Clough Proverbs Lesson 57

DI #1: The Law of Self-Control

Before we move to the book of Proverbs I’d like to take time to answer two questions that have been handed in from last week. One question is: if respect must come before love, as we have emphasized, both in the morning and evening, do parents who say their love their babies lie? How can one respect a little kid who burps over everyone who feeds them? Could this just be for instruction, that the father loves us even though we warrant no respect from Him? Please respond. Well, actually based on the principle of Scripture the respect that is there for a small child is really a respect to the God who gave it and if the respect isn’t toward the God who gave the child to the couple, then obviously there’s no stability in the relationship between the parents and the child. So the principle holds, respect before love. But the respect for your child only develops as the years go by; we don’t get this immediately. What you respect to start with is the fact that he is a gift given to your from God and that you as a parent are stewards responsible to God for what He has given, to train that child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The second question hasn’t directly to do with what we covered but is often asked and since it does pertain to a theme that we’ve been trying to encourage here at LBC: Why has so much ancient art, and modern art for that matter, pictured angels with physical wings. What caused men to ever begin thinking that they had wings? Is there anything in Scripture to allude to whatever has caused this misunderstanding of it is just from man’s imagination? The angels having wings comes from the fact that in Scripture some are pictured as having wings, they’re a special class called the cherubs and they are given in Isaiah 6, they’re mentioned and in the book of Revelation they’re mentioned. So there is a biblical background for why artists put wings on angel, but they’re only a small class and most of the time when angels show up in Scripture they do not show up with wings. If you were to see an angel they look like anybody else, people, two eyes, two ears, and they look like a normal person, and most of the time when they have appeared in history they appear, not as some sort of spook or ghost, they appear as a normal person, you couldn’t tell them apart. They are able to complete counterfeit a normal person. This is why the book of Hebrews mentions this fact where it says it’s actually possible you could have met one and never know it, and the reason is because they don’t appear as some sort of flapping thing that comes at night to scare you or something.

And then there’s one other thing that I’d like to mention before we get into the book of Proverbs; some of you have asked about when the next issue the magazine (?) is going to be out, this the magazine concerning the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and his reconstruction of history. The next issues will shortly be coming out and they’ll be dealing with the historical problems, that is, the complete alteration of the dating system for secular history, the time of the Exodus and so on. I highly recommend this publication for the serious students of Scripture; if you see me later we’ll talk about where you can get copies of this.

This morning we’re going to continue our study in the book of Proverbs on the laws of the soul. By way of review the first law we dealt with was the law of psychosomatic effect and it’s illustrated physically by the fact that the heart in the body pumps oxygen, O2 throughout the entire body and nourishes the body. So similarly, spiritually the heart, which is the functioning center of the ego, the mind and the conscience, controls the body. And we can apply the law of psychosomatic effect in how we pray for the sick. Now that you know what Scriptures teach in the area of psychosomatic effect, when you pray for a sick person, or you consider yourself, one of the things always to think about first off is whether or not the individual is spiritually oppressed and therefore because they are spiritually oppressed their mental attitude is off and this is affecting them physically. In other words, when you consider syphilis, the first thing that should strike your mind as an informed believer is is that sickness due to psychosomatic attack, is it due to the fact that the person has been on negative volition and mental attitude sin and the body has simply reaped the toll of this kind of thought behavior pattern.

We also, in connection with the law of psychosomatic effect dealt with what we call the beaten spirit. Today we’re going to cover a law that deals with the opposite of this, the other extreme; it’s good that we just review this for a moment; the beaten spirit in the book of Proverbs has to do with spiritual tiredness. There are three ways you can be tired and you ought to learn if you are a believer this morning, as you go on in the Christian life, as you become more wise, apply more principles, you ought to be able to learn to discern the kinds of ways that you can be tired and deal with these ways accordingly. Every time you feel tired it’s not due to the same reason. There is obviously one way you can be tired and that’s simple physically tired because your body is worn out, and if you’re physically tired the obvious solution is sleep. And you’ll find with a good night’s sleep you can recover, one or two good night’s sleep maybe if you’ve burned the candle at both ends for a while. But physical tiredness can be dealt with quite simply and you can recognize when you’re physically tired by how you bounce back.

Three’s another tiredness that you can have, besides being physically tired; you can have a soulish tiring which is mental and emotional tiredness. And this is the feeling that comes upon you when you have dealt with a strange situation in the home, strange situation in the office, you’ve been under pressure from exams or something and you just have had it mentally and/or emotionally. And that is a soulish tiredness. And you can use the law of psychosomatic effect to good advantage here; if you’re soulishly tired, one of the ways of breaking it down, breaking the pattern is to develop a good plan of physical exercise. Whereas with physically sleep you physically rest, with soulish tiredness you don’t physically rest; you physically get out and do something, even if its out picking crab grass out of your Bermuda grass or something, just doing something physical will oftentimes help you when you are soulishly tired. You’ve just got to break out from the situation and move on to some other areas to get stabilized again. So don’t assume that a good nights sleep is going to do it; a good nights sleep will not necessarily cure soulish tiredness.

But that isn’t the tiredness that we’re mentioning in the beaten spirit concept. In the beaten spirit concept we’re talking about a spiritual tiredness and a spiritual tiredness is not mental and emotional. For example, you can be mentally beaten and know it but not be discouraged. You can have tried and tried and tried to work and you’ve been through finals or something for a week, or you’ve been through a very harrowing experience in the family, and you know you are emotionally and mentally worn out but you also are not discouraged or depressed. You can be mentally and emotionally tired without being depressed in the sense that you know God’s promises are true, given a little time you can recover, no major disaster at hand but right now you just don’t feel like doing anything, mentally or emotionally.

That’s the second form of tiredness, but the third form, the spiritual tiredness is referred to in the book of Proverbs as the beaten or broken spirit. And this tiredness, the chief characteristic of it is a complete depression about going on living any longer. And that is a spiritual tiredness, it is a spiritual oppression, and a good nights sleep is not going to solve that problem, nor is just physical exercise going to solve that problem, nor are tranquilizers going to solve that problem or stimulants going to solve the problem. You may fool yourself into thinking that drugs can solve spiritual tiredness problems and you may think that for a day or two, or a week, or a month but if you’re spiritually tired the only solution for you is to find out the cause of it. And it goes back to the fact that somewhere along the line you have gotten out of fellowship over some particular sin, mental attitude sin, or somewhere, some thought pattern, some way you’ve handled or mishandled life and it has forced you back out of fellowship.

So you’ve got to do basically two things to recover from spiritual tiredness. The first thing you’ve got to do is realize it is not God’s will for you to be this. Now a lot of Christians make a tremendous mistake right at this point in that they accept spiritual tiredness as normative. Well, that’s just me, that’s just the way I am. It is not the way you are; you should never accept spiritual tiredness as the norm for the Christian life. God never intended you to be walking around with a beaten spirit. It is abnormal! So the first thing you have to do is recognize, if you’re spiritually tired, that it’s an abnormal condition and God does not want that for your life as a believer. As an ambassador for Christ you cannot function when you are spiritually depressed, and God does not want you to be that, and when you accept the idea that this is somehow, well, that’s just the way I am, you are already giving ground to it right there. So the first step to break out of it recognize it’s abnormal and will not be tolerated. It is not part of your position in the Lord Jesus Christ; God never designed the Christian life to operate this way and when you find this condition in your life you are not to tolerate it. It is intolerable for a believer.

The second thing to do is if you’ve got to go back to some point and use 1 John 1:9 and I can’t tell you where that point is and no one else can tell you where that point is but God the Holy Spirit will point this out to you if you take time to examine your heart on the basis of the Word of God. And as you ask the Lord where is it that I’ve fallen down; where is it that I’ve gone astray, and sooner or later you’ll come across something that the Holy Spirit will impress on your mind, you use 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” and you’ll find the spiritual oppression leaves. And if it doesn’t leave then you have to keep on until it does but you never accept this condition.

The other conditions you wouldn’t accept, at being physically tired you’d go to the doctor and find out why you’re physically tired, maybe your diet’s wrong, maybe you eat a lot of junk, you wake up in the morning and from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed it’s one Coke after another or something, or you don’t take care of your body in other ways. Well, you shouldn’t accept that as normal either and you go see a physician about it, find out what’s the matter. And the same thing with mental and emotional sickness, so why should you accept this as normative? Well, that’s just me; it isn’t just you! When you accept this you not only start depression increasing, but you make your self persona non grata with everybody else in the family, and you’re a drag to be around other believers when you’re like this. So you’re fighting not just for your own happiness, you’re fighting for the happiness of your loved ones; people who love you, people who appreciate you, people who enjoy your company, they can’t enjoy your company because you’re dragging around, spiritually tired. Well, that’s the beaten spirit and the law of psychosomatic effect in the book of Proverbs tells us some of the manifestations and the results of this.

Then last week we dealt with the law of mystery, the idea that the human heart can never be known by finite man. The law of mystery—it’s illustrated again physically as the Bible always illustrates spiritual truth by a physical analog, and that is that the heart supports the brain, not the other way around. You, physically are made to live, you can have a tremendous massive brain damage occur to you and you’ll still sit there and breathe; you can be a human vegetable lying in a hospital bed and still be alive and have absolutely no use of your brain; a pathetic situation. And people who are running around on motorcycles without helmets are asking for trouble in this area. It doesn’t require too much to permanently injure your brain and turn you into a vegetable. But in this situation it illustrates the physical truth that your brain depends on your heart but your heart does not depend upon your brain.

Now the law of mystery results in this application: the only criterion that you can safely use to judge your heart is the Word of God. Because the heart is basically a mystery we can’t even know hearts, leave alone someone else’s heart. There is no way we will ever know all the depths of our own heart. And therefore Scripture warns us, do not be introspective. The mystics down through the years have always tried to violate this law, they’ve always tried through some system of introspection, going into the closet and playing Buddha or something, through introspection have tried to know their heart and know their soul and this is impossible, so declares the book of Proverbs. And the answer is that you need an objective, external standard, which is the Word.

Today we come the law of self-control. To see the first verse of this turn to Proverbs 14:29; we’ll take three or four verses this morning, go through this, and in the process of learning this law, if you pay attention carefully, you’ll learn some interesting things about your human spirit that you may not have known before, because these particular verses on the law of self-control will tell you, will teach you how people viewed the human spirit. I tried to kind of prepare you for this as I’ve gone on in the series, and that is, don’t ever think of the soul and the spirit abstractly. Some of you have taken courses in college and you’ve discussed the platonic concept of the soul and you’ve got this idea that its kind of an abstract formless ideal. And you’ve carried this over into understanding Scripture, and I’m trying to cut that out of your minds because the people in the Old Testament were not thinking that way. They knew Greek, they didn’t think like Greeks; they thought like Semitics, and Semitic people don’t think in abstractions, they think concretely. And so when they think of “spirit” they think of something they can feel and see, like the breath. And so the presence or absence of the human spirit in the person is in one to one correspondence with physical breath and respiration. In fact, the same Hebrew word for “spirit” is the word for breath; there’s no difference in their mind. They tied the unseen immaterial human spirit to the seen observed breath and together they’re seen, and they are not separated. The Greeks do that but the Jews do not.

Now to catch the content of these verses, first let look at verse 29 and then I want to take you to the physical analog. “He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding; but he that is hasty of spirit exalts folly.” Now, the word for wrath is actually the word for nostrils, and it’s in the plural. “He that is slow,” and literally it’s kind of funny, it reads, “He that is long of nostrils,” that’s the way the Hebrew reads literally, of course you have to understand the idiom involved here, that’s not what it means but that’s what it reads and it’s not talking about somebody with a big nose, it’s talking about the fact that the nostrils is the place where the breath comes out and particularly what they are looking for is the word to be angry. And when somebody’s angry, there’s the breath. And so the Hebrew, when he uses the word for anger, doesn’t think of it as an abstraction, he’s looking at what it does to your body physically, it increases respiration, and so therefore the word “nostrils” in the plural came to equal anger.

Now do you see how these feelings, how these emotions, how these abstractions that we always talk of abstractly, are in the Bible pinned down to something physical that you can touch, that you can sense. Now because of this, to prepare you for the law of self-control I’m going to go into a little anatomy, just some elementary anatomy on respiration and after we deal with this elementary anatomy lesson on respiration, then we’ll go to these verses and you watch as we read the verses how it is all built on human anatomy. If you understand human anatomy you can understand the spiritual truth involved. And all you have to do is just know the human body and how it functions. And the Bible is written so that once you know that, then you can understand the spiritual truths that are being taught by that analog.

So we have to go to the respiration system and we have to look at it and understand what it does. Basically the respiration system is a system of exchange of O2 and CO2 in the body; you’re an engine. Somebody once said when we get a bunch of people in our assembly here that every one of you is essentially equivalent in heat to a hundred watt bulb, and when engineers design a building for cooling they have to anticipate, multiply the number of people that you’re going to have by a hundred watts and that is how much power is being given into the atmosphere through heat. And so when you design an air conditioning system you have to design it to remove; you can imagine if we had this many hundred watt bulbs it’d be kind of hot in here. Well, that’s why it gets hot, because our bodies are engines that are constantly burning; they’re constantly burning energy and our bodies are inefficient. This is why sweat came after the fall; the human body is a very inefficient machine, its efficiency is about 20%, it means that the energy that we burn we only use about 20% of it, the rest of it is given off as heat and waste. So the body is not an efficient machine; originally it apparently was but now it is not, due to the fall and other effects.

But the respiration system is what supplies you with the fuel necessary to cause the burning to occur, oxygen. The respiration system is divided into two parts, the internal system and the external system. The external system consists of your lungs and the various passage ways, the bronchials and so on that go down into the lungs and through diffusion the oxygen is passed back and forth through membranes in your lungs. And it may seem an interesting to note here how that much oxygen can pass through your lungs, especially if you’re running or if your body is demanding a lot oxygen, how does the oxygen get to your blood. Well, God has so designed your lungs that if you took all the interior surface of your lung, the tissues over which this gas passes, it’s like a thin membrane and the oxygen passes this way, through the membrane, CO2 passes back through this way, and those membranes, if you take the total area of them, are equal to two and a half times your outward body surface. And it’s amazing that as small a little things as the lungs contains this much surface area and that’s because God has designed it to meet our need for oxygen under various extreme conditions.

Now, associated with the external are obviously your diaphragm, and when you breathe, when you breathe deeply, you actually do not move your lungs; air does not come in and blow up your lungs; you create a vacuum in your lungs through the movement of your diaphragm, you can feel it when you take it breath, you can feel the muscles go down and what they’re doing as they’re going down is setting up a vacuum in your lungs that suck in air from outside. And when you push the air back out then the CO2 is expelled. That’s the external part of your respiration system. But internally, and this is the part that’s very interesting from the Scriptural standpoint, you’ve got a lot more involved and that is you’ve got a very, very fine-tuned regulatory system, so that your body will automatically get the right oxygen and CO2 amounts.

The internal mechanisms have to do with a thing in the medulla of the brain called the respiratory center. And the respiratory center coordinates how fast you breathe and how deeply you breathe. Now the respiratory system itself doesn’t tell the lungs how fast to breathe but it coordinates all the muscles necessary. Can you imagine one lung collapsing and the other one expanding, you wouldn’t get too far; your body has to be coordinated. So in your brain is the respiratory center and it sends out various signals down here to coordinate the muscles of the diaphragm and so forth. But, how does the respiratory center know how much breathing should occur to meet your body needs. It has three ways and it has three types of censors that are distributed throughout your body, very wonderfully, they work automatically. And you have nothing to do with their designed it million and millions of years before you ever popped on the scene and therefore He designed it perfectly.

The censors have to do, first with your blood chemistry; they constantly measure the amount of oxygen and CO2 in your blood system. And you aren’t aware of this but this goes on all the time. Your body is constantly measuring and sending the measurements up to the respiratory center. For example, if you hold your breath, little children like to do this, see how long you can hold your breath. Well, you can try voluntarily to cancel out the respiratory center and you just hold your breath and hold your breath and hold your breath and hold your breath, and finally all the cells in your body are giving out C) 2 and the CO2 levels in your blood start to rise and rise and rise, and these sensors are telling the respiratory center, there’s too much CO2, there’s too much CO2, there’s too much CO2, there’s not enough oxygen. And for a while you are able actually to override your respiratory center, but up to a point; you can’t kill yourself this way, the respiratory center will cut out the voluntary and automatically send the impulse that you have to take a breath, so actually you can’t do this. You can suffocate yourself other ways but you can’t suffocate by voluntarily holding your lungs this way because the respiratory system is just worked out so it overrides your volition at this point.

Now the chemistry is one way the respiratory center has of detection. Another way is by pressure. There are certain places in your circulatory system where there are sensors that detect your blood pressure and so when the blood pressure gets high because you’re exercising, the pressure report goes up to the respiratory center and that will fire the muscles to inhale. And then the third way in which the respiratory center is also fired is through censors that measure motion in your muscles. There are actually parts of your body, when they go into motion, that are reported directly to the respiratory center. So the respiratory center has a whole network of censors that are monitoring your bodily needs for oxygen. And who are prepared then to coordinate the necessary action to supply oxygen.

Now what does oxygen do? Why all these censors? Why have a respiratory center? Why do this? Because your body needs power, your body needs energy and so therefore the respiratory center is put there, it is designed to supply energy and not just any amount of energy but energy at the right moment. For example, probably many of you have had the experience of what they call hyperventilation and when you deep breathe faster than you want to and you just keep on deep breathing and you see how you feel after about a minute or two of this, you’ll feel dizzy and you may even faint because there you’re putting too much oxygen into your body, the body can’t use it. So the respiratory center knows everything and works this thing out accordingly to supply power.

But, I said the respiratory system overrides your volition; where does volition come into this physically. And then we’re going to see the application spiritually. The volition cannot change the respiratory center automatically. You can’t say, respiratory center increase my breathing. The respiratory center doesn’t care what your volition says; no way you can affect your respiratory center by your volition. But you can indirectly, and how do you do it? Your volition chooses motion, it chooses activity, so you may choose to run, you may choose to go up the stairs fast, you may choose to do something requires oxygen by your volition, and after, repeat, after, after you have voluntarily chosen you set in motion things that activate all of these censors and then your respiratory center fires for inspiration. So how do you change your respiration? How do you change your body? Not directly by your volition; you change it by actually behaving a certain way and as a result of the behavior your body, built to adapt to the behavior, built to handle it, then comes (?) and responds. Your body, then, responds to what you do; you can’t directly influence it, you indirectly influence it.

Now, carrying this same thing over to the area of the soul and visualizing for a moment the idea of this human spirit as breath, here’s the way it works. The human spirit is given for power for service. This means that your body obtains energy from the human spirit the same way, or in an analogous way it has obtained energy from the oxygen you breathe. Suppose for example, to make this really clear, suppose for example you get out here and you decide you’d leave your car and jog home. And you got down to [names a street], that’s about as far as you could before your body would have to do something to start supplying oxygen. Some might make it further than that but the point still remains that you would go a certain ways and then finally your body would have to do something to supply extra oxygen.

Now, it’s the same thing spiritually. The heart, which is the functioning center, the mind, the conscience and the ego, where the volition, the heart decrees that a certain reaction or response to life will take place, just like you choose to go out and jog. The heart decides to have a certain mental attitude; you face a certain situation in your life and you’re going to react to it in a certain way. You choose, by your volition, to act that way, but like you choose to run or to jog or to do some activity, you can only do so much on the strength of your volition of your choice and after that you have to call upon extra power. Your respiratory center has to fire up the respiration system to provide energy to do what you have chosen to do. It works spiritually, your volition sets off the direction of response to a situation in life, but if your human spirit did not empower you to do that chosen direction you wouldn’t last very long. So the human spirit is like a battery; it provides energy to do what you have chosen to do. It, in other words, fortifies and mobilizes energy to empower attitudes that you choose to have. You choose to have certain attitudes but you can’t generate those attitudes by yourself, just like you choose to run some place but you yourself don’t choose to change your respiration and everything else, that’s all done for you by your body. So you choose to have certain attitudes and your human spirit quickly comes in to give you those attitudes. Now that is the mechanism that goes on, normally.

Now I’m going to go back to the physical side; I’ve dealt with first the respiration center; I’ve shown you how it normally works in a very, very elementary way. We made the parallel with your human spirit, that your human spirit is fired, so to speak, by your volition, because you choose to have a certain attitude, your human spirit is right in there to provide that attitude. Okay; that’s the way it normally functions. But now let’s watch what happens when we have an abnormality and that abnormality is treated in the book of Proverbs, which we will get to, but I want you to have firmly in your mind the physical analogy with your body so that when you read Proverbs then you can understand it.

Let’s go back to the physical body once again. Let’s ask ourselves what happens when the respiratory center fails. For example, a person can have a head injury, or they can be on narcotics and certain forms of drugs that influence and dull the respiratory center. Under this condition, when the respiratory center is dulled through brain injury, through narcotics and certain forms of drugs, it loses its ability to coordinate your breathing properly and you have breathing anomalies; one of these breathing anomalies has a certain name for it and it looks like this, if you want to diagram the amount of oxygen. If this is the normal proportion you tend to have more oxygen on input and you keep it in your lungs and you have more CO2 and it just goes like that, like a sign wave. And that’s the way your body operates. But under this abnormality, when the respiratory center is dull, what do you suppose happens? Remember I said the respiratory center is fired by certain censors; chemical censors, censors of pressure and censors of motion. Now if the respiratory center has been inhibited by some drug or by brain damage what do you suppose is going to happen when your body starts sending signals, hey, CO2 is too much, CO2 is too much, CO2 is too much, w don’t have enough oxygen. The respiratory center is dull and it doesn’t respond so now the person, all of a sudden the oxygen gets very low, very low, very low, and there’s just no breath, the respiratory center never fires the lungs to breathe in, until finally the CO2 gets so much and the oxygen so little that the respiratory center wakes up and all of a sudden does something, okay, we’ve got a big breath and the person is [he breathes fast & hard], like this, deeply and fast for a short time, until the oxygen level builds way up too much, but since the respiratory center in insensitive to the censors it allows the breathing to go fast until the oxygen is way too much and so you have too much oxygen, and this is what happens. The (?) goes back and forth and the person won’t breathe here and then they breathe very, very quick, and then they won’t breathe for a while and then they breathe very, very quick. And this is what happens oftentimes with brain damage or with narcotics; it upsets the respiratory center because it can’t control what it’s supposed to control.

Now, the Bible teaches that there’s a similar thing that happens to your human spirit, and that particular analogy comes out in these verses. Briefly stated, and then we’ll watch it in the verses, it’s this, that your human spirit, through negative volition, you choose, as a Christian, to respond improperly toward life. The human spirit in the believer is regenerated, because it is regenerated at the point of new birth the human spirit really doesn’t want to promote those attitudes that your volition calls for; your volition is calling for anger, hatred, bitterness, this is what you want to do and so your human spirit is called upon to supply the power necessary to make that attitude really strong in you; but the human spirit is regenerate and it really doesn’t want to do this and so therefore we begin to have a warping effect on the human spirit. And that effect is now noted in these verses.

Let’s look first at Proverbs 14:29, “He that is slow to wrath,” we would just simply say he that has patience, a long temper instead of a short temper, “He that is long of anger has discernment,” or “great discernment,” now the word I said was really in the Hebrew “long of nostrils,” as an idiom for anger. But to take away any doubts in your mind that this refers to the human spirit and not just a bodily emotion, turn to Ecclesiastes 7:8, and here you’ll see almost the same Hebrew expression except instead of “long of nostrils” it is “long of ruach,” or long of spirit. And sure enough, in Ecclesiastes 7:8 it’s translated you would normally expect it, “the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit,” or “the long of spirit is better than the haughty of spirit.” So the idiom, “the long of nostrils” is identical to “long of spirit,” both mean the same thing, both have to do with the fact that under a situation in life you come to you have a choice of how you’re going to respond to that situation. You can respond with mental attitude negative volition of hatred and bitterness, and that will fire your human spirit to do things it really was not designed to do.

But let’s first look at the first part of the first part of Proverbs 14:29, here is the normal, here is God’s will for us, how we normally operate, “He that is slow to anger has great discernment,” the word “understanding” means discernment, ability to choose between right and wrong, truth and falsehood. It obviously therefore has reference, as we have seen repeatedly in the Proverbs series, it has reference to your conscience. So what this teaches is that a person whose mind and conscience operates very well together will have a control over their spirit. In other words, their spirit will be ruled, will be subordinate, like your respiratory center controls your respiration; what is it? It is that the mind and the conscience are (?) together and you’re operating the way God designed you to operate.

Now, the last part of verse 29, “he that is short of spirit,” it doesn’t mean short in quantity or power, “short of spirit” just means hasty, short-tempered, exactly the same English word, the way we’d handle it would be short-tempered, the Jew would not say “temper,” he didn’t have a word for temper, his word was spirit, which shows you therefore what you see in temper is actually a manifestation not just of emotions but of the power of the human spirit. For example, if you have ever seen someone violently angry, in a wholesale tantrum, haven’t you ever heard them, or haven’t you yourself said, it’s scary because you feel like you have lost control of yourself. And it’s a common observation, that if you get very, very angry it almost scares you, to the point you wonder what you could have done when you were that angry, you lost your mind you even hear the expression, I lost control of myself, I lost it. And you actually sense in your soul that something is let loose that scares you. There’s power available for what you really don’t have control over.

All right, subjectively what you’re feeling then is your human spirit surging; that power does not come just from your emotions, according to Scripture. That tremendous surge of strength is the power being supplied to you by an unruly and insubordinate human spirit. Like a respiratory center that fires up and you’re breathing too fast, so you have called upon your human spirit in an insubordinate way, trying to get it to do something for which it wasn’t designed and it reacts wildly, and supplies this tremendous surge of energy. You wanted to be angry but perhaps you didn’t want to be that angry. That scared you; you were not prepared to see so much anger in your own soul. Where did all that anger come from? Where did all that energy suddenly mobilize itself from? The human spirit was called into action in an undisciplined way.

Now the one who is “short of spirit” is just this way, the human spirit is undisciplined, “and he that is hasty of spirit exalts folly.” The word “exalt” is a Hebrew participle and it means it’s part of his character to literally raise up, to build up it means. [Tape turns] …folly, it means the idea of producing something that is just false production, it’s just foolishness, and a person as this constantly builds up, constantly produces foolishness.

Another verse, Proverbs 16:32, here we have the analogy between the military and the human spirit. In Proverbs 16:32 the first part, and the second part, this is synonymous parallelism, look at it and read it carefully to yourself for a moment. “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty one; and he that rules his spirit, than he that takes a city.” So, you have A-B construction, A prime, B prime construction I this verse. A, “the one who is slow to anger is better than the mighty one,” and the second part of the verse, “he that rules his spirit is better than he that captures,” literally, “a city.” So the second half of both parts of this verse refer to a successful soldier; a successful military commander.

Now before we go to the first part of the verse let’s go to the two second parts; just forget about the human spirit, just for a minute, and look at the soldiers here. What is the successful soldier, basically? A successful soldier is one who knows how to use power in a disciplined way; power in a disciplined way. In World War I we had illustration after illustration of how not to do it; if you’ve read history, it was a case where you had trench warfare and for years and years the French and the Germans and the British and later on the Americans bled by the millions; millions of young men lost their lives in mass charges to gain just another trench. And then they’d sit in the trench and then they’d all come out again and they’d be gunned down, and the slaughter was horrible. It was just as bad as it was in the Civil War where you have mass infantry charges, just to secure a few more feet of ground. And then the enemy would gas them or something and they’d move back and it was just see-saw, back and forth, month after month, year after year, in the horrible trenches of France and Germany and that was the history of World War I. The men who fought and designed World War I were men who were influenced by a military theoretician by the name of Clausewitz, and Clausewitz propounded this idea, although he has been misunderstood by later people who read him and they thought the way to do it was just sheer power, just overpower your enemy by frontal assault, and obviously this tactic failed because your enemy is going to try to overpower you by frontal assault. And so you had no gain of ground, everybody was trying to bulldoze everybody else and it never worked. People got killed by the millions but you never gained much ground out of it. That was an unwise or foolish use of power. But a victorious wise military person knows how to employ power selectively, he knows how to psychologically demobilize his opponent, and then crush him with an attack.

So the person who is the winner in a victory, “he who captures a city,” he who attains his military objective is not necessarily the man with the most power; he’s the man who uses what power he has the wisest way; he knows his weapons and he knows how to use them. So therefore, in this verse 32, the last part of both of these stress not power, but the use of power. I can remember in college the sport I was associated with was the crew, this is 8 men in a boat, you have a little man at the front and he’s kind of like the quarterback for this thing, and he sits there with a horn and he tells the guys how fast to stroke and so on. In crew is a beautiful illustration of a sport where it is not the strongest who win, but the most coordinated who win. I can remember one time watching a meet between Harvard and Annapolis, between the Navy crew and Harvard. The Navy was using their football players, as many colleges do because it’s a spring sport and it’s a good opportunity to keep them in shape and so on. And the Navy in this particularly race had obviously the strongest men; man for man they were much, much stronger than the boys from Harvard.

But the coach of the Harvard crew had a system that has been amazing in training crews, in fact that’s why Harvard crews usually win their races, and the system he developed was all during the winter he’d take his boys and he’d build a rack over a swimming pool inside and he’d have them row by the hours in the swimming pool; they wouldn’t move, just constantly on this rack rowing, and of course psychologically it’s tremendous because if you realize you’re just not moving, all you’re doing is pushing water with that oar, well then you get out in the boat and you push water and you move, it feels betters so psychologically it builds you up to anticipate motion.

But if you ever have a chance sometime to watch a real good crew race, you watch the blade work and watch how an excellent crew, all four blades, there’s four oars on one side, four on the other, you watch how they come down to the water; they don’t lift them way up like you see some clown out in a rowboat going like this, that’s not the way you row because it takes too much time to bring the oar up and then bring the oar back down; a good crew you’ll always see them, there’s just about a half inch between that oar and the water. They sweep back, put it in the water, sweep back, put it in the water, sweep back, put it in the water and every one of those oars will hit the water at exactly the same time. If one man does not hit exactly right he actually not only doesn’t help the boat, he hinders the boat because as his oar strikes for a moment it’s stationary, and it’s absorbing power from the other men so in a crew situation every one of those boys has to hit at the same time and this is the role that little fellow up in the front of the boat is always yelling at them; his job is to get all those oars in the water at the same time. All right, in this particular meet Harvard completely won, beat Navy by three or four boat lengths. Why? Because the Harvard crew, though not as strong as the Navy, the Navy guys were pulling a lot harder, but they were not pulling in coordination.

Now that’s the point in an athletic sense that is being made here in a military sense in verse 32. It is not, the one who takes the city doesn’t have the strongest army; the one who takes the city has the wisest army. Now let’s go back to the first part of verse 32, “He that is slow to anger is better than the hero,” the word “mighty” means the hero or the soldier who is victorious. The “slow to anger” is the same expression we’ve seen in the previous verse, “and he that rules his spirit,” the word is mashal, it’s a Hebrew participle, if you want to think of it like marshal, mashal is a word to reign or control, or to bring into subordination. And so therefore you see what the Bible views anger, that anger is insubordination of the human spirit, that you are firing off your human spirit, not even realizing the tremendous power that you have, and triggering off something that you do not know how to control. That is why the Bible warns against undue anger; you are triggering your human spirit to do things and you really don’t have control over it.

Now another verse that explains the same thing, repeats it, Proverbs 19:11, “The discretion of a man defers his anger, and it is his glory to pass over a transgression.” That, by the way, is quoted in the New Testament several times, Proverbs 19:11. “The discretion of a man,” this word, “discretion, is sakel, I put this on here because I think some of you can recognize that word, sakel comes from that word we used in the Psalms, maschil and you remember what a maschil psalm was? One that is well-designed or skilful, so sakel means skill, prudence in the practical details of life. Someone has translated it just as prudence; they suggested this is the best word to translate this Hebrew word. “The prudence of a man, his skill defers his anger,” defer means habitually, in other words, one who has skill knows how to use his power wisely, he paces himself. “The wisdom of a man,” or “his skill defers his anger,” the word “anger” is again the same word for nose, following the same idiom, “and it is his glory” or his honor,” and the word for glory in verse 11 happens to be the word for rank. It is used in the military, in fact tonight we’re going to see it in 2 Sam 23, it means military rank in an organization; it is his rank, it is his high honor “to pass over a transgression.” The word “transgression” means personal, an insult to him personally. In other words, it’s not lying down, letting the world walk over you, but in situations where you’d just blow it and get upset, why bother. Why fire off your human spirit into some mode for which it wasn’t designed; a person who is skillful won’t, he’ll control his human spirit.

One other verse, Proverbs 29:11, this is not in the Proverbs section we’re dealing with but it’s such a good illustration of this I am going to deal with it at this point. This is the most picturesque of all the verses in seeing the human spirit. “A fool utters all his spirit, but a wise man keeps it in till afterwards.” Now a fool is a k^esil, a k^esil we have seen before is a person who has been on negative volition for some time, who is in compound carnality. He “utters,” literally in the Hebrew it is the word to go forth, in the hiphil stem this verb means to cause to go forth. The hiphil stem always makes the verb causative, to cause to go forth, or he brings forth all his spirit. Perhaps the vernacular would be he lets is all hang out. “He brings out his whole spirit,” now again, before we try to apply this let’s try to understand it.

All through the Proverbs series we’ve been trying hard to get our minds to function in the groove that the man who wrote Proverbs is functioning; we want to understand how he thought, then understanding that we can apply it. Now if you can visualize somebody very, very angry, somebody really in the middle of an adult tantrum, very, extremely angry, the Jew would look to him and he’d say see, he’s letting all his spirit come out. Now that may again help you understand the Jewish idea of the human spirit; he’s letting all his spirit come out. But in contrast, “the wise man keeps it in until afterwards,” now the way it’s translated it sounds like he holds it a while and then he lets it out too but that’s not the thrust of the verse. The thrust of verse 11 is that he calms it down; the word “keep in” means to calm down, “he calms it down in the background,” literally, or “in the back,” not till afterwards, it’s not chronological, it’s spatial. “He calms it down in the background,” in other words, like the respiratory center controls breathing properly, he who is wise will control his spirit properly, he won’t let it go [he breathes fast and hard] like this and then calm down, and then again, and then not breathe for a while, his human spirit is constantly supplying just the right form of energy under a controlled situation.

Now this should, perhaps help you understand more about your own human spirit. You can’t see your human spirit, you can’t feel your human spirit directly but the Bible teaches you can control it and see the effects of that control.

We’re going to conclude with three other verses to apply this truth, the law of self-control, using the volition to control the surges of power from the human spirit. One of these verses in the Old Testament and two in the New, and they apply to things that we see around us today. Turn first to Ezekiel 13:3, down through the history of the Church we have had people who thought they were prophesying in the name of the Lord when they became ecstatic. And people who become ecstatic think that is the work of the Holy Spirit, but now look, the law of self-control will give you an added insight why ecstatics cannot be the work of the Holy Spirit. If God designed your human spirit to be under the control of your volition at all times, in ecstatics your human spirit is not under the control of the volition, what does that tell you about ecstatics? It tells you that they are violating the law of self-control and therefore are not of the Lord.

Look at Ezekiel 13:3, “Thus saith the Lord, Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit,” in other words, they are not controlling their spirit, they are letting their spirit control them. They are like an angry person. Now so far this morning we’ve just dealt with the law of self-control in the sense of anger, extreme anger, as the unruly spirit manifesting itself. But there’s another way besides extreme anger and that’s in religious ecstatics, when the human spirit comes out with all its power, and Ezekiel warns that false prophets are prophets who cannot control their own human spirit.

Another verse on the same point, 1 Corinthians 14:32, Paul warns that the mark of the true prophet of God is that he can control his human spirit; he is not a religiously ecstatic individual. Verse 32, “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.” They can turn them on, they can control them, they can turn them off, so to speak. The switch is used by the person. Now that’s completely opposite to everything you hear, oh you just kind of let go and let God. Or you let your tongue just kind of flap in the breeze, and you let go. Now that’s exactly opposite to a disciplined controlled situation. And this is one further reason why we deny that the modern system of ecstatics has nothing whatever to do with the work of the Holy Spirit. It does not function in line with the way the human soul has been built to run.

One final verse, Ephesians 4:25, this is a warning what happens when this law is habitually violated in the life of an individual. You cannot violate God’s laws without reaping the horrible dividends. In Ephesians 4:25-27 we have the same law though it’s not mentioned explicitly, “Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor; for we are members one of another. [26] Be ye angry, but don’t sin,” all anger is not bad, Jesus Christ was angry when He walked in and He took a weapon, mind you, equivalent in our day to a blackjack, and hit people with it. Yes, the Lord Jesus Christ did that in John 2; there were a bunch of goons that operated a money changing situation and He physically beat them up, single handedly. Now that time Jesus Christ was angry but He did not sin. And here’s what is so hard to find the balance, “Be ye angry, and sin not,” to clarify it, “let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” The idea is that anger by itself is not necessarily bad, but if you let it sit there and get of high volume so you lose control in an instant of time, or you let it simmer with a mental attitude of bitterness, it is now out of control; you have gotten out of control, and the next verse is the ultimate result of that kind of behavior. [27] “Neither give place” or a tupos “to Satan.” In other words, you are opening yourself up for demonic oppression when you habitually strain your human spirit.

Now these two laws, this law and the law we dealt with previously, we’ve seen two conditions of the human spirit; the beaten one and now the unruly human spirit. Just look and contrast these two for a moment. What is the “beaten” human spirit? The beaten human spirit is the situation where you’re totally depressed, your spirit doesn’t provide any power, it’s like that analogy I gave at the beginning today when the person is respiratory center doesn’t function and what happens? The CO2 builds up and builds up and he just sits there, you can look at his chest and it doesn’t move, he’s not breathing. Why? Because the respiratory center hasn’t fired the processes to take in breath yet, and that’s like the beaten spirit, it just sits there and oh dear, I wish I were dead kind of thing. And that is the beaten human spirit, and it is a spiritual problem so don’t think it’s going to be solved by a pill.

The other kind is the unruly spirit and the unruly spirit is the case that we have seen where the spirit is used so much, so violently, that a person has lost control of their own human spirit. Both conditions are bad and yet both conditions are in a way opposite to one another.

The final application of all this is watch that in your home you don’t teach these patterns to your children. Children will always pick up everything bad and never anything good. If you have ten great things about you as a person and one bad thing, guess which thing you kids will follow? The bad one. You don’t even have to teach them to be bad; somehow it comes automatically. Now it comes automatically in this thing, you can have a whole generation, in fact, you can have three or four generations in your family or someone else’s family that you can observe this pattern. You have a tendency of one member of the family to go into a condition of the beaten spirit, moping around, this kind of thing. What happens? Their children learn, that’s exactly what I’ll do. When I face a situation like mother, when I face a situation like father, I’m going to mope around; daddy does it, momma does it so I’ll do it. So what have you done? Train the kid to acquire a beaten human spirit. Or, you can train your children the other way, to have an unruly human spirit, by letting it all hang out every time somebody drops something on the floor or something. It goes both ways, and as parents particularly, those of you who are parents, remember, you’re charged with watching how you model for your children. Apply these two principles and see what happens.