Clough Proverbs Lesson 58
DI #1: Laws of Hope and Learned Behavior
Before we turn to
the book of Proverbs I’d like to answer two questions that were handed in on
the feedback cards. One is: Will you
explain why a young child or a teenager should respect or obey his parent’s
authority, regardless of whether the child thinks he is being fair or right and
how long this obedience is required according to Scripture. The third divine institution, which we’ll get
into in more detail, is the place where authority is learned. And basically the rule is that as long as the
child is dependent upon his parents he has the obligation to obey them. And if he thinks he wants to be independent,
well then, he can be independent in all other ways besides just the specifics. The text in the New Testament that shows how
this works is Luke 2, if you happen to get involved in this kind of a thing,
because Luke 2 states how the Lord Jesus Christ dealt with a situation when he
was a teenager and knew He was God. Now
some teenagers think they are but Jesus was and His parents didn’t believe Him
and Luke 2 shows how Christ handled that situation.
I might add here
too that in the situation one reason why parents do not command more authority
over their children is because they don’t command more respect from their
children, and the reason the parents don’t command more respect from their
children is because their parents have not been the ones that have taught them
the Word of God; it’s always some outsider that teaches the children the Word
and the gospel. I’ve never been able to
understand this because it seems to me the best thing that I like to do with my
boys is to share the Word of God with them and lead them to Jesus Christ. And I’ve never been able to understand the
mentality of parents who always want to pawn this off on the pastor, pawn it
off on some Sunday School teacher. It’s
your privilege, and this is why here with the family training literature we’re
trying to put into your hands a tool so that you can grow your authority over
your children and build it in a respectful way by being their teacher in the
Word of God. And so this would
contribute to breaking down any rebellious tendency that oftentimes occurs.
The second
question: We have all been taught from elementary psychology that to withhold
or suppress strong anger is bad. Can the
Christian suppress anger in the flesh and is this the harm that human viewpoint
causes? Can the Christian damage his
spirit also by unrighteously preventing the whole spirit from going forth and
getting angry? I dealt somewhat with
this question last Sunday evening and it comes out of the Proverbs series, it
comes out of the last law that we dealt with and I must say at this point that
I neglected last Sunday to mention this whole application of this third
law.
So let’s go back
and look at one of these laws in Proverbs that we’ve studied under the laws of
the soul, and as we answer this question we can introduce the final set of laws
that we’re working on the soul this morning.
The first law that we’ve had is the law of psychosomatic effect which
teaches that your spiritual condition will influence your physical
condition. You can be a Christian, a
non-Christian, anything else; it doesn’t make any difference because you are made
to operate this way. You can’t escape
from it. A second law that we had was
the law of mystery, which states that you cannot know your own heart, ever. There will never be a time when you can
totally understand yourself, so forget it if you’re trying. You can understand some things about yourself
but the human heart can never be understood, it’s always a mystery.
Then last Sunday
we dealt with the dealt with the law of self-control, showing how under
conditions when the human spirit is urged to create anger or ecstasy, the human
spirit goes into an unruly state and the result of this kind of behavior is an
unruly human spirit. It’s a dangerous
kind of thing and it is one which ultimately leads to satanic influence. Now in response to the law of self-control,
the idea that it is wrong biblically to give vent to strong emotions of anger
and so on, we have this question. The
first thing we can say in reply to the question is that the modern concept
often used in group therapy situations of ventilation, of strong emotion, is
condemned in the book of Proverbs. It is
considered to be an unscriptural process from God’s point of view. The reason for this is that by so ventilating
the strong emotions you are giving signals to your human spirit to really go to
town; really generate, like we described from God’s Word last week, all the
strength and the power and it’s more power than you can handle. In other words, it’s like pressing down,
floor boarding the accelerator of a tremendous engine. You do not have the chokmah, or the wisdom to control the power of your own human
spirit. And it’s asking for trouble to
give ventilation to these strong types of emotions. However, the Bible neither, on the other
hand, tells you to suppress or ignore them.
Rather, the Word of God says you discipline and channel them, that
emotions are useful but they have to be channeled, they have to be controlled
and directed, not suppressed but directed.
There’s a difference. And as you
go through the book of Proverbs you’ll notice how this occurs. We’re coming up on something later on where
this is very clear. So not suppression
of it.
For example, the
tendency to anger; instead of just turning off your mind and letting all hell
break loose, the biblical response to that kind of a situation would be to go
back and rehearse the content of the Word of God, that you introduce the divine
viewpoint framework in the mentality of your soul, you circulate this and you
find as you do this the anger just kind of subsides and you work with it. In other words, you deal with the vertical
relationship between you and God and the horizontal relationship between you
and other people resolves itself.
Those are the
first three laws under the laws of the soul.
Today we finish with the laws of the soul and we deal with two of them;
one is the law of hope and the other is the law of learned behavior. Both of these laws are taught in the book of
Proverbs, both summarize the teachings of the book of Proverbs, and with this
we will complete the second part of the first divine institution. Remember the first part are the laws of
responsible actions; this second group we have been studying are the laws of
the soul.
Now the law of
hope, what is it? Two verses we’ve
already studied in the book of Proverbs teaches this. Turn to Proverbs 10:24. If you understand the law of hope it will
help you use the faith technique correctly.
Let’s get some background for the law of hope. As creatures that are finite we are limited
in time and space, that should be obvious.
And the only place that you exist along the area of time is in the
present. But you have a relationship to
the past and you have a relationship to the future time. And the Bible has words to describe this,
words that you’ve heard over and over again but maybe never have recognized
that this is what is being taught. Paul
uses three words to describe the Christian’s relationship to the past, to the
present and to the future. For the past
faith; for the present love, for the future hope. And that’s why it says the greatest of these
is love. Now that’s not some sentimental
thing cranked out from 1 Corinthians 13, it’s rather Paul is simply saying that
the place where you operate is in the present and that’s why the greatest of
these is love. But faith, or trust, is
your relationship to past things.
For example, God
in the past has revealed His Word, His promises, and has fulfilled those
promises, fulfilled prophecy and so on.
And out of the past you obtain the confidence in His piety, so you can
have a relationship to God in the present moment. But your relationship to Him in the present
moment is always grounded upon the past, the facts of history and so on out of
the past. That’s why when I opened the
service this morning I read 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul speaks to the
Corinthians that your faith is grounded in what happened in the past, that God
in the Old Testament, by His words, promised the resurrection on the third day
and recently Paul says we have adequate testimony in history that that promise
has been fulfilled. Five hundred
eyewitnesses saw Christ after He rose from the dead and Paul says in the last
part of that verse, he said the greater part of these eyewitnesses still live today,
the implication being if you want to check the facts of the Christian faith go
and ask them, they’re around, they’re living, go talk to them; ask them if they
saw Jesus Christ after He rose from the dead.
So your
relationship to the past is one of faith.
But that’s not what really interest us here today; what interests us
today in connection with this law is your relationship to the future and that
is one of hope. And since every person
is made in God’s image, every person, believer and unbeliever, has some sort of
relationship to future time. You, right
now, have a relationship to the future and it’s bad or its good but it’s a
relationship. And you can change it in
your response to the Word of God or you can make it worse but you have to have
some sort of a relationship to the future.
You’re made this way; you can’t function now without some relationship
to the future. Take worry, for a bad
illustration.
Worry is a bad
relationship to the future. When you
worry you are preoccupied with something that you fear is going to happen to
you in the future. Through worry you are
concentrating on something out in the future to the point where your body is
absolutely mobilizing the forces and energy and hormones and so on to cope with
this thing. Now that thing may be two
days off, but right now through this mental attitude sin of worry you are
telling your body through various ways to get ready for it, get ready for it,
get ready for it, you’re constantly giving signals to your body to prepare for the
future, prepare for the future, prepare for the future, but there’s only one
problem. Since you can only live in the
present you can never discharge the energies that your is building up to cope
with this. And so your body discharges
these energies and that’s why you get ulcers and everything else. You’ve call upon your body to cope with the
future but you don’t live there yet, and so therefore the body has no place to
go. And you’ve mobilized all these
energies to cope with a problem that you can’t touch yet. And worry, then, is a wrong relationship to
the future.
Now hope is the
opposite of worry. Worry and fear go
together; worry and fear is the opposite and hope is the positive and we are
going to study those two opposites under the law of hope today. First, Proverbs
Now here’s where
you conscience and mind will play a trick on you if you don’t watch it. It’s designed to do that. If you are in violation of your conscience
and you have some mental attitude sin or some overt activity, your conscience
says no; when your conscience fights you and when your conscience says no,
you’re conscious at the same time, along with the no, is telling you you’d
better watch out for the future because you’ve judgment coming in the
future. So a bad conscience or a defiled
conscience starts to eat away your relationship to the future time. It will always do this; it’s designed to do
this, to make you uncomfortable enough to use 1 John 1:9 if you are a believer
or if you are not a believer to make you uncomfortable enough to come to Jesus
Christ. So your conscience has a
function and it always performs this.
Now suppose we
have a person on negative volition, suppose they have violated their conscience
time and time again over an issue. The
conscience has said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, over and over and over again. And therefore the conscience has created in
the mind a fear of the future, a foreboding over what is going to happen in the
future. But since the person likes to
suppress things out of his mind, the Bible calls this scaring the conscience
and blinding the mind, since this process now sets in motion here’s how you can
really make yourself miserable and be a very confused person. Your mind begins to shut down, it begins to
anesthetize itself, I don’t want to hear the conscience, I don’t want to hear
the conscience, I don’t want to hear the conscience, keep it away from me, I
don’t want to bother with it. So the
mind begins to shut down activities in this area.
But the conscience
can’t be shut down; the conscience according to Proverbs 20:27 is the candle of
the Lord and it keeps on functioning, whether you mind turns off or not. Now what happens now? The mind refuses to accept the products of
the conscience so the conscience just goes into the subconscious and so therefore
the conscience keeps on creating fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, and finally this
breaks out into neurotic and psychotic behavior patterns. For example, people that are afraid of
certain things, people who are afraid that something’s going to happen to them,
you say well what’s going to happen? I
don’t know what’s going to happen I just have a fear that something’s going to
happen. Where does this come from? It compounds this way, by the fact that one
time they did know what was going to happen, that they were going to get
disciplined because they had violated their conscience at a certain point but
by now they are so used to it, so tired of hearing this, that they’ve just it
out of their mind literally and so it just bangs around in their subconscious
creating all sorts of problems. People
can get fixations on certain things and fear of certain objects, certain
people, certain situations, for no apparent reason, and you wonder, what is
wrong with that person. It’s just simply
the law of hope operating in their soul, they’re creatures, they’re designed to
have a relationship with the future, they have no confidence in the future
because they’re conscience is condemning and they pay a price. All of us pay the price, believer or
unbeliever, we all pay the price because we are all built the same way.
Proverbs 10:24,
then, says that the fear, the same fear that’s going to come, that means
there’s going to be judgment and it’s going to come upon him, “but the desire
of the righteous shall be granted and here is the positive. The opposite of worry and fear is the hope
and the confidence, and here is where the Christian operating on positive
volition has a tremendous advantage in the depths of his soul and is so much
stronger in the depths of his soul than the person operating on negative
volition because under conditions of positive volition, where the mind and the
conscience team and there’s unity between them, there’s agreement between them,
there is confidence of blessing in the future.
The hope is optimistic. Why is
it? Because it’s rooted on some mystical
feeling? No, because the conscience is
clean and anticipates blessing. It’s
simply that.
Proverbs 10:28 is
a similar issue, “The hope of the righteous is gladness,” in other words, the
relationship of the righteous person, the one who has a clean conscience toward
the future, “is gladness.” Why is he
glad? Because he has confidence about
the future, it doesn’t strike him as a foreboding thing; there’s nothing to
worry about, he knows the One who holds the future.
A third proverb,
Proverbs 10:24 and 10:28 we’ve dealt with before but now a new one, Proverbs
13:12. This is the last one we’ll talk
about this morning having to do with this particular law, the law of hope. But in 13:12 is a statement of the same
principle but this statement is different than the other two proverbs. This verse tells you how you can apply the
law of hope on yourself, on your children and particularly in teaching
situations. It should be used in any
kind of learning theory. “Hope deferred
makes the heart sick; but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.” Now the word “hope deferred” and “makes
sick,” both are participles. The Hebrew
participle emphasizes continual action, over and over and over and over and
over again. So the first two words in
that verse, “hope deferred,” means something that you think about, that you
desire, but over and over and over and over again it’s frustrated; you never
receive it. And so “hope constantly
deferred,” and then the main verb, “makes the heart sick,” and this is the
process, constantly makes the heart sick.
Now what does
heart sick mean? Let’s go back to
it. The mind is built to accommodate
God’s truth. If we have some object here
and that is the hope of the mind, the mind believes that this is going to come
to pass in the future. In other words,
it believes it is the truth. Since the
mind functions to digest, to assimilate, to respond to truth, and it fixes on
some point, some object of hope and that object is always frustrated, it never
comes, it never comes, it never comes, it never comes, the mind becomes sick
because the mind was built to stand on truth.
And a hope that never comes destroys the very function for which the
mind was built, to anticipate and to interact with that which is true. Hope that doesn’t come never is.
Now, how to cope
with heartsickness. The Bible gives us
many, many illustrations of this kind of heartsickness, and I can suggest three
things that can be used to cope with the sickness and this isn’t a subjective
thing, you can feel this or sense this in your own heart. You, obviously many of you have had things
that you’ve anticipated and looked forward to and you never get it, never get
it, never get it, and you know what kind of a discouragement comes because of
that. Now biblically there are probably
three reasons why you have this kind of situation. So when you get involved with a hope that is
constantly deferred, since it’s not God’s will to be (?) obviously there’s
something wrong with the way you’d hoped, and that means that either you have
made a mistake as to the time of fulfillment, this is a mistake that the
promise often makes and it’s one that they pray over constantly in the book of
psalms, is that you’ve got the right hope but you’re hoping for it too fast,
your timing is off. So you have part false
hope, part true hope. You hope in
something that is right for you, maybe a right man/right woman, that’s a bona
fide hope if you’re single, but they never seem to show up and you get sick. Now the reason is that the timing is wrong;
you are dictating to God when you want that hope in time and that’s wrong and
so therefore the sickness is brought on by yourself because you have made the
wrong estimate of time. You have, more
or less, dictated to God when this hope will be fulfilled. So you’ve made an error as to time but you’ve
got a true hope, false time.
The second way is
obviously the reverse, you could have the time right but you could have the bad
hope, the hope is something that you’ve carved out from your human
viewpoint. Using the analogy of right
man/right woman again, or best man/best woman, you have your eyes on some
person that you think would fulfill all your needs and it’s not the right
person and God knows it and you are the only one who doesn’t know it, the other
person knows it, but you go on hoping anyway and you’re frustrated constantly
and that’s because your hope is wrong, it’s human viewpoint hope.
Now the third one,
the third kind of an error in false hope is a little more difficult. Here it’s nothing wrong with the time, nothing
wrong with the object but you’ve made mistake as to the method
fulfillment. We had an illustration of
that last Sunday night with David. David
in Psalm 142 anticipated and hope for the righteous one to give him
praise. David looked forward to the time
when there would be tremendously mature believers surrounding him. David expected God to answer his prayer by
dropping into his lap hundreds and hundreds of mature believers. Instead God picked out 400 of the sorriest
clods in the nation Israel and put them in a cave with David. So we have the Adullam group, and the Adullam
hoods were God’s answer to David’s prayer of Psalm 142. It’s very interesting because eventually the
Adullam group, as we saw from 2 Samuel 23, the Adullam group are going to become
tremendous. Out of those men at least
ten become general officers, probably more but at least ten out of 400 trainees
become general officers within 20, 25 years and so it shows you a tremendous
potential in the group. But here David
didn’t perceive the method. What is his
hope? To have a group of loyal men
around him. Was that hope wrong? No, that hope was right. What about the timing? Bad timing didn’t enter in so much as the
method. God was not going to give David
400 top believers boom, just like that.
What God was going to do was give him 400 potentially good believers and
let David train them. Well, that wasn’t
the kind of hope I wanted. Well, that’s
the kind God assigned to you.
And so often times
when you think you see a situation where you’re discouraged because what you
hoped for doesn’t seem to turn out that way, just remember, you maybe well off
when it comes to (?), that God might have just dropped into your lap the
perfect hope, but He expects you to work with it an develop it. And furthermore, because God, according to 1
Corinthians 10:13 will never allow you to be tested above that which are able,
has made sure that you can work that and produce what you hoped for or he wouldn’t
have given it to you in the first place.
All He wants is some cooperation on our part to work it out.
All right, so
that’s the heartsickness; heartsickness described in Proverbs 13:12. Heartsickness described in Proverbs 13:12
comes about by some sort of a bad relationship to the future; it is the result
psychologically of a poor relationship to future terms. “When the desire comes,” this means a desire
and the verb here means to have to have come to pass in history; it’s
historically accomplished, it’s a participle.
This is part of its character, one that has accomplished is “a tree of
life.” The human soul is built to thrive
on ratification, so to speak, verification of its hope continually. This is why good learning situations will
always involve the fact that you have to have some successes. We’re going to see a marvelous example of
that tonight with David and his group, they have to go into combat for the
first time and this group of men have been training and training and training
and they’re going to go into combat the first time and it’s always important
that a group of men in this situation win the first time they’re in combat
because it’s very discouraging to go out after you’ve been training and
training and training and let the enemy kill you, kill some of your buddies that
you’ve worked with and so on, and there goes the whole morale of the
outfit. Well, God is going to work in a
wonderful way using the law of hope in 1 Samuel.
All right, that is
the law of hope and the faith technique is vitally concerned with the law of
hope. When you use the faith technique
you are making use of the law of hope and never know it because when you put
your trust in a promise of God, God’s immutability stands before that promise. When you trust that “all things work together
for good, to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His
purpose,” and if we “cast all our care upon Him because He cares for us,” we
stand on top of God’s immutability and this means that we have a perfect
relationship to the future, God is eternal, God exists in past, present and
future simultaneously, and therefore trusting in His promise as to the future
is a perfect hope.
If your hope is
grounded on something apart from the Word of God you are going to have
heartsickness. The only way you can
wisely live using the structure of your soul, the way it was made, is to put
your trust in the Word of God and nothing else; not in people, you are always going to be made sick by
trusting some person you admire, some person you look up to. Some people have an idolatry about this and
it works this way: they start out as new believers, and then they see somebody
up here more on the ladder of sanctification, and so they start admiring this
older believer, and they begin to think that older believer is going to satisfy
all my needs, just look at him, he just is the model of everything. And sooner or later, since the older believer
lives this side of resurrection has a sin nature, and the old sin nature shows
up. Oh, big shock, see; now do you see
what’s happened? What happened
here? This older person has become god
to the new believer instead of Jesus Christ.
The object of your faith, if you want to avoid the disaster of
heartsickness, must always be God’s Word and never some person. It has always got to be… this is why people
who enter into business partnership, who will enter into marriages, who enter
into other forms of social associations involving contracts and so on, without
praying about it and first being absolutely convinced that it’s God’s will are
going to wind up with heartsickness.
Why? Because they have placed
their trust in a contract, they have placed their trust in some other person,
they’ve placed their trust in some thing but they have not placed their trust
in the plan of God. Now you can never be
in association with somebody that is perfect, on this earth; never! There’s only one person that is perfect and
that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Those of
you who are married have already discovered this; the single people
haven’t.
But it’s a most
important lesson for a person to learn and when you learn it you’re going to be
able to avoid this problem of verse 12, but the tendency always is to get eyes
on something. This is why in premarital
counseling it is always my objective to stress to the couple that they know
this is God’s will for them, period, because there are going to come times when
you wish it wasn’t God’s will. There are
going to come times of disaster and pressure when you’re going to be very
sorry, when you’re going to be very frustrated, when you’re going to be mad,
when you’re going to be angry, but what is it that takes you through it? Trusting the person? No, they’ve fallen apart in front of you, you
can’t trust that. What are you going to
trust in? You’re going to trust in that
which is valid in the future. When you
trip down to the altar you’ve got years and years and years ahead of you; it’s
all in the future and all of that is unknown.
Now how can you trust in the future that is unknown? By trusting in a person? You can’t trust in a person, you have to
trust God and His plan for your life, that’s the only thing that’s valid for
the future and if you’re trust isn’t in that just forget it; your marriage,
your business arrangement or whatever it is that you have is going to fall flat
on its face and you are going to be heartsick.
And you’re going to moan, oh, why did this happen to me, or blame God,
why did God let this happen to me kind of thing. Always that same kind of reaction and this
results from a violation of the law of hope.
The law of hope states, like the law of mystery, the only way your soul
will function in history is to do it the way it was designed to function, trust
in God Word, and trust in anything else is going you into deep difficulty.
Now we come to the
last, the fifth law of the soul, and this is the law of learned behavior. And the law of learned behavior has to do
with man’s human spirit. Let’s take
plants first to compare, animals, and man.
And let’s look at how they respond to certain stimuli in certain
situations. The plant responds directly
to certain situations. You train ivy or
something to grow up a wall and you apply pressure and so on, but you have to
constantly apply pressure, constantly stimulate it and so on. You don’t teach an ivy plant to do something
and then in five years it picks up a bone or something the way you trained
it. Plants don’t do that and the reason
plants don’t do that is because plants don’t have a spirit. Animals do according to Genesis and animals
have a spirit and therefore they are living souls, and this adds something
new. Not only do animals now have
instinct, like a plant you might say has instinct, if you want to say it that
way, animals have instinct but animals have learned behavior patterns. They can be taught something, they can be
trained. And so this new factor that you
can observe in animals is viewed as the presence of the animal spirit. They can be trained.
But when you come
to men, not only do men have a spirit like animals but the Bible says there’s
another thing true about man that’s not true about animals; there’s something
more added. Just as we progressed from
plants to animals, so when we progress to animals from plants beneath them, is
that man still is made in the image of God, there is a constant, there is an
awareness of absolutes. And so now when
man responds to stimuli he has learned behavior patterns, and by the way, man
has very few instincts, very few instincts.
If you read some authorities in the area of physiology you’d be amazed
to see how non-instinctive we are. Man
is the only creature that doesn’t know how to instinctively drink water, one of
the most obvious things going. Animals
know how to handle water situations but human beings will not take on enough
water when they need it, and when they don’t need it they’ll drink too
much. In other words, we are built with
a very minimum set of instincts. Viewed
from the animal’s standpoint we’re pretty stupid because we don’t come equipped
with instincts.
Now there’s a
reason that God has made us this way.
God has deliberately designed your soul so you have to learn everything,
even how to drink water. Now why do you
suppose God has made us so we have to learn everything? Because in the process of learning we also
have understanding. Two things are
involved, the learned behavior patterns and understanding that goes with
it. Animals don’t have understanding,
you just train them, but in human beings you don’t just simply train them. This is not determinism; you don’t simply
train a person. You have to work with
their understanding and after they understand then they have to train, and
sometimes you train a little bit and the understanding comes with it. But there are two elements always
involved. In ever counseling situation
there are always two elements involved; understanding and development of
learned behavior patterns.
Now let’s look at
this for a moment so we understand what Proverbs is teaching us here. As men we must learn to do certain things. Since we have very little instinct it means
we have to start from scratch, from childhood, and learn vast areas of
life. Now let’s just start with a little
infant and watch how this process works.
Just think of how many muscles are involved in a child feeding
himself. From the time the spoon goes
into the dish to the time it goes all over the floor the first 150 times, till
the time he finally makes it to the mouth, there are many, many muscles have to
work. Depth perception, if the child
doesn’t have any depth perception the spoon is never going to his mouth. So you have tremendous coordination between
eyes, between the sense of touch, you have a whole bunch of things that a child
has to learn.
Now I took a very
simple and obvious thing to show you something.
After the child learns how to handle a fork and spoon and so on, we
suppose that the person is raised in the West, in the East they’d be learning
chopsticks, but no matter what the cultural situation is when the child has
finally learned this, when the kid sits down to the table does he say now I
will lift the spoon up, and then I will move it, and I will open my lips and it
will go in? Does the child think of it
consciously? No; it’s automatic. So what happens? You have life here, made of tremendously
different complex situations and one of these would be eating. Now your life right now is too complicated
for you to devote your conscious attention to everything you do. It’s impossible, you wouldn’t have your
clothes on yet, from the time you woke up if you still had to think consciously
about every little movement, from pulling up zippers to buttoning buttons, if
you had to do this (?) you still wouldn’t be dressed.
Why, then do we
learn these behavior patterns? It is so
we can enjoy a complex life without consciously thinking about it. Why does a child learn his eating? So he doesn’t have to sit there and
consciously thing, he just sits there and can do something else. It frees you, in other words. Learned behavior patterns free you to live a
complex life. And this is how you
develop; you develop eating habits, you develop habits all over your life and
they are the ways of your freedom. You
would be so over burdened if you couldn’t learn behavior patterns; we’d be over
burdened and swamped. There’d be nothing
we could do except the barest minimum of taking in water, maybe. That’s about the only thing we could do in a
24 hour period, that and sleep probably, it’d be a very, very discouraging and
very, very humiliating existence. So
learned behavior patterns encompass your whole life.
Well so far, what
I have said about these learned behavior patterns has nothing to do with
whether you’re a Christian or not. I
want you to see this; what we’re talking about has nothing to do with whether
you’re a Christian or not. Whether
you’re a Christian or not has to do with the kind of behavior patterns, but you
this morning have already developed many, many, many, many behavior patterns. You have had to in order to live. Now as a Christian we face a problem that in
many, many areas of our life we can develop patterns of behavior that we call
–R learned behavior patterns, that is, that they have a learned behavior
pattern that is an outworking of a rebellious mental attitude.
Let’s watch how
one sets in motion here. Here we have a
situation, a situation and a response.
The person is on negative volition; the person probably starts out in a
social situation, let’s say, that give rise to anger, gives rise to animosity
and jealousy and so on. That’s the
social situation. And maybe the person
hasn’t been faced quite with a situation like this; this is kind of new to
him. So now in this situation he has a
certain understanding, this is warped by negative volition, so we’ll say he has
human viewpoint additives. Now, since
that is his understanding he begins, consciously the first time, to create a
response out of this human viewpoint. So
slowly we get a learned behavior pattern developed; when he faces that
situation he’ll respond that way because he has trained himself to do it, just
like you train yourself to ride bicycles, drive cars, and eat. It is the same process of learning.
Now learning has
to be done by all men, whether you are a Christian or a non-Christian it still
involves learning. Let’s watch this in
several passages of Scripture before we deal with these passages in
Proverbs. Turn to Hebrews 5; here the
ideal man, Jesus Christ, is said to have had to have learned. If you watch this law of learned behavior you
can explain a tremendous number of things about yourself. People say I don’t understand me, you can a
little bit if you see these learned behavior patterns, you can watch it in your
own family, incidentally.
Let’s look at
Hebrews 5:8, “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things
which He suffered.” Now, let’s look at
this for a moment. Jesus Christ was
virgin born. Jesus Christ did not have a
sin nature. [Tape turns] … really
meaning to do this, and oftentimes they themselves are all right, it’s the
people that follow them, so it doesn’t matter who teaches it, just recognize
the teaching; it goes like this, that all you have to do is let Christ live His
life in you. Now that’s fine if you
understand all that’s involved. But if
you don’t understand you can make a very false conclusion out of that statement
and say oh, I don’t have to develop righteousness in these areas, the Lord will
just do that. Now is that true? What does this verse say? The Lord, in His own life, had to develop His
own behavior patterns. It’s part of His
being a responsible creature and salvation does not remove your and my
responsibility. God doesn’t take
volition out of your heart when He saves you.
He leaves it there, He wants you to use it and so sanctification
involves you and involves me in learning to obey.
Notice Jesus does
not say… it doesn’t say in verse 8, “Though He were a Son, yet learned He
things about obedience.” It doesn’t say,
“Though He were a Son, yet learned He doctrine of obedience.” It doesn’t say that at all, does it. It says He learned obedience; it means that
it took time for Jesus Christ in His sinless humanity to develop learned
behavior patterns. Did Jesus Christ have
to learn to eat? He sure did. Mary and Joseph had to teach their son how to
eat. Did Jesus Christ have to be taught
how to put His clothes on? He sure
did. Mary and Joseph had to do that. That’s why in Luke 2, the passage I just
showed you, why did Jesus go back and stay with His parents even though His
parents were wrong in a few specifics?
Because Jesus Christ, as God-man still had things to learn from both of
His parents. Imagine that; twelve years
old and (??) Jesus Christ still had things He knew He had to learn from His
parents and they couldn’t be learned anywhere else and therefore He stayed in
the home and learned. And it may be
painful. What does it say in verse 8,
does it say Jesus enjoyed learning this.
No, it says “He learned obedience by the things He suffered.” It was tough to learn obedience, even without
a sin nature.
Now come to our
situation. Visualize the, if you want a
physical picture of all this in front of you so that you can see it, visualize
soil, perfect soil, on which there will be no weeds. Who drops the seed in the ground and who
cultivates the ground? The farmer. Is he going to get his crop by just letting
God do it? No, he’s going to get his
crop by him dropping the seed in the ground and him doing the cultivating to
bring forth the fruit. Now that’s a
perfect, in Eden type situation. God
expected Adam to (?) the seed and expected Adam… in fact, what did He tell
Adam, go and till the ground. Adam
didn’t sit there, oh God’s going to do it, (?) let God do it. That’s wrong, Adam was to do it.
But now, after the
fall what else do we have to do? We have
to get rid of the weeds. So whereas
before it was a simple question of developing +R learned behavior patterns, now
the problem is we have –R learned behavior patterns to kill and these to build,
and it’s a constant struggle throughout the rest of your Christian life. You will always find yourself developing the
learned behavior patterns in the wrong direction because that is the flesh
operating. It will always work this
way. It will not come natural to develop
+R learned behavior patterns. They are
very difficult to start. Now God the
Holy Spirit promises us the energy and the encouragement to keep at it but He
is not going to do it for us. We are
going to have to do it for ourselves.
Now turn back to
Proverbs 10 and let’s watch how the law of learned behavior works. Again, make sure you understand this business
of learned behavior. Those of you who
know how to drive, when you first learned to drive, remember that awful
feeling, I’ve got to steer the thing and if you learned with a shift you’ve got
the clutch, you’ve got the accelerator, you’ve got the gear shift, good night,
you’re supposed to control all these things and look out the window too? How can I drive like this, and you remember
all these things coming on all at once and you wonder how can I do it. Now you step in your car you never think of
it, do you? Now why? That is what learned behavior does. Learned behavior is (?), you by your own
volition… where does volition enter into learned behavior? When it sets the pattern for it. So here your volition set the pattern for
some learned behavior, let’s say some positive learned behavior pattern out
here. Let’s say your negative volition
one time set up a situation where you started with a –R learned behavior
pattern; now here’s where you’ll understand something about compound carnality
if you master this law.
Watch; remember we
made a distinction between simple carnality and compound carnality. Why?
Here is the difference; in simple carnality, here you are, you’re in
fellowship with the Lord, you’re a believer, you’re operating in time, you sin,
some mental attitude sin, sin of the tongue, overt sin, something like this,
you’re out of fellowship. You get out of
fellowship, 1 John 1:9, you’re back in fellowship. Fine, in simple carnality that’s fine because
that does restore you, you are once again filled with the Holy Spirit, and you
once again move on. But now just a
minute, suppose instead of that you take this situation. You’re on negative volition, you’re out of
fellowship. It starts off looking the
same way; only one problem, this time when you’re out of fellowship you involve
yourself in some situation, maybe it’s with drugs, maybe it’s with alcohol,
maybe it’s with some sort of a prescription drug addiction type thing, where
you’re out of fellowship and you’re depressed and then you discover, say, I’ve
got a good human viewpoint compensation; while I’m depressed and due not to
physical reasons but due to spiritual reasons, while I’m depressed I think I’ll
just live it up a little, it’ll make me feel good and so on. Or I’ll do something else, and so I begin to
teach myself that in that situation this is what you do. That’s how you solve
that kind of a problem.
Now the first time
it happens you had to try to do it, the first time, it was my volition, the
mental attitude was mental attitude sin, worry, fear or something that got you
out of fellowship, but while you were out of fellowship you taught yourself
something. Now we’ve got a problem
because the learned behavior pattern your soul was originally made to work on
learned behavior patterns, why? Because
that was your created structure. God
created you to have a soul that would learn.
Now that we’re fallen, that doesn’t cancel out the way the soul was
made. So your soul just sits there and
goes on learning, learning, leaning, learning, learning, learning, and when
we’re in trouble it learns both thing, now it learns bad things. So while you’re out of fellowship you’ve
picked up a learned behavior pattern.
You might have been out of fellowship off and on for 3 or 4 weeks on
this thing. And so you’ve really got a
good pattern of behavior set up.
Now look what
happens, you say gee, I’m out of fellowship and it’s time I got back in. So you confess your sin and you get back in
fellowship, you use 1 John 1:9, fine.
Only one problem, about two minutes later the same situation hits and
what have you done to your soul? You’ve
trained it to respond in a –R learned behavior pattern. You’ve trained your soul to respond in an
ungodly way, and then bang, three minutes later you’re back out of fellowship
because you’ve trained yourself to respond this way. So there you are, boozing it up again. This is why when you come out of compound
carnality it is a learning process; using 1 John 1:9 yes, but not just 1 John
1:9, you have to go back to the way God trained Israel and He trained them by
having a severe form, not legalism, but it had a severe authority structure
with discipline, and that is the only way you can break out of –R learned
behavior patterns, this is why compound carnality is so tough to recover
from. You need to stay in fellowship and
you need to get your gluteus maximus regularly dealt with by the Lord. And that’s why I say carnality has withdrawal
symptoms. It has severe withdrawal
symptoms. And that’s why when you’ve got
one of these times it’s so discouraging for you, you say I used 1 John 1:9 and
(?) out of fellowship; sure you are, because you’ve trained yourself while you
were out of fellowship with a bad habit.
And you’ve got to retrain.
Let’s look quickly
now at these verses, Proverbs 10:23, “It is sport to a fool to do mischief, but
a man of understanding has wisdom.” Now
let’s look at the first part of verse 23, the last part isn’t a very good
translation here. “As sport is to a
fool, so is doing mischief,” that’s what it says. In other words, the word “mischief” here
means to raise hell, it’s the word for flaunting acts, it means to habitually
do this, it means stressing anti-social actions is basically what the word
means. But it means just to kind of
shake your fist at authority, a general social rebelliousness. And “sport” means something that is
pleasurable. And it means something that
you’ve taught yourself to do that is pleasurable. In other words, when you are experiencing
something that is pleasurable, when you are thinking of something that you like
to do, which appeals to you more, something you’ve trained yourself to do that
you’re relaxed at doing or something that you’re always tense at doing, you
haven’t learned to do it right?
Obviously something you’ve learned to do. So the “sport” in verse 23 means the benefit
of a learned behavior pattern. It means
that it is natural, we used the word, it’s become “second nature,” a very good
word, something that has become second nature for you to do, that’s what this
word means. It has become second nature
to a fool to do mischief; it has become part of his soul. That’s the way he acts, not because he
necessarily chooses to at that point, because he’s been trained to do it by
himself by earlier choices.
And then the last
part of verse 23, literally it reads, “As sport is to a fool, so wisdom is
sport to a man of understanding.” It’s a
direct antithetic parallelism in verse 23.
In other words, a person who is wise enjoys being wise; it has become
second nature for him to function in divine viewpoint and it’s uncomfortable
not to. Now that is a very happy state,
when you have the maturity in areas where it becomes uncomfortable for you not
to do it the biblical way. And you will
find this develops; this does develop in the Christian life.
Another verse
illustrating the law of learned behavior besides 10:23 is Proverbs 13:19, “The
desire accomplished is sweet to the soul, but it is an abomination of fools to
depart from evil.” “The desire
accomplished” means the hope, it means the hope of doing something well, “is
sweet to the soul,” and this means that the pattern of behavior, whatever this
desire is, its accomplishment is sweet.
In other words, it’s easy to do.
That’s the mark of learning to do something; it becomes very easy for
you to do it. All right, so let’s put it
together with the last part of verse 19.
“The desire accomplished is easy” or “sweet to the soul, but it’s an
abomination of fools to depart from evil,” in other words, it’s extremely
difficult for a fool to depart from evil.
A fool is two things here, it can be an unbeliever, it can also be a
believer in compound carnality, an idiot, and that’s what a believer is when
he’s in compound carnality, he’s a fool and it is extremely, extremely
difficult, sometimes it takes years to break down patterns of behavior that we
have learned while we’re out of fellowship.
Another verse in
Proverbs illustrating the same principle is Proverbs 15:21, “Folly is joy to
him that is destitute of wisdom, but a man of understanding walks
uprightly.” Again, same principle, the
joy mentioned here is the pleasure of a habit; it is that which has become
natural to do, that which has become ingrained to do. “Folly is natural to him who is destitute of
wisdom,” is it because he’s born that way?
No, it is because he has learned to be that way. “… but a man of understanding,” the word buna for understanding means one who
follows his conscience, it means therefore in verse 21 a man who is habitually
in fellowship with the Lord, a man who is sensitive that when he is out of
fellowship he immediately recognize it and uses 1 John 1:9. “…he walks,” the word “walk” means
continually do so, it’s imperfect, this kind of action, habitual action, “he
continually walks uprightly,” or according to a standard or he makes his walk straight.
Now, did the man
of understanding make his walk straight overnight, or did the man of
understanding have to learn to make his way straight? When a little baby learns how to move the
food up on his spoon from the dish to the mouth, watch them when they first start,
it’s anything but a straight line, then after a while it becomes smooth. Same thing with walking the Christian life,
you don’t learn how to walk in the Christian life a straight line right away;
it’s a process of time.
Proverbs 16:17,
same principle, “The highway of the upright is to depart from evil; but he that
keeps his way preserves his soul.” Now
the word “highway” is a rare word in the Old Testament, this particular word
for highway… here’s how we see the principle operating, was that you take two
cities and there’d be rough terrain within these cities; in the ancient world
they would make their road on the highland, never down in the valley, you can
guess why? Two reasons, you’d have
flooding and it’d make the road soggy, they didn’t have hard surfaced roads and
you couldn’t drive wagons over them so they’d make the road in the upright
place. That’s, by the way, what the
prophet Isaiah is talking about when he says He shall make the rough places
plain, he’s talking about building these raised highways. And the highways are raised also because they
are easier to defend from highway robbery.
So the raised highway, which is a noun in verse 17, has the connotation
of space and enjoyable travel. There is
a security about this kind of travel.
So “the highway of
the upright,” that which is comfortable for the upright, in other words, “the
easy journey for the upright is to depart from evil.” And that means he habitually departs from
evil in all phase; in phase one, the time we become Christians, at
justification, we depart from evil because we reject all schemes of salvation
except that which his secured through Jesus Christ on the cross. That system alone, “I am the way, the truth,
and the life, and no man comes unto Me,” that truth alone is what we believe at
the time we become Christians. So we
depart from evil, we depart from all competing solutions to man’s
problems. The second area which we
depart from evil is throughout phase two or sanctification. It’s a habitual thing of departing from
evil. Why? Why is it habitual, is it because (??), yes,
that’s part of it but that’s not all.
What happens as you grow more and more in the Christian life?
What is God the
Holy Spirit constantly doing but showing you more areas that He wants
changed. You change one, you learn one
thing, okay, you’ve got something else to learn. It’s constantly that way. I don’t buy this people who have been
Christians for 25 years or something and say oh, I haven’t learned a new lesson
in 10 years; there’s something wrong, if you haven’t learned something in the
last week or two there’s something wrong in your Christian life. You should always be learning something. So you have habitual learning in phase two. And then finally in phase three, do we depart
from evil in phase three? We sure
do. How do we depart from evil in phase
three? We receive resurrection
bodies. We’re physically removed form
this earth. So we depart from evil in
phase three. So “the highway of the
upright,” the highway of the believer going on with the Lord, “is to habitually
depart from evil.” That’s his
pattern. And that is not learned
overnight.
This is synonymous
parallelism in verse 17, it means the last part of the verse is parallel to the
first part, “he that keeps his way,” and the word here for “keep” means to
monitor, it means to watch out, it means to anticipate danger, so what does
that tell you about the first part of verse 17?
If the last part of verse 17 is really in parallel with the first part
of verse 17 what does that tell you is needed to develop +R learned behavior
patterns? What must you have in order to
get on with the development of these patterns in your life? This verse gives you the hint right
here. “…he,” and it’s a participle,
“that continually watches out for his way,” “continually” is alert, so what
this is saying is that you cannot develop godliness and righteousness in your
life if you are dull, if you are not alert, you have constantly got to be
alert. This is why the Bible says do not
be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit. What does drunkenness do? It makes you dull and not alert. “Be alert,” Paul says, “be sober,” why is he
saying that? It’s the prerequisite for
developing godliness. “…he who
continually watches his way,” now when you watch your way you’ve got to have
something to watch it with and that’s how much Bible doctrine you know, if you
don’t have any Bible doctrine you can sit there and watch all you want to, but
if you have taken in the Word of God habitually and you habitually watch what
areas in your life for application and correction, then you keep your life, you
make it worthwhile.
One further verse,
Proverbs 18:1, now this verse is all messed up in the King James translation at
least. But is a very good summary for
what we have said this morning. Let’s
start with the subject in this sentence, subject clause, “A man having
separated himself,” we’ll forget the first two words there, just forget those,
“A man who has separated himself,” now this is not godly separation, this is
ungodly animosity; the separator here was used in rabbinic literature for a
troublemaker in the synagogue, he couldn’t with any other believers, he was the
lone ranger type, so, “the man who habitually separates himself,” means one who
can never get along with other believers, he defies the authority of God, he
defies the authority of the Word and he defies the authority of the pastors and
the ministers. This is a malcontent, a
habitual malcontent in other words.
“…seeks,” and the word “seeks” is habitual, they habitually seek,
“according to desire,” notice if you have the King James it should be
italicized after “see,” there’s an italicized “and,” it’s not there in the
original, they’ve put the two verbs together.
That’s wrong. “A man having
separated himself seeks through desire,” in other words, the man on negative
volition operates according to the desires of the flesh, he has –R learned
behavior patterns and they are in particular characterized by emotionalism and
that’s developed by Paul in Romans 16; they serve their own bellies is the way
Paul paraphrased 18:1. And what Paul
means is, “belly” is the word, the Hebrew word for emotional pattern and it
means that a person on negative volition is basically a man whose emotions have
got out of hand and who has patterned his learned behavior patterns to fulfill
his emotions.
So, “a man who is
a habitual malcontent constantly seeks to fulfill his desires,” in other words,
he has gone on and allowed his emotions to teach his soul, instead of his mind
and conscience. And then the second
thing in 18:1, “he intermeddles with all wisdom,” it’s constantly intermeddles,
it means to burst out again, it means to attack and to reject the authority of,
“all wisdom” means all schemes of wisdom, all ways of wise solutions and
responses to life. In other words, here
you have a person and he has this situation he faces in his life. He has a way of responding that is godly,
there is a way of responding that is ungodly.
How does he respond to this situation?
Somebody comes and says oh gee, I feel miserable and he says well the
reason you feel miserable is because you’re responding to life in the wrong
way, in an unscriptural way, you should be responding this way so this is what
you ought to do, boom, boom, boom. That
would be “all wisdom,” literally it means every piece of wisdom. In other words, here’s some advice, common
sense advice in Scripture. So we have
some advice here given to him, and he says no, he “intermeddles with all wisdom,”
he will not accept advice that would lead to changing his behavior
pattern. He rejects the advice and he
goes on and reacts to the situation the way he wants to, according to his
desires period.
Now these verses
illustrate the law of learned behavior and we can summarize them this morning
by saying this: the law of hope deals with our relationship to future time, and
therefore false hope curses, true hope blesses.
The law of learned behavior is that because we have a human spirit in
God’s image we learn evil or good; you cannot stop yourself from learning. This is one of the curse of the soul,
actually. Some of us would wish that
God, when He cursed the earth at the fall, made it impossible to learn
evil. But God didn’t do that, He kept
our soul’s ability and desire to learn; He didn’t take it away from us.
So now the problem
is that it works when we don’t want it to work; it works automatically. You can’t change this morning your craving to
learn, to pattern yourself. No matter where
you go, this week try it some time, you might try a little exercise. Think through common every day things that
you do without thinking about them and get firmly in your mind habits that you
have just learned. Then do something
else, after you’ve done that, ask yourself, now which of these habits is really
pleasing to the Lord. And then come back
to what we’ve said; it’s an abomination to a fool to depart from evil. Now when you’re faced with patterns of
behavior in your life that are deeply ingrained, you know they don’t fit
Scripture, and you know they really should be changed, the awesomeness of it
all descends on you and you finally realize then that you really have to trust
the Lord to keep after you, harass you, beat you until you change that pattern of
behavior.
Next week we’ll
deal with a whole new area and a whole new complex of laws in the book of
Proverbs.