Clough Proverbs Lesson 74
DI #3: Family Training for Social Life
How can an older ltz, (the Hebrew word, the sophisticated
term for spiritual clod) who is already out of the home change and become wise
if he earnestly desires to break out of this and be saved from this by the
Lord. And then there is another one
that’s parallel to this and I’ll answer these two together: the ltz cannot find wisdom according to
Proverbs; what about the high student who is super smart, obeys the parents and
yet doesn’t have enough common sense to come in out of the rain. How would that kind of person be classified
biblically? Last time we dealt with the
problem of going into the teenage bracket because this is the time when
scripturally the basic patterns of life’s response are shaped, and so the
teenage years are ones that are very important.
It’s a very volatile time and very upsetting time, but nevertheless,
that period of time is when basic patterns are laid down. Now a ltz
is one who emerges from this position with a lot of –R learned behavior
patterns, in other words, these are habits built into him.
And as I have been
careful to point out, these are patterns or rebellion against the divine
institutions, and therefore it means that ltz
are people who are in rebellion against God’s creation order whether they are
believers or not. You can have people
who are believers and are just thick when it comes to any concept of
submission, in any area of life. You can
be a very bright person as far as teenage is concerned, you may be very sharp
intellectually, and for various reasons may be obedient but all the while this
is going on you may be in very great rebellion.
Now I know that those of you who are teenagers probably don’t care
particularly what I’m saying, it doesn’t mean anything to you, and I don’t know
how it’s going to become anything to you anyway until you experience the
results, but I can tell you from where I sit that if you realized what you were
setting yourself up you’d have second and third thoughts about what you’re
doing, some of you, because you’re building into your soul certain abilities,
certain habits, that you’re going to carry with you, some of them for the rest
of your life. And some of them, yes, can
be changed but with pain.
Can a ltz break out? Yes, but remember, this, if it’s a Christian
involves compound carnality and compound carnality means two things; it means
you can get back in fellowship, that’s 1 John 1:9, and that is relatively
simple… relatively simple. The problem
however is that when you meet various situations you have already trained
yourself to handle them the wrong way which means you’re going to be out of
fellowship the next time the situation comes up, out of fellowship so fast you
don’t know what happened. So, this
problem, then, of getting out of fellowship in the middle of a situation is
your –R learned behavior pattern and that is what is difficult to erase, and
painful to erase and takes you a matter of months of concerted activity to erase. It’s very easy to pick it up, very hard to
remove it. So you may think that you’re
being neutral, you may think that you can put off spiritual things. You may think that you can put off Jesus
Christ’s claims in your life. You may
think that this isn’t going to have any repercussions for you but I’ve got news
and it’s all bad, because this is already having repercussions and the evidence
it is having these repercussions is your attitude right now to the Word.
See, if the Word
of God isn’t number one and if every day you do not get in the Word of God in
some way, shape or form, you’re out of it.
And I can say that dogmatically, you’re just out of it. And you can pretend and you can carry on life
as usual but there’s going to be a price to be paid later on. And I can’t warn you more strongly than the
Word of God does and Hebrews and other passages where God becomes angry. A ltz
is one that isn’t just neutrally fouled up; a ltz is under the anger of God and how can a ltz come back? By being
obedient to what he knows and it’s a long hard road to come back because you’ve
got God angry at you, and there’s no levers, no buttons to push that are going
to make God not angry at you’ you have just got to more or less plead for mercy
in the sense that, obviously 1 John 1:9 gives you confession, gives you
restoration, but what I’m talking about is God’s overall attitude towards you;
His overall attitude toward your life, He’s hacked off and when God gets angry
the anger does not dissipate, the anger stays, and diminishes slowly.
The other question
that we had was, after my pointing out public education: Therefore, is public education biblical. No it isn’t but we are Gentiles living
outside of the
Now let’s turn to
Proverbs 10. We’re studying the laws of
the third divine institution. Again, we
go back to how God has divided the spheres of life into various institutions and
we are on the third one, the family. And
it’s in this institution that very, very important things take place. Already one law of the third divine
institution, which is often overlooked, laughed at, ridiculed, that God’s laws
aren’t broken and it always works this way, those of you who saw the film this
morning obviously saw an entire society that fell victim to this particular
rule; the success of a family is measured by the character of its
children. And you saw what happened this
morning in the Western hemisphere.
The second law
that we found with the third divine institution were four principles of
biblical learning. It begins with
humility before God; humility before God’s trainers, that is, the parents; then
the third one was that wisdom leads to more wisdom and vice versa; folly leads
to more folly. And finally corporal
punishment is a valid tool; God authorizes corporal punishment as the fastest
way to reach the inner parts of the soul is through the gluteus maximus.
Now we come to the
third law of the family and that is training for social life. Now I held off out of the first divine
institution, held this for the third and I’m not going to talk about it in
terms of the fourth; the third divine institution, the family, is the place
where all rules, cause/effect in a personal relationship, etc. etc. etc. are
learned. Why? Because the first human society had Adam and
Eve as its head and the human race had, theoretically there had been no deaths,
then all men would have been in the same family, and it would have been a
living family with Adam and Eve continuing to live, so you would still have
Adam and Eve as the great-great-great-great-grandparents of this family
controlling the family; so every person in what we call society is basically
part of that one family. Now this has
been fractured by sin, but remember, the original creation ordinances are not
negated by sin; they are only injured.
So the principles we are now going to begin studying under this third
law is that training for success in social relationships begins in the home.
And there are more
problems with this area than any other area practically, when you look at it
from the everyday situation. Children
are not taught how to get along in the home and therefore they never know how
to get along outside of the home. If
people can’t get along in their family they will not get along outside of their
family. That is a biblical
principle. We’re going to study those
things and we’re going to watch how when you rebel against God’s laws, against
His created order, which is the third divine institution and these laws that
we’re studying, then through negative volition you become a ltz or a kesil,
a foolish person and a foolish person is one who can’t get along with other
people and therefore experiences all sorts of mental problems, such as
inferiority and superiority complex, such as depression because they’re not
popular, always getting in arguments, scraps and so on, never can get along
with everybody, it’s always everybody else’s fault, never theirs. This all comes about for failure to conform
to God’s created order, which is to learn how to solve these problems in the
family. 90% of the depressions and the
mental problems that come come about simply because people do not know how to
get along with other people.
Let’s look at some
of the proverbs and some of the principles.
We’re going to discuss two principles under this law, the first one is a
very important one, and that is that individuals give character to their group. This is a relationship between individuals
and the group that works in your home, it’ll work in any group that you’re in,
it works nationally, that the individual gives character to the group. This principle, once you see it, explains a
lot of things. It explains why you may
be personally ostracized from some group that you want to get into and don’t
seem to be able to make it. The reason
is that the group unconsciously, almost intuitive senses that you are not going
to give it the proper character and therefore you’re excluded from the very
start. There is almost a fifth sense and
we’ll see what that (quote) “fifth sense” is, it’s also biblical, that operates
in any group; I don’t care if it’s Christian, non-Christian or anything else,
this sense operates to sensor and to segregate people that are a threat to the
group, and generally it is a person who is suspect, a person who the group
unconsciously feels… they may not even be conscious they’re doing this, but
they’ll just cut you off and just exclude you because they feel that you can’t
give character to their group. And
obviously the answer then is well how do I give character to the group, and
that’s by conformity to the Word. Let’s
see this principle.
Proverbs 11:10,
this illustrates the principle with regard to a city, though the principle can
be applied in many, many spheres of life.
“When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the
wicked perish, there is shouting. [11]
By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the
mouth of the wicked.” Now the city is a
small, the word “city” in the Bible as we found in the family training
framework literature thing is basically can mean a collection of tents, it is a
word that refer to a large city or a small city, so don’t think of some
concrete jungle when you see the word “city” in verse 10, it can be any lose
group of people.
“When it goes well
with the righteous,” now what is the righteous?
The word “righteous” is tsedek,
and this is the Hebrew word that means standard, and it refers to God’s Word as
the standard or the yardstick that measures, and the righteous is the person
who has developed a maximum amount of +R learned behavior patterns that conform
to that standard. So here is the
righteous person, the person who in his soul, by practice over years, has
learned righteous patterns of behavior.
And part of the righteous patterns of behavior that these people have
learned is how to get along with people in the group. Now at this point some may raise the
question, well, Jesus didn’t along with His people and I thought the New
Testament says that the group is always going to hate the righteous
person. So right here we have to
understand something about this righteous and why the righteous are basically
accepted in the group.
The principle goes
back to the conscience. Suppose you have
a whole group of people here and they have a conscience. Now the conscience has a basic
God-consciousness to it; this group you may belong to may be a pretty gross
outfit and the sin may be so thick you can cut it, mental attitude and overt
activities, but nevertheless, no matter how bad it is every one of those people
in that group, whether it’s at the office, whether it’s in your neighborhood,
whether it’s in your dorm, whether it’s in the classroom or wherever it is,
people have a conscience and since you know they have a conscience you know
that deep in this conscience is God-consciousness. Now they have a certain amount, some people
have more God-consciousness, visualizing it this way as volume, than others,
but all of them have God-consciousness.
How do we know that? Because if
they didn’t God couldn’t hold them responsible.
So they’ve got to have God-consciousness. Romans 1 teaches this.
So then what
happens is that here you are and if you crank out +R learned behavior patterns,
and you in your behavior conform to the standards of God’s Word, then there’s
going to be a meeting, so to speak, between your +R learned behavior patterns
and the God-consciousness in each one of their consciences. Now on the surface they may hate you and
revile you, they may not want you around as the people of Jesus’ day didn’t
want Him around. But, deep in their
conscience there is a fundamental respect and Proverbs is not looking at the
surface sin of the group. These verses
in the book of Proverbs, if you’re going to understand them properly don’t look
as that, they look on the consciences of the group.
Illustration: you
may be in a situation where everyone is ridiculing some points of truth and you
stand for it. The moment you stand up
for the Word of God in the middle of a hostile group you can feel the group
pressure. You can just feel it, it’s
there. The atmosphere is suddenly
electrified and you feel like you’re the capacitor or something about ready to
discharge. But you can feel the group,
almost physiologically, kind of waiting on you when this happens. Now the tendency is to chicken out in that
situation and pull in your horns and pull down the flag and move on, in
compromise, instead of sticking with the principles because you know the longer
you stick with the principles the more obvious you are going to become. But here’s something very interesting. Though you may be the target of a lot of
hostility because of your stand for the Word of God, nevertheless, these people
are going to respect you; they will always respect you. People didn’t disrespect Jesus Christ, they
hated Him and there’s a difference. You
can hate someone you respect, simply because you hate the principle for which
they stand. But you do have a
fundamental respect for them and it’s that respect that Proverbs is looking at.
Another
illustration; we’ve often had businessmen and men in the service who have stood
for the Word of God and made their testimony very clear and very public. And what happens, of course, is that sort of
a discrimination sets in because they are looked upon as having some sort of
religious B.O. or something and this turns people off, supposedly. But the interesting thing about it is, these
men have reported to me, is that when the boss wants a job done and he has a
very critical task, who does he come to?
The person he apparently can’t stand.
Why? Because he respects him,
because he has the confidence that Christian man will get the job done. This is repeated over and over and over and
over again in business, in the military, in various other areas, that the
believer who is mocked and ridiculed for his position, in the final analysis is
always the person looked upon as the one that can do the job, the one that will
do the job and do it well. Now that is
what Proverbs is looking at.
And what Proverbs
is challenging you and I with is to get back to this principle; we are after
respect, not approbation, and there’s a world of difference between the
two. You see, the tendency is when
you’re carnal, the tendency is when you’re out of fellowship, is always to seek
the approbation of the group. You can’t
stand five minutes inside a group of people if they just don’t fall all over
themselves because you walked in the room, because they don’t give you a lot of
attention, because they don’t always talk what you like to talk about, that
kind of thing, approbation. You just
can’t stand that and you’ve never been trained to handle yourself in that kind
of a situation. So you resent it and
your tendency is to either shut out everybody in the room and turn into a
statue or just to become hostile, or just to leave the group and the hell with
them kind of attitude. And all of those
are unscriptural.
But it all comes
about because you are confused between respect and approbation of a group. Approbation of a group you do not want and
you don’t need. Respect, Proverbs is
going to argue, you do need… you do need, that’s right, I said need, and I’ll
explain that also from Proverbs. But
this first rule is that individuals give character to a group and so therefore
the respect of the individual hinges on his potential to contribute character to
a group.
Let’s look at
Proverbs 11:10 again: ‘When it goes well with the righteous,” here the person
is one who is getting respect, going well, means the fact that this person is
exhibiting his righteousness in either leadership activity or otherwise; “the
city rejoices,” now that doesn’t mean the city likes him personally. It doesn’t mean the city is overjoyed every
time they see him but there’s a basic core of rejoicing. Now we are all living in a time in our country
when we don’t have respect for leaders.
Now you may disagree with a leader and not like him but I think all of
you can tell the difference between not liking a public figure and having a
respect for him on the one hand over here, and just not having respect for any
of them. And you are experiencing as
Americans right now what it means to have no respect; there just is an
emptiness, a washiness, there’s a chaos, there’s no leadership, everything is
kind of washing around. There’s no
firmness any more, no rigidity. That
comes because there’s no character and there’s no respect.
Now in colonial
America when this country began, people did not like men like Alexander
Hamilton, these were not popular men, don’t kid yourself. Alexander Hamilton was probably one of the
most brilliant believers in the American Revolution and was the most soundly
biblical in his philosophy of government.
Jefferson was some sort of a clod and everybody holds Jefferson up to be
a great democrat; Jefferson was some sort of a creep that he never took up arms
to defend the country, he just popped in afterwards. Alexander Hamilton was an artillery corpsman
and fought with George Washington and he was the one who laid his life on the
line for this country; Jefferson just said a lot of words. But men like Hamilton were the real geniuses
behind America. And they were not liked
and popular men. Samuel Adams is
different, but Hamilton was a lot different.
He was considered to be arrogant, he was considered to be proud, he was
considered to be just too good for everybody.
The reason for this is that in any group that has no character, they
diagnose your confidence in the Word as pride.
This is completely reverse.
Now watch what
happens here; under the divine viewpoint, this is the divine viewpoint, suppose
this is going on in your soul and here’s the human viewpoint going on in the
group. Now under divine viewpoint you
have God here and you are submitting to God’s Word, so there actually is
fantastic humility here because what you’re saying is God said it and I obey
it, period. Now that is implicit confidence
that leads to instant obedience. And
that’s a sign of Christian maturity, instant obedience to God’s Word. Of course once you understand what’s going on
and so forth, it doesn’t mean blind, but instant obedience. Now that is true humility before God; you are
humble in the sense that you yield, point by point in every area of your mind,
to the absolute authority of the Word of God.
That is proper humility.
But watch what
happens; here you are in a group that runs by human viewpoint; you are humbled
to the standards of God’s Word. Now how
do you appear to these people? You
dogmatic bigot! Proud! Nobody’s right around here but except you;
that’s right! Why? Because God says so and He’s right,
period. As one person recently expressed
and I think it was very well, the attitude that you have that’s totally humble
is that this is what God says, it’s true, and if you like it God bless you and
if you don’t God damn you. And this is
basically the attitude. But how is that
interpreted? It’s interpreted as the
most cocky arrogant bigoted position that you could ever take.
Now you learn from
history, the men like Alexander Hamilton, like Jonathan Edwards, like John
Witherspoon, all, if you read the biographies of people around them, they
couldn’t stand these guys for their cockiness, their arrogance, their lack of
(quote) “open-mindedness,” (end quote).
Yet who was it that gave character to this nation? They did.
Who was it that fundamentally saved this country from Jefferson? Men like Hamilton. If Jefferson had his way we’d have a French
Revolution. Who saved this country from
men like Thomas Paine? Hamilton, these
people, the arrogant, cocky, unpopular men who stood for the Word of God and
its principles.
Now this is
something you’ve got to understand as we go into these proverbs; don’t think of
Proverbs as teaching you approbation of the group; I’m warning you against
that. Don’t read that into these verses;
it’s not in these verses. These verses
are talking about respect of the group which is different than
approbation. Now you can use your own
words to sort out the difference, those are the words I happen to be choosing
today, you may think of some better ones that will fit more with you and how you
think.
But let’s look at
Proverbs 11:11 and watch, “By the blessing of the upright,” the word “upright”
again emphasizes standards; the word means straight. “By the blessing of the straight, the city is
exalted,” “the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the
wicked,” now why is it always true that wherever you have a group of people
under God’s creation it is always… always… always going to be true that that
group will prosper as positive volition grows in it. In the long term run it always has; that was
the whole argument of the film this morning, that civilizations rise and fall
in proportion to the divine viewpoint.
It will always work out and it’s the unconscious, almost unconscious,
not quite all unconscious with men, generally in any group, your office, your
school, people you hang around with, it’s almost unconscious but not quite,
that they know this, and they basically need those unpopular dogmatic bigots
around to keep up the character of the group.
Now to see this a
little bit clearer turn to Romans 1, that famous passage on deterioration
socially. I want you to look at the last
verse to show you that no matter how gross the group is in which you may
associate it’s never totally true that they don’t know right from wrong, and
they ultimately deep down don’t have a respect for the standards of truth. In Romans 1:32 it speaks of these people who
have deteriorated socially; these are Gentiles who have never become
Christians, they’ve drifted away from divine viewpoint; and they know the
judgment of God, now look at that, look at what preceded verse 32, look at all
the things listed in verse 29, all the things listed in verse 30, all the
things listed in verse 31 and after all of that, God’s Word says in verse 32,
they “know the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worth of
death, not only do them but have pleasure in them that do them.” Now that’s the attitude but notice in verse
32, deep down in their God-consciousness of the conscience, which is
indestructible, they know right from wrong.
And that is your fifth column; if you are thinking now in terms of your
relationship to any group, know this, you have a fifth column working for
you. It’s the God-consciousness in the
consciences of that group. You’ve always
got that working for you, no matter how much animosity your draw by your stand,
no matter how hostile the group becomes toward you personally, you know in back
of it they know right from wrong and it’s that that you have to bank on; that
is what you have to rely on as you operate by faith, sometimes in very, very
hostile environments.
Let’s go back to
Proverbs 11 again; Proverbs 11:14, again, following the same principle it is
the individual who gives character to the group. The next two verses that we are going to
study are verses that demonstrate why the group needs individuals with wisdom,
no matter how gross the group may be they still need individuals with
wisdom. Verse 14, “Where no counsel is,
the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” Now I doubt anyone remembers it but when we
began Proverbs we explained the word counselor and the word counselor, you
recall then, was the word that meant a person who is able to truly grasp the
situation because of divine viewpoint framework and give advice based on the divine
viewpoint framework. The counsel here is
not what in psychology circles is called non directive counseling; this is
highly directive; it’s authoritative counseling that says this is the way it
should be, period. Not “what do you
think,” kind of thing. It is
authoritative.
Now verse 14 is telling us that when there is no counsel, when there is no
counsel there is no divine viewpoint framework in the group. Now keep in mind, these are creation laws
that apply both to believer and unbeliever.
So take a nation, like America for example, that’s a good one right now,
no divine viewpoint framework; if there is no divine viewpoint framework
automatically the group is going to go down.
Now why is there this automatic rule?
Because who made the world? God
did. Who wrote and revealed the divine
viewpoint framework in the Bible? God
did. Same God did both of them. What does that mean? That means if the divine viewpoint is
exercised, the divine viewpoint framework fits the real world. It’s not pie in the sky, it’s not living for
tomorrow completely; it is the present world and analyzing the situations in
the present world in the light of the Word of God. And anyone who has a divine viewpoint
framework is a counselor. So in this
verse, then, “Where there is no counsel,” that means where Christian citizens
either are stupid and ignorant of the Word of God and like to remain so because
they’re wrapped up in all their victorious life and feeling groups and so
forth, instead of studying the Word of God on a daily basis they have
substituted something for the divine viewpoint framework, your nation is going
to go down.
Also another
thing, you can have Christians citizens with the divine viewpoint framework
that never open their mouth and the nation will go down because counseling
means that you open your mouth and you give it.
And as a citizen you are obligated by God, God expects you as a citizen
with the right to vote, to feed divine viewpoint into the flow. Everybody else is feeding human viewpoint in,
you’d better get a little bit of the divine viewpoint in, and you have various
ways that are open to you, to make divine viewpoint felt, in other words, to
make Christian waves, to rock the boat a little bit. That is your obligation, because if you don’t
that principle holds, the nation of the United States gets its character from
the individuals with divine viewpoint and if you keep your mouth shut and you
retreat and retreat and retreat and you let the public schools totally shape
what your child thinks, if you let the public school system take over your kids
at age 4 with Head Start and the rest of the things, Heat Start means Heart
Stop, it’s a human viewpoint attempt to destroy conscience, and those kinds of
programs that are designed to destroy the family, the family will be
destroyed. God’s law says so, right
here, “Where no counsel it, the people fall.”
So that’s the principle.
Let’s turn and see
the principle in Proverbs 15:22, “Without counsel purpose are disappointed, but
in the multitude of counselors they are established.” Again, the dependency of the group on the
individual with character, translated the individual with divine viewpoint who
makes itself, who brings it to bear. On
a four year cycle here at Lubbock Bible Church there are people that go through
and take in the Word and then go off after graduation to many, many different
places in the country. You have an
opportunity when you get away from here to put what you learned into practice,
you’ll have more time to do it, more freedom to do it and that’s your
opportunity. And so you can make hay
while the sun shines or you can goof off, but there’s coming a time when you
will have tremendous opportunity, many of you.
Many of you will
go on for different careers where you will have tremendous opportunities in
leadership. You will have the
opportunity to be the counselors; you will have the opportunities to be the
salt of the earth, and by the time you get into those positions the earth will
need salting like it never needed it before.
And it’s your challenge, it’s a challenge directed to you because you
can be a tremendous and powerful influence.
In the four years many of you are here and some of you are business
people that drift through in four or five year cycles and so forth, you can
pick up the Word of God and implement it if you want to, or you can make some
other interest of your life take
precedence. You take the Word of God,
learn it, submit to it, develop godly patterns of obedience to it in every area
of life, at least start in every area of life, then you will have a tremendous
impact. This country has not seen what
I’m talking about for at least 200 years.
This country has not seen an effective Christian onslaught in every area
since the last of the Puritans. We have
gone on and on with religious revivalism, with people getting saved, individual
souls but really no great impact as far as the nation is concerned and the
reason is we have neglected the whole counsel of God.
Now let’s watch
historically how Proverbs 15:22 plays out in United States history. Let’s take two examples from out recent
history to watch how this works. Let’s
take first the area of the military. If
it’s true what the Bible teaches, that the individual gives character to the
group, and that the group always needs the counsel of wise individuals, and we
see ourselves militarily falling down today in third and fourth rate status
before a mighty, mighty military machine, the likes of which the world has
never seen, I refer to the Russians, what has happened to our counselors? Isn’t that the principle here; it’s the
counselors; if we had the counselors then we would have it. All right, let’s look at the counselors; look
at men like MacArthur, what happened to them.
Look at men like Billy Mitchell who after World War I warned the United
States the next war would be decided through air power, who was ignored. MacArthur who warned us two decades ago what
was going to happen in far east Asia and warned us that American blood would be
wasted in a land situation there, so did we listen? No, there was no counsel. You see, to have successful counsel you have
to have the counselor, you have to have the counsel and you have to have the
counselee. And you don’t have counsel biblically
until you have all three. We’ve had the
counselors only but we haven’t had any counselees, nationally speaking, because
we have rejected the counseling; there has been no counselees.
We can go to Hyman
Rickover, a man in the Navy who for the last two decades have yelled his head
off that what is going to save the United States is a nuclear submarine
force. Did anybody listen to Hyman
Rickover? No, when I was going to MIT I
heard Dr. Rostow who was recently the foreign affairs advisor for Lyndon
Johnson’s administration get up in all seriousness in the lecture hall and say,
we don’t have to worry, when the Russians have 51 nuclear submarines and we
have 51 everybody will be happy and tensions will cease. That was when we were leading and his
argument was we should stop building our nuclear submarine fleet, and of course
we did, so did the Russians stop with 51?
No. Have tensions ceased? No.
And of course, again warnings of men like Rickover have just simply gone
down the drain. Now, as if God can’t
warn us through our own people, just in the last two months He’s starting to
warn us from somebody else, the father of the Russian hydrogen bomb, Andrei
Sakharov, the man who corresponds to the great nuclear scientist in our
country. He’s the man who’s the
architect of the Russian program and what does he say? Only a copule of months ago called American
reporters to his apartment and said you Americans are really stupid because you
trust us Russians in these SALT talks; you are asking for it because the people
that run this country, said Sakharov, aren’t interested in negotiations,
they’re only interested in taking over Europe and you’re letting them do it.
Now who is it that God has to use to speak; He’s used Americans to warn us,
He’s used the Russians to warn us; He’s used incident after incident to warn
us. The recent war with Israel, who were
the architects behind the antiaircraft missiles that were used against the
Israeli Air Force with such disastrous results?
The Russians. What do you think
they were interested in that for? Just
to protect a bunch of Arabs? No, they
were interested in testing their missiles for when they’re going to take Europe
over. [Tape turns] Did we listen? No. So
in the area of the military it’s very easy to see that we have [can’t
understand words] Does this verify Proverbs 15:23; exactly. [Second side of tape very hard to hear]
Let’s take a
second area that we have studied in the first divine institution. Let’s take economics. We have had voices crying in this country
that you can’t spend more than you make; that’s an elementary principle but
after you’ve had a few (?) you can invent ways of getting around it and so now
we have systems of economics that advocate deficit spending, [can’t understand
words] So we have an entire financial
scheme in the United States is (?) from one end to the other in systematic (?)
from the (?) point of view. And so if
you look at some items to pinpoint this on how well we’ve obeyed the biblical
principles of economics, let’s look at some (?) from 1973 to 1963; take
national defense. That has risen (?)
percent and every one of you who are in a family are kindly paying $1,170 a
year to national defense. Now basically
this is a very small increase by virtue of the next one. Security; that includes social security and
everything else, that has increased 138% in the last ten years. And don’t you see how secure you are,
marvelous! $1,041 every family is paying
for security.
Now I ask you, can
you be secure with an insecure military?
The best security if you want to take the $1,041 and build yourself a
good fallout shelter and pack it with food and that will be your best form of
security because we’re going to see it.
Interest on the debt; this is a needless expense if we were adhering to
the Word of God. That’s gone up 89% and
each family is kindly contributing $316 a year to pay on past debt, which is an
expense that you shouldn’t have to pay if we were run on biblical laws. We could go on and on. Education, notice how much better educated we
are now than we were in the Puritan days; notice how everyone knows the
Constitution very well, we have discussions in public about the fine details of
Article X or Article III or Article IV of the Constitution and everybody understands
the issues. Every family spends $159.00
a year and that’s gone up 526% since 1962.
Can’t you see all the tremendous increase in public education, a real
great contribution? Well, that’s
Proverbs 15:22 spelled out with specifics.
Now let’s come to
a second principle. The second
principle, built on the first one, the first one was that the individual gives
character to the group. And therefore,
before we go to the second principle and state it, let’s draw an application to
the first one. In your families how do
you teach children to socially succeed?
You teach them character and they will succeed. The best success preparation for any child as
he grows up is to teach him the depth of character that comes from a systematic
obedience to the Word of God in every area, and he is going to have the respect
of groups. You don’t have to worry about
all those gimmicks, all the little parties, all the other things that are used;
teach them the Word and how to apply it in issue after issue, point after point,
and they will be successful the way you want them to be if you’re thinking
divine viewpoint.
Now let’s come to
the second one. This is the opposite;
individuals depend on the group for their historic value. This may seem strange in light of our independence
on the Word but it’s true, that your historic value is depending upon the
group’s idea. It’s the group of men
within your (?) that imputes to your life historic value. Now God does, yes, and the historic value
that men impute to your life is often different from what God imputes to your
life. But, it is a fact that Proverbs
comes down hard on this. Proverbs 10:7,
the group makes a historic evaluation of your life. Now this is the source of some mental
problems with people today, deep down in their heart they know this, that their
life is what the group more or less evaluates them and they don’t like it and
they feel excluded and then they get depressed about. Instead of solving the problem biblically, which
is to develop a biblical character and response, instead of doing that they sit
in their room and sulk, or compensate by doing some weird thing like get on
drugs or doing something else that’s designed to attract attention, look how
great I am, I take drugs; boy, that’s really thrilling, it takes guts to pop a
pill, doesn’t it? That really is an
accomplishment? So these are the kind of
panaceas that people invent in their human viewpoint rebellion against God’s laws.
Proverbs 10:7 now,
“The memory of the just is blessed, but the name of the wicked shall rot.” Now that’s the biblical valuation of the
whole problem right there. “The name,”
or “The memory,” the name is the word in the Bible which means essence or
character. Now look at how the words are
used synonymously. You have name, name
equals your character; then up above it has memory and memory is something in
the group, obviously rocks don’t remember, trees don’t remember, people
remember. So it’s people that store the
memory and the name is your character, and the two are used synonymously
here. And it’s no accident they turn out
to be synonyms as far as the man who writes God’s Word says. Your memory before a group largely hinges on
your character. “The memory of the
just,” this is the same word, tsedek,
which is the righteous one who conforms to God’s standard; “the name of the
wicked one shall rot,” literally, that’s what it means, and the word “wicked”
is very interesting in contrast to the righteous, the word “wicked” here looks
like this in the Hebrew, rashah,
r-a-s-h-a-h, and that word when it occurs for wickedness refers to chaos. That’s the word if you recall sometimes if
you’ve ever read it in Isaiah, he’s talking about the wicked are like the
troubled sea that casts up mire and dirt and can never rest, always like this,
always jumping from one thing to the other, no standards, no (?), no character,
no stability, always jumping around.
That emphasizes a certain part of evil; evil in God’s universe always
produces chaos, and the person then whose name shall rot means that he has
contributed nothing to the group except chaos.
Now look at this
from a long-term point of view. Here you
are, associated with some group. Right I
the present moment this may not be true, but if you’re going to stand with the
Word of God you are going to have a testimony in front of that group; the group
may not right now appreciate it, but since they have to live in God’s world and
face situation after situation after situation after situation, every time the
group hits a new situation they’re going to see that what you stood for works,
and that’s where you earn your reputation in a group. Now suppose instead you chickened out right
here. Suppose when you stood up to the
Word of God the first time and you felt that pressure you chickened out and you
say well, I’d better pull my flag down and forget it, I’ll be an invisible
saint, tied to an invisible church, that does invisible work in history.
Now suppose you
did that; all right, you kind of crawl back into the dirt and disappear; now
the group has nothing to evaluate you by, ever.
If you went out on a limb and stood for the Word of God to start with,
then as history proceeded don’t you think God would show the group that what
you stood for was true? God’s certainly
showing the United States right now, isn’t He, that human viewpoint economics
doesn’t work. Isn’t God showing the
United States, and I hope not in a very graphic physical way that our military
policies are grounded on human viewpoint and they aren’t going to work either
as the Chief of Naval Operations said in a recent speech in Houston, the
American public wants a second class navy, the American public will not only
get one, they’ve already got one. And
that’s just the way it is. So we’ll find
out and those who have stayed with the Word of God, it’s not that you say
anything like I told you so, that’s not the point. The point is that honor and glory is due God
because by standing on His Word you attract attention to Him. People are going to say now where did they
get that idea from. Where did they get
the strength to stand in that hour?
Don’t panic when
you hear the words of disaster; we emphasize the reality around here and we are
in a bad way nationally speaking, and we may collapse economically in a year or
so or something, we may not, but the point still remains, if you will take in
the Word of God you will be the best prepared of any person. If we have a collapse around here people are
going to be fainting, falling apart and all sorts of things but it’s those who
have prepared themselves from the standpoint of the Word that can take it. If Russia dropped a nuke over here in the
West and we were under 36 hours or something of intense fallout, and you had to
exist in some fallout shelter some place, if you had to live in a fallout
shelter for 36 hours or so, you’d watch people fall apart, oh I can’t take it,
I’m at the end of my rope and so forth.
You couldn’t take it either if right now you don’t start taking in the
Word. And use it! So you get used to handling yourself and then
if that happens you’re ready for it, and if it doesn’t happen then you still
can use the material.
Let’s look at
Proverbs 12:8, “A man shall be commended according to his wisdom, and he that
is of a perverse heart will be despised.”
Now the word “commend,” again, it’s the group that is evaluating his
life. It’s not God, it’s the group
here. “A man shall be commended
according,” it says in the King James, “according to his wisdom,” literally it
says “according to the (?) of his wisdom,” which is the Hebrew way of saying
“according to the proportion of his wisdom,” in other words, certain people
will have, say this much wisdom; other people will have this much; other people
will have this much. In other words, the
commendation is directly proportional to the amount of your wisdom. Now what is wisdom?” Again, wisdom is a combination of the divine
viewpoint framework, doctrine that has been taken into the soul, plus +R
learned behavior patterns that are a habit that you have developed in applying
that doctrine in situation after situation after situation. So the combination of doctrine and practice,
that’s wisdom.
Now it says, “A
man shall be commended according to the amount of wisdom” or chokmah that he has, “and he that is of
a bent heart,” literally, it’s the word for crooked, “he that is of a crooked
heart shall be despised.” Now the
“crooked heart” goes back to the concept of what the soul looks like. Let’s look at it. Here’s the body, the body is made up, central
nervous system and various things, and then God says when he made Adam He made
his body and then He breathed into him a spirit. So you have the spirit and its
contribution. The result of the two
together is the soul. Now with that kind
of a model we can see what this “bent heart” is all about. “Heart” refers to the mind and the
conscience. That’s the heart in
Scripture. Now when the heart is “bent”
what does it mean? The heart is bent
means that there is a barrier set up between your mind and your
conscience. You conscience is telling
you what is true, what is right; your mind is just thinking, but your mind
needs a base in order to think from and that’s your conscience. But, conscience is constantly condemning
human viewpoint in the mind based on how much divine viewpoint you’ve taken in
to load the conscience. So as the
conscience begins to condemn and condemn and condemn the person says well, I’m
going to be disobedient, I’m going on negative volition, I’m not going to submit
to God’s Word, I’ll do it tomorrow, and so meanwhile a barrier begins to set in
here between the mind and the conscience.
And it grows with every disobedience, every time you put off until
tomorrow, or every time God shows you that something is right and you fail to
respond, bang, you hurt your conscience and you can start very, very early, at
God-consciousness, three, four year olds, all the way on up, developing these
habits.
A “bent heart”
then is one that the conscience is almost nullified, and you have a person that
may be very brilliant. Don’t confuse
academic brilliance with chokmah in
Scripture. They are not related. Academic brilliance can be shown by some of
the greatest idiots on earth, and some people that are not academically shrewd
at all know things about the Lord that would just floor you, by their own
personal experience with Him, submitting very humbly, very simply the Word of
God, they have learned lessons that most theologians haven’t learned. Why?
Because they’re using their conscience, everybody else is using their
mind. So a “bent heart” is this kind of
a person. What does it say about this
one again, verse 8? “The one who is of a
bent heart will ultimately become despised.”
The idea is that all of his reasonings, brilliant schemes are going to
collapse because God has made the world and the person who operates on human
viewpoint cannot fit the real world. I
once said this and I’d like to hear myself say it again: human viewpoint is a
form of insanity; if you want to define insanity as separation of the real
world we’re all insane to a degree, we always have been since the fall; we
don’t like all of reality, there are certain things about God and reality we
don’t like. God’s part of reality, and
so when we turn away from God we become insane, to a degree. And carnality just increases your insanity
because it insulates you from the real world.
It’s only the humble Christian submitting to God who’s really real.
Now one final
verse in the same vein, Proverbs 22:1, this is the motto and it goes back to
the family and the education of its children.
We’ve learned two principles this morning about teaching children to
succeed in society. One is they have to
learn that if they want to be acceptable in the respectable sense to a group,
they’re going to have to be able to give that group character, and that means
the child has to be trained and his character has to be developed and when it
is then he will not have a problem with acceptability in the group. The other lesson that we’ve learned this
morning is that he must depend upon the group later in life for a basic
judgment as to how worthwhile he is.
Now one example
comes to mind is one that probably anybody can see quite quickly and that is
capitalism. Most people that are against
the capitalist system of economics, the more or less free market concept, are
basically people that are misfits.
Misfits always detest capitalism.
Do you know why? Because
capitalism shows you your worth. In
capitalism nobody scoops you out; in capitalism in the free market you get what
you produce, all other things being equal, far more than you would in a
bureaucratic system, and people, the eggheads and others, who are to a large
degree social misfits, you will find always have animosity to capitalism and
the reason that they have this animosity is because living in a free market
they never can earn money, they never can feel like they can earn the kind of
money that they’re worth. And the reason
they never can earn the kind of money that they’re worth is because they’re not
worth it, and they don’t like to be reminded of this and so they take it out
with a hatred towards free enterprise.
And this is why many, many misfits are your most powerful advocates of
socialism and hindrances to the free market.
They’re trying to insulate the true evaluation that the group places
upon them, and it becomes very clear in a free market, the evaluation the group
places on you.
Now Proverbs 22:1
is sort of the motto that ties these two principles together, and this is the
objective you should teach your children.
This is what should be taught in the third divine institution over and
over and over and over and over again, “A good name is rather to be chosen
great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold.” Now it’s not talking about be a humble poor
clod because many of the people who were taught from Proverbs in history at the
time this book was written were wealthy people.
When Solomon was
king in Jerusalem, they said, in certain passages, that silver was as abundant
in the street as pebbles. Now that shows
you that Solomon had a fantastic economic system. But what produced the economic system under
Solomon was the spirituality that had preceded him under David, and it was this
concept; you aim for the good reputation; you aim for the high character, not
in the eyes of men but go back to what I warned you about, Proverbs is looking
at the reside of God-consciousness in the souls, the God-consciousness of this
person, the God-consciousness of this person, the God-consciousness of this
person and in the eyes of that God-consciousness, that’s where the good name
shall be. And the rest of it, you’ll get
a lot of static, yes, but your aim, your objective, teach the children they are
going to have a good solid character and if this were taught you could forget
about a lot of the little gimmicks, how to get along at the parties, you have
to go to this party and that party, learn to dance by 6th grade
because if you don’t you’ll be a social misfit and so forth. All of that is a bunch of baloney. It is the depth character on the basis of the
Word of God that counts. If that’s there
your children will be successful.
Next week we’ll deal with several other principles in Proverbs dealing with
specific sin patterns that I have noticed in my counseling and also that are
explained in the book of Proverbs.