds to breath or O2. As the
breath is taken into your body, as it contacts all areas of your body, the
breath comes into touch with all areas of your body. You might say your breath takes the form of
your body. And so the human spirit, as
it were, takes the form of your body and the Lord sits there and He measures
the human spirit. It is the Lord that
measures.
All right,
parallel verse, Proverbs 21:2 teaches the same thing, slightly differently but
again it’s repetition. “Every way of man
is right in his own eyes, but the LORD measures,” same verb, takan, He “measures the hearts.” So it is God measuring the heart, not by the
standard we know as such, we know part of His standards, not all of His
standards; God measures it from an infinite scale.
So these two
verses together teach that man cannot know his heart fully, the Lord alone is a
capable judge of your soul… the lord alone
is a capable judge of your soul.
Now the third part
and the third series of verses, it should be obvious what they’re going to be
now, if we’ve had the first one that we can’t know our hearts, and we’ve had
the second one that God only is the One who does know, then obviously the third
one is we’ve got to listen to the Word of God.
The Word of God is the judge of the thoughts and intents of the
heart. Turn to Proverbs 12:15, the Word
of God must be the only standard for evaluating our hearts. We must have a standard outside of ourselves
that has its root in infinity and God’s Word is the only thing that
qualifies. This is why counseling that
is done in a human viewpoint framework is nothing more than just patchwork. A psychologist or psychiatrist who operates
outside of God’s Word, who tries to counsel people in life without a framework
of absolutes, is just wasting his time, wasting the person’s time. Nothing is going to come out of it simply
because he is finite, the counselee is finite, and they have limited
knowledge. I need something bigger than
limited knowledge to solve my problem.
So in Proverbs
12:15 we have the counselor in the counseling situation. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes,
but he that hearkens unto counsel is wise.”
Now the word for “fool” is similar to that word we met the other day, kesil; kesil, you remember was a person who had chaos in the
heart. It goes back to this; he was on
negative volition, the negative volition caused a darkening of the illuminating
ministry of the Holy Spirit that caused an in draft of human viewpoint which in
turn, therefore, led to a hatred of God, and therefore frustration in
life. That’s a kesil and this is another word, avil, and an avil is the
same thing as a kesil and
both of these people are people who have progressed along compound carnality,
who are in rebellion against the Word of God, who therefore, because they do
not want to know what is in their heart, have cut themselves off. See, the darkening sets in, so they have a
restricted perception and the more they sin the more restricted the perception
gets, until they honestly can’t see what is right and what is wrong in some
areas. They honestly can’t do that any
more; they’ve destroyed their ability to perceive the issue. They’ve destroyed their ability to think,
they’ve destroyed their ability to operate in life and that is an avil.
“The way of an avil is right in his own eyes,” this is
speaking of a person who is highly restricted, totally restricted in his
perception because of sin, “but he that hearkens,” and the word “hearkens” is a
participle and it means it is his character to hearken, it is his character, it
is part of his being, it is an attitude of life that has been inculcated over
many, many months and years of practice, “he who habitually hearkens unto
counsel,” now there’s your essence of divine viewpoint. What is divine viewpoint? It is the finite sinful creature hearkening
to God’s counsel. It is the sinful
limited creature harkening continually to God’s counseling. Where is the counseling? The revelation that you hold in your
lap. That is the counsel. And divine viewpoint is habitually making
that your standard, not your emotions, not something else. Not even what a group of people tell you, it
is what God’s Word says.
Now that is the
person who is wise and obviously it shows you something very interesting about
divine viewpoint. Divine viewpoint is
the only way or system of looking at life that fits with the way you’re built. You are not built to operate on a human
viewpoint basis. You are not built to
get your own answers autonomously and independent from counsel; you are built
to receive the broad categories of truth from God’s Word. And if you are sitting there trying to
engineer every little detail, trying to build a basic philosophy of life,
trying to operate in life that way, you are operating against the way you are
even built physically. Your physical
brain can’t even handle the pressure.
Your physical brain is not capable of operating consistently on human
viewpoint. At some point or other along
the line you have to break down and begin to steal pieces from God’s Word on
which to operate.
All right, “who
hearkens to counsel is wise,” chokmah,
that refers the believer who submits and takes in counsel. Why now?
Because out of all the wisdom literature what have we found? That the ancient Israelites believed that you
could not know your heart, you couldn’t even start in your knowledge of
yourself, apart from knowledge of other people, without the counsel of God’s
Word.
Look at this; you
start out in life and here’s yourself, self-knowledge. You start out with that and you have others,
and then you have things out there. You
can’t even know yourself right apart from God’s Word, what ever makes you’re
going to know other people apart from God’s Word and whatever makes you think
that you can know situations apart from God’s Word?
One further verse,
Proverbs 14:8, “The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way, but the
folly of fools is deceit.” “The wisdom
of the prudent,” he discerns or makes clear his way. The key point about verse 8 is the verb. It comes from the Hebrew word bin, b-i- n,
long “i”, and the word in the hiphil stem means cause to separate; “bin” means to separate; the preposition bin means to be between. It means two things, separate, to make an
antithesis between them, and to bin
then was to make an antithesis between what is true and what is false, between
what is right and what is wrong. Now if
you put the verb in the hiphil it means to cause to separate; it means to teach
for one thing. But the hiphil form of
the verb in verse 8 means that “The wisdom of the prudent one,” and then
there’s a dash, there should be a dash there, “he causes to understand his
way.” That verse is very, very rough in
the grammar but it’s there to make a point.
The point is that the man who is prudent is the man who habitually takes
in counsel, and the counsel in his mind causes him to separate his ways; he
discerns the right from the wrong, the truth from the error. How?
Because he’s limited man, he can’t get it from himself; he gets it from
outside, an outside authoritative word.
The opposite, “the
folly of folly of fools is deceit,” the word “fools” is kesil, it’s the same word for one who has deliberately
hardened their heart against God’s revelation.
The word “deceit” obviously means treachery or it means deception and it
means the opposite of bin, it means
that they can’t separate the right from the wrong; they can’t separate the
truth from the falsehood.
So we then have
the third point about the law of mystery, that the Word of God must therefore
be the standard. All right, repeating
then, the law of final mystery for you, to make sure you’ve got it. It’ll save you from two mistakes, the mistake
of perfectionism, relying on your subjective emotions, you can’t trust them and
it will save you from trying to build a philosophy independent of the Word of
God.
Man is limited and
he cannot know his heart fully, only partially.
Therefore, he must depend upon the omniscient holy God for an external
authoritative standard. Third, that
external authoritative standard is the Bible.
If the Bible is not the standard we really are in trouble, because the
law of mystery condemns us then to perpetual despair, to perpetual
confusion. That’s a decision you have to
make for yourself; is the Bible really the external standard or is it full of
errors, full of mistakes, in which case you have nothing.