On a beautiful Saturday after a bunch of scootering and bowling with my boys we returned home only for one of them to tell me his ears hurt. Prone to ear infections, I knew immediately his ears will bad off. Being a Saturday, I took him to an urgent care and shelled out for the appointment. He tested positive for strep but the nurse said his ears looked fine. I went home, grabbed his twin brother, and brought him back for a strep test. Sure enough, positive. I get home around 6/7pm and sure enough, my son’s ears start hurting, badly. He was inconsolable. We went back to the urgent care for the third time and finally late that night he had enough meds in him to help him sleep. By the way, this was all after my wife and I realized he gave him too much of one medication and were now worried about that.
What’s my point here? On the late-night trip driving back home after the third trip to the urgent care I was tired, frustrated, annoyed, and you name it. To help, I started meditating on Proverbs 3:5. Yes, you read that right. Verses in Proverbs. Isn’t Proverbs just for wise thinking in odd situations? How does Proverbs help when you have sick kids and are exhausted? Surprisingly, the point of the whole book of Proverbs may be different than what we often think.
Prov. 3:5-8 summarizes well the main message of the book and the end of that text says, “It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.” Proverbs, a book about healing and refreshment? Really? If you read Proverbs front to back you’ll find it’s a book about life and death. It’s about healing or wasting away. Refreshment or being drained to death. The question is, what is the thing that will be healing and refreshment, or life, for us? Let’s look at the text.
Proverbs tells us how to find healing and refreshment and starts in a surprising place. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart…” We often think of Proverbs as an action book. It will tell us what to do. It will give us wise sayings to help us make decisions. When we think, “I need to grow in trust in the Lord,” we don’t think to read Proverbs. Furthermore, we think Proverbs is mainly dealing with our intellect. But this summary text deals with our “heart”, which includes our intellect but is more than that. Here’s the initial point: Proverbs is saying that if you want to be wise and thrive in life, start with considering who you trust with your very life.
You have two options and only two options. You can trust in the Lord or you can “lean on your own understanding.” You can live outward, looking in trust to the Lord or you can live inward, looking at yourself in a mirror and concluding that you are trustworthy enough to trust yourself with your life.
This trust here is not a pie in the sky trust that ignores the complexities of life. Proverbs says we are to trust the Lord and “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Proverbs understands the complexities of life and the countless ways in which we walk. It knows our ways are often scary, uncertain, confusing and difficult. It knows you might be thinking, “I don’t know which way my career should go, my dating life should go, my marriage should go, my college major should go, my parenting should go.” Sometimes Proverbs speaks directly to those ways but the primary concern of the book is that in all those ways you know – you acknowledge - who is the Wise One, the King, the Creator, the God of all grace.
This is key: the text doesn’t tell us to become wise to the point that we no longer need to rely on God. Ironically, I think sometimes we go to Proverbs to become less dependent on God. To get all the answers so that we don’t have to lean on Him and acknowledge Him. But the wise life is dependence on Him in all your ways, paths, decisions, and actions. Then and only then will we find our paths are made straight for us, by Him. Any other path is a path of decay and death.
This main point of trusting in the Lord is made even more clear when put negatively. “Be not wise in your own eyes”. This gets at one of the few repeated verses in the book. In Prov. 14:12 and 16:25 we read, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” In other words, be not wise in your own eyes. Lean not on your own understanding. That is the way of death. This is the core problem Proverbs identifies with the human condition. We trust ourselves. We deceive ourselves. And we so kill ourselves, like an “ox goes to the slaughter…he does not know that it will cost him his life.”
Knowing everything we just covered we are in a much better position to understand what it means to “fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.” When you take Proverbs as a whole and these verses specifically, to fear the Lord means to know who God is in such a way that you entrust everything, absolutely everything, to Him. Think about it like this. A king’s subjects can be afraid of Him and distrust Him completely. Those kind of subjects hate the king and want to overthrow Him. They don’t “fear” Him. They are afraid of Him and find him untrustworthy. However, a king’s subjects can fear him and so trust him completely. Those kind of subjects love the king and trust him with everything. They don’t want to overthrow Him, they want him to rule them with his power and goodness and grace. They fear Him. They trust Him. In Proverbs, to fear God is to so know His goodness, greatness, and graciousness that you trust Him with everything from your daily bread to your eternal life.
To not fear the Lord is to fear none other than yourself, which is the path of evil. Left to yourself, your heart beats for evil, not good. You choose and create crooked paths that lead to death. Again, you have two options. Trust yourself or fear the LORD. Trust the LORD or be wise in your own eyes.
Proverbs is a book about life and death. And it says the consequences of foolishness are far worse than making a bad financial decision and being broke. Proverbs says we deceive ourselves in a far worse manner, in a manner that leads to death. Ultimate death. Here is the extent to which we deceive ourselves. Prov. 30:12 says, “There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth.” It’s not just that we think we know how to make the best business decision here or the best parenting decision there. The problem is that we are so self-deceived that we believe we are clean before God. We are righteous in ourselves. We are welcome in the presence of God based on how wise and good we are.
Only when God’s Word, specifically His Law sinks in, do we realize one painful thing. We are fools. Before we are anything else, we are the fools Proverbs talks about. Only when we realize we are foolish sinners will we hear the good news that Jesus didn’t come for wise, righteous people but for fools. Then on the cross Jesus became the fool for us, in our place, dying the fool’s death that Proverbs speaks of, all on our behalf. Do you want healing, refreshment, and life? Trust the Lord with your very life.
