When the scoffer is punished, the naive becomes wise; But when the wise is instructed, he receives knowledge. The righteous one considers the house of the wicked, Turning the wicked to ruin. Proverbs 21:11-12
Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, "Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil." Punishment is not just for the one who does the evil deed. Society at large also receives instruction when punishment is handed out for crimes and evil deeds that are done. Today's proverb helps us understand this. The scoffer is the first person we see in this proverb. We see him being punished for something he has done. It is important to see that while others are instructed and given wisdom from this punishment, the scoffer is not one of them. A scoffer is incorrigible in his evil. He mocks God and does not care or concern himself with wisdom. He himself is the beginning and end of what little wisdom he desires. When this scoffer eventually breaks laws in his quest to poison society against God, he receives the punishment due for his crime. It is sad to see though that by the end of this proverb - and even the following verse - the scoffer learns nothing. He will continue in his scoffing behind bars - living to curse God and in so doing - have a curse upon his own life as he continues in his patterns of self-destruction. But there is help for others in seeing this fool's punishment. The naive or simpleton watches and learns wisdom. This is not the typical word for wisdom here, but is the Hebrew "sakal," which means to be prudent, show discernment, and to be instructed in a way to go. The naive watch the actions of the scoffer receive their due punishment and consider his end. As a result they learn not to walk in those ways - if only to avoid the punishment. The truly wise man though watches and receives real instruction - and as a result receives knowledge as well. Knowledge is "daath" which means a knowing that gives him practical wisdom and knowledge as to how to walk each day. The righteous is the last type of person who watches the punishment of the wicked. He looks and considers not just this one action that is receiving punishment, but he looks at the entire life of the scoffer. He considers his entire house (family, business, children, etc.). The Hebrew here is a little difficult to translate - and here is it rendered "turning the wicked to ruin." That gives the idea that the righteous man is out to destroy the wicked here. The Amplified Bible though, gives the best sense of the Hebrew here when it translates this passage, "The [uncompromisingly] righteous man considers well the house of the wicked—how the wicked are cast down to ruin." The righteous man can and should work to make sure that the laws of the land reflect the laws of God. In that way he does work to see the house of the wicked turned to ruin. That is what is ultimately best for a society. But what is being communicated here is that what the righteous man does is note that the entire household of the wicked comes to ruin because of his ungodly behavior and his attitude of scoffing at God. When we watch the demise of the wicked on television and in the news we need to receive instruction from it. Our hearts should not be drawn to such stories for the juicy gossip content. That is the attitude of the world, who learns very little from such things. We should watch and grieve the destruction from the standpoint of seeing that a lifestyle of arrogant scoffing and derision of God leads to destruction. We should also receive the instruction that God means for us to receive. Honoring and glorifying God is the wise man's lifestyle. As the house of the wicked crashes to the ground we should remember that Jesus Himself taught us that the foundation of a man's house - whether it is founded on obedience to God's Word or not - will be the deciding factor on whether it stands or falls.
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By His knowledge the deeps were broken up And the skies drip with dew.
Proverbs 3:20 What does God breaking up the deeps and having the sky drip with dew have to do with walking in wisdom? These comments from Proverbs 3:20 are a part of two verses that speak of God creating the world. But they are also a larger part of an argument from the writer of Proverbs as to why we should look to God for His wisdom. His argument is that if God can do these marvelous things through the creation - then we should know that He is more than able to meet any need that we wil ever face. We read first here that by God's knowledge the deeps were broken up. The only other place a phrase like this makes sense is in Genesis 7:11 where we read that during the flood the fountains of the great deep bursted open. Later in Genesis 8:w we read that these "foundtains of the deep" were closed. The only other time in Scripture the "deep" is mentioned in this way is as a description of Israel walking through the Red Sea during the Exodus. It was by the wisdom of God that the Lord broke open these places where water was stored in the oceans. Some wonder where all the water came from that caused the earth to flood during the time of Noah - and evidently it came from rain and from huge undergroud reservoirs of water that were released when these deeps were broken up. Today, we are just beginning to be able to do deep-water drilling in the oceans. but the thought of going to the deepest parts of the oceans - and releasing huge reservoirs of water are beyond us still. But God, by His knowledge, broke them up and released all that water. God then turns from the massive in the realms of water, to the very small. It is also by God's wisdom that the skys drip dew. The dew is a fascinating thing to understand. This process happens each night as cold meets hot in the atmosphere - and the result is the condensation of water into dew. We can predict when dew will happen - but the wisdom that produced the process whereby dew happens is astounding. It would take generating the entire atmosphere and weather systems that function like clockwork around our globe. When you consider for a moment that God has dew forming pretty much 24 hours a day - every day we live - you begin to see the magnitude of having dew drip from the skies. What God is trying to get us to grasp is that He is incredibly smart - actually infinitely smart - really, He is the originator of all knowledge of all things - there is nothing He did not know, nor is there anything that He will ever NOT know. Therefore, we would be wise if we turned to the God Who can break open the deeps, as well as cause the skies to drip with dew. If Almighty God can do these things by His wisdom, do you not think He can handle whatever problem we are currently trying to solve without it? The eyes of the LORD preserve knowledge, But He overthrows the words of the treacherous man. Proverbs 22:12
When you consider what kind of opposition the Bible has had throughout history, it is a wonder that any of it has been preserved to our day. Yet just as this proverb says, God had preserved His knowledge - as well as the writings of many other godly men - even though it has often been attempted to be destroyed by evil men. What is often lost to us are the words of the treacherous men who have lived throughout history. But even more than that we see that their very words themselves have been overthrown. The "who's who" list of evil men who have predicted the demise of God and His Word is so long that I would not have room to list them all in a post here - yet all their words have been overthrown. They have risen to predict that God would be destroyed - only to see Him remain and continue to change history through His Word and His church. How frustrating it has to be to see generation after generation continuing to be transformed by the gospel. How frustrating to see the very same gospel that they've hated for generations stand in another generation as their wicked philosophies were thrown on the trash heap of history. It is wonderful to see the stories of men like John Hus and John Wycliffe and how God preserved their works - especially their translations of the Bible. Both men saw the false church react strongly to their translation of the Scriptures - especially since their translations were trying to put God's Word into the language of the people. The false church killed John Hus - and were so disgusted with Wycliffe that over 40 years after his death dug up his bones and burned them and condemned him. But God preserved the writings and knowledge that these men gave to us - eventually using both of them as precursors to the Reformation. Rather than destroy the knowledge that they brought to us - God preserved it and used it to overthrow all the treacherous words and actions of the godless church that tried to overthrow the Word of God. Here is wisdom . . . realizing that God's Word will stand when everything else has faded away. As Peter said, 'All flesh is like grass, and all its flory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls off, but the Word of the Lord endures forever." (1 Peter 1:24-25, NASB) The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7
How can someone start on the road to becoming wise? If we asked that question of 100 people, we might get some similarity in their answers, but if we did not know this verse at the beginning of Proverbs, we probably would not choose fearing God as one of those answers. The beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. We will not gain any kind of true knowledge of ultimate reality until we do. There are a great number of truly smart men (in earthly terms) and yet many of them reject God - at least they reject the God of the Bible. Smart they may be - but when it comes to eternal matters - they are dumb as stumps. Their great learning in human endeavors has made them arrogant and unwilling to bend their knee before the One True God. The man who thinks he knows something - most likely does not yet know as he should. Human learning manifests itself in pride. Paul told us under the inspiriation of the Holy Spirit, "Knowledge puffs up . . . " That is something that is dangerous in the most deadly way. When we think we truly know something - we don't yet know anything. For all their supposed knowledge, these scholars are facing a horrific future. They will continue in this age as sage, wise men - only to learn that it is the fool who says there is no God. They will be praised as men of great insight - only to find that all their genius has done nothing to save them from the wrath of God. Never have they trembled before the majesty and glory of God. Never have they seen the universe rightly - as His creation and as a testiment to His vastness and infinite nature. Never have they considered that if we are moral beings, we must have been created by a moral Being - before Whom we will have to stand and to Whom we will have to give an account. The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge becuase as creator, all things have their origin in Him. Without a healthy respect and fear of God, we will ultimately give ourselves over to our own foolish pride - and lift ourselves to an unhealthy level in our own thinking. That can end only in disaster at the throne of God's judgment. God is in heaven, we are on earth - therefore we should tremble in His presence. To fear God means that we recognize Him as supreme and absolute. If God is a mere concept - a thought - He is nothing more than a mere jump between synapses in our brain. But if He is real - then He is the most powerful, most wise, glorious being that ever has and ever will be. His power and glory are unexplainable - for they are incomprehensible. As such, we tremble before Him for He is ultimately in power and will remain so for all eternity. Until we know and grasp this - we are mere brutish fools walking upon the earth. Part of our problem with this word knowledge is that we've divorced it from the biblical context. We have come to view knowledge as the mere storing of facts as man sees them. This is not what God refers to when he says that the fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge. The word used here is "daath" and it means not just a storing of facts, but an ability to know to where we can practice discernment, insight, and an experiential knowledge and experience of something - or in this case, Someone. Just knowing a bunch of facts and being able to manipulate them on earth so that it impresses other humans - is something akin to being able to juggle a set of balls well. Nice trick - but what exactly is it worth in the end? The knowledge we speak of in Proverbs 1 is that of knowing God - and being able to see things like He does so that we have a discernment that will aid us for eternity. That only comes when we see God accurately - and then in the light of His glory - see the world accurately for the first time in our lives. Until that moment arrives in a man's heart - he is and will always be a fool. We are told on the back-end of this proverb that fools despise wisdom and instruction. Here is the value of knowledge - it makes us wiser and teachable. The fool who rejects God despises His wisdom. Since God is all-knowing and all-encompassing, He is the ultimate source of knowledge. If one wants to get it right - go to Him. If one is unwilling to go to Him (as the wicked admit they are) that one is actually despising wisdom and instruction. He only wants to exalt his own thinking and the activity of his own mind. Since He is utterly limited compared to an infinite God - well - he is stupid. He hates seeing the full picture in favor of his utterly parochial view. He despises discerning the best since the only thing he considers best is his own view. He is unwilling to be instructed by the One will absolute knowledge - thus he rejects the greatest Teacher anyone can imagine. In every way - his lack of respect, honor, and fear toward God is evidenced by his unwillingness to sit at God's feet and learn from Him. So how do we grow in knowledge and wisdom? It is by first acknowledging that God is ultimate in knowledge, in wisdom, in everything! Then it is by humbling ourselves and learning to tremble in the presence of the One Who is Lord and God. Then and only then can our minds and hearts be opened to receive the wisdom, the instruction, and the knowledge of God. How blessed is the man who finds wisdom And the man who gains understanding. Proverbs 3:13
Happy is the man who finds the wisdom of God. That is what our proverb says today. But the happiness spoken of here is no mere good mood - it is a happiness rooted in spiritual things - in knowing God Himself. The word "blessed" here is the Hebrew word "eser" and it means to be in a state of bliss. This word is almost exclusively used in a poetic context and is usually used in an exclamation. "Oh the blessedness!" would be the normal expression using this word. This word is used several times to speak of the joy and blessedness - indeed the bliss enjoyed by someone who has a relationship with God. Here though, the word is referring to one who finds the wisdom of God. Even more so, the blessing refers to one who not only gathers wisdom from God - but who can use it to discern. He gains understanding from God's wisdom entering his life. When we find wisdom, we learn to turn from the worldly ways of this present life and seek out God's answers for things. We come to see life from the perspective of God. What God thinks and what God wants becomes paramount in our lives. Oh, what a blessing comes when we finally turn from our own selfish thinking and learn to look at things His way. We turn from the insanity of a self-driven life to a life guided and led by a loving God who knows what is best in every situation. When we gain understanding we are even more blessed. This is the ability to discern - to distinguish between things that differ. We can know the difference between our will and God's will. We know what is right and what is wrong. We can discern between two or three different options which one is God's will. In a world where we have to make hundereds of decisions each day - that is a wonderful gift. If you have found wisdom - and are gaining understanding - don't take it for granted. It is a rare thing for a man to have wisdom come into his life. It is an act of God's grace and mercy. For this you should fall to your knees and thank God for such a fantastic gift! For wisdom will enter your heart And knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; Proverbs 2:10
God wants us to have a "heart" religion - and not just one that affects our heads on certain days. Here we have Solomon speaking to us about having wisdom enter our hearts and knowledge becoming pleasant to our mind, will, and emotions. This is the kind of work that the Lord wants to do in us. Let's take a closer look at what it means to have this happen - and the reason it is not such an easy task. First of all - as with all things in a Biblical worldview, sin has made things diffiicult because it has ruined us. We learn from the prophets that we currently have a heart of stone. One of the promises of the new covenant is that God will remove from us this heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. The sign of this is that God will have written His commandments on our hearts - and we will want to obey Him. Part of this process also comes when we seek the Lord and desire to know Him and the wisdom that comes from having His Word before our eyes. In Proverbs 2 we see the pursuit of God's Word - and the passion that Solomon had for it. This is a work of grace because we read in 1 Peter 1 that we are to long for the Word like a newborn babe longs for its mother's milk. When that work of grace happens - the Word of God will dwell within us richly - and in time - it will enter our hearts. This work of God's grace will encsure that wisdom too will enter our hearts. To have wisdom from the Word in our hearts is vital. Jesus said that it is out of the abundance of what is in the heart that the mouth speaks. That is why it is so important to have wisdom enter our hearts. The heart is also the wellspring of our being. Whatever reigns in our hearts will reign in our lives. That is why we don't just want a small helping of the Word of God - but we want it to dwell richly within us. We want an abundance of the Word in us - and we want it to powerfully speak to us as we seek the Lord and desire to hear from Him through His Word. The second precious work we read of here is having knowledge from God become pleasant to our soul. The word here for knowing is the Hebrew word "daath" and it means a knowing by experience, encounter, and relationship. This is not just having a mental knowing in our heads - it is truly knowing God in an intimate relationship with Him. We have encountered God Himself - we've experienced Him - and as a result of our former and continued encounters with Him - we know wisdom. What is even more precious to me about this verse is that we learn that this intimate knowing of God Himself will become pleasant to our souls. The word used here is "naem" and it means something sweet, beautiful, pleasing, comfortable, and delightful. Remember that when we read of a work in our souls - we are talking about a work in our mind, will, and emotions. When wisdom enters our hearts - knowing God will be pleasant to our minds. Before this work of grace we were opposed to God - and the thought of someone having ultimate authority in our lives yielded rebellion and resentment. Our minds were disturbed by the thought of someone who knows our every thought and deed. It was anything but comforting to know that we would stand in the judgment and give an account for every word, thought, motive, and deed. Our response to such things was anything but pleasant. When wisdom enters our hearts - knowing God will be pleasant to our will. Here is an interesting study in the Scriptures. Before a work of God's grace happens in our hearts, obedience to God is anything but pleasant and delightful to us. We are born rebels and our status as such is confirmed again and again by our response to God's Law. God's Law reveals to us that we are sinners - that we do not find submission to God pleasant. We rebel against it and do not do the things that His Word says to do. If any one passage of Scripture bears this out it is Romans chapter 7. There Paul reminds us that the things we want to do, we don't do - but the very prohibitions of the Law are what we choose to do. Paul's cry at the end of that chapter is that he is a wretched man who desperately needs deliverance from sin. But when God does that work through Jesus Christ our Lord, we find that a transformation has taken place - and that transformation continues as we walk with God, indeed finding an intimate walk with God pleasant to our will. When wisdom enters our hearts - knowing God will be pleasant to our emotions. Our emotions can be a source of amazing blessing as well as a source of untold problems. Some wind up with their emotions far more in control of their lives than they are in control of their emotions. We find ourselves on an emotional high during which we would do anything for the Lord. But then we find ourselves in the same week with an emotional state, that if we let it control us, will render us almost incapable of doing anything. Here is where wisdom is so important to our souls. When that work of God's grace begins to change us, we learn to tell our emotions that they will not control us. We enjoy our emotions, but learn not to have them dominate our moods - and our attitude. That is reserved for God's Word which consistently directs us as the Holy Spirit uses our mind to understand it - our will to choose it - and His power to carry it out. When that work of God's grace happens, we find knowing God in our emotions a delightful thing. Before you think that emotions are a bad thing - I want to remind you that David spoke of how his emotions were moved by God Himself - and how he knew the heights of joy as well as the depths of despair - all as he knew the living God in relationship to Him. Walking with God is more than just knowing a bunch of principles and ideas. That kind of thing smells of religion. God wants a vital relationship with us. It takes the entrance of wisdom into our hearts for us to move into that precious relationship. As we seek the Lord, may He give us grace to know such a marvelous intimacy with Him. "I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, And I find knowledge and discretion.
Proverbs 8:12 How gullible are you? Here is a verse in Proverbs that tells us that being wise and godly are actually the opposite of being gullible. If that has whet your appetite for more - read on. In chapter 8 of Proverbs we have a picture painted for us where wisdom is personified. She speaks to us and tells us about herself. The more we learn of her - the more we are to desire her. In the midst of this description we have wisdom saying to us that there is a companion that she dwells with. Her companion's name is "prudence." If we will stay with these two, wisdom and prudence. we will be influenced in such a way that we will also find knowledge and discretion. Let's take a closer look at this friend of wisdom. Prudence is the Hebrew word, "ormah." This word means to be crafty or prudent. We're pretty much OK with the second of these two words, but crafty presents an interesting picture. We don't usually view someone who is crafty as a positive thing, but here it is used in a positive way. The idea here is that of someone who is crafty with wisdom and with seeing things from God's perspective. Whereas the wicked would use craftiness to trick someone and gain an unfair advantage of them, God is using it to speak of the inability to be caught by someone's trickery. It is a wisdom and cautiousness that keeps us from being gullible. We are not speaking of someone who is always thinking the worst of people - but we are speaking of someone who knows men. It was said of Jesus that he did not entrust himself to men - because He knew what was in a man. Let me use a biblical illustration to make this clearer. Joshua was tricked into making a treaty in the book of Joshua chapter 9. The Gibeonites used trickery to make it look like they were from a far away country. They put on worn-out clothes and sandals, took worn-out sacks, and dry and crumbled provisions to make Israel think they were not Canaanites. Israel was snookered by all this - only because her leaders did not walk according to wisdom. The Scriptures tell us that their failure was in not seeking and asking God about their situation. They took everything at face value - and believed their eyes. They did not seek the Lord and submit themselves to Him. In the end - their lack of prudence led to their being too gullible. Wisdom dwells with prudence. Wisdom is found with those who do not make "snap" judgments and decisions. They stand back from things long enough to ask questions - and more importantly - to ask God about what their eyes see and what their minds seem to be comprehending. Thus, when we walk with this wise cautiousness - we are led to find knowledge. We are led to find out things that a "once-over" mindset and choice will never find. You don't judge a book by its cover - you open it and read a little. You don't make wise decisions by reacting to the outside only - you take time to investigate things, people, and situations. When we walk in this wisdom - prudence will also help us to find discretion. We remember discretion from earlier verses in Proverbs. Discretion is being able to differentiate things. It is seeing two things that may look alike at first, but are not. Closer examination reveals the difference. And the difference often makes all the difference. Being gullible is not something we have to hold onto in life. It is something that reveals a tendency to not turn to God and to Scripture to obtain wisdom - i.e. God's perspective on things. You do not have to suffer from terminal gullibility though. You can learn to step back and examine things closer in the light of God's presence and Word. This will help you to build purdence, knowledge, and the ability to discriminate between that which is good and that which is evil or even not so good. You will find out that gullible is not written on the ceiling. What you will find is that God's Word and Spirit will help you see the difference between your will, the will and way of the world, and God's will. Apply your heart to discipline And your ears to words of knowledge. Proverbs 23:12
This is a simple admonition here in Proverbs - and yet if we will look at it carefully, it will yield to us some very helpful information. The first thing we see is that we are to apply our heart to discipline. The word "apply" here means, "to bring to" - thus what God is saying to us is that we need to bring our hearts to something. Here we read that what we bring our hearts to is discipline. The word discipline is "musar" which means to instruct with discipline. It refers most often to the discipline given by a father - both by word and by the rod. It is very easy when discipline is applied to us for us to not allow it to reach the heart. We may hear the words - and receive the correction - but we do not bring our hearts to it. True correction and discipline is for the heart - not the bottom. It might be applied to the rear end with the rod - but the aim in these things needs to be directly to the heart. Those who protest the use of the rod see the issue being striking a child - and they see it as evil in all circumstances. But the godly parent is not aiming for the rear end alone. They want to instruct with their discipline. They want their words and their use of the rod to affect the heart of the child. If you have their heart - in the end you will truly change their behavior. What Solomon is saying though, is for the one receiving the discipline. Apply your heart to what God is trying to teach you. If you are like me - there are times when you bristle at discipline. It is not pleasant to have God apply the rod to us. It is not a delightful thing for us to be corrected and rebuked. But when God grants us discipline it is only for our best interests. We can be absolutely assured of this. Therefore we need to train ourselves to receive it joyfully - gratefully - and educationally. If we do, maybe we won't need a second dose of discipline to complete the job for us. The second admonition here is that we also apply our ears to words of knowledge. Knowledge here refers to more than just head-learning. Solomon is telling us about a knowing of God and His ways. He refers to a working knowledge - a practical knowledge - intimate knowledge - knowledge that truly changes the way we act. The verb "apply" is assumed here - thus we are told to bring our ears to this knowledge that God is seeking to give us. It is more than just hearing it - it is concentrated listening. It is listening to learn and to apply it to one's life. This is key to us becoming wise. If we will truly bring our hearts and ears to what God is seeking to communicate to us, we will be blessed greatly. God longs for us to be wise and to know and follow Him with all our hearts. These two practices - bringing our hearts to times of discipline - and bringing our ears to hear obediently what God says to us - will assure that we grow and personally experience all the godliness that God desires to give us when He works and speaks in our lives. POSTSCRIPT: Recently, individuals have quoted articles from this section and stated that we teach child abuse at Calvary Chapel Jonesboro. To this I feel the need to respond. First, biblically, we are told that if we have a problem with our brother to go to our brother - not the internet - and confront our brother. To date, these individuals have yet to contact me to discuss these things. That should say volumes in itself. Second, we do not teach child abuse at our fellowship. This blog is an endeavor to teach what is in the Bible for the edification and upbuilding of God's people. Anyone who has been to our fellowship knows that in our classrooms we administer NO physical discipline. We correct with words and with "time outs" and eventually with a report to parents. From our nursery throughout every age group our people are instructed NEVER to administer physical discipline. We believe this right alone belongs to a parent. Even then we teach the following about any application of physical discipline. Discipline is about the heart of a child. Physical or corporal punishment is ONLY to be administered in a spirit of love for the child. Teaching and loving verbal correction is key - as is prayer for the child's eventual salvation in Jesus Christ. Any physical punishment administered due to anger or rage is out of line and wrong. The parent is to discipline the child with appropriate discipline - not abuse. In the end the child should be taught - and in every circumstance hugged, loved, and prayed with after any physical punishment to assure them of our love. The idea of a "beating" is completely out of step with what the Scriptures are teaching. Instead the idea of loving discipline is intended. The Lord by wisdom founded the earth, and by understanding established the heavens. Proverbs 3:19.
Those who ascribe the establishment of the heavens and the earth by random processes as prescibed by the theory of evolution really do have a problem when it comes to the shear volume of evidence that says to us that there is an intelligent design in all of creation. Wisdom itself tells us that there has to be a great intelligence behind all that we see and know in creation. Anyone who has studied the human body would go beyond saying it was just intelligence to say that what we have in creation is nothing less than divine genius. Those of us who ascribe to the Lord God the foundation of the earth and the establishment of the heavens have no such problem. Solomon tells us in Proverbs 3 that it was God who by His wisdom founded the earth. The glorious intricate design of our world is no miraculous accident. God's wisdom is inscribed on every aspect of what he has made. There is such a wondrous design in what we see on the earth that it should amaze and astound us. Just looking at the human eye should adequately blow our minds. Let me share with you some of the astonishing information concerning the human eye. Oue eyes contain a self-adjusting aperture, an auto-focus system, and inner surfaces surrounded by a dark pigment so that there is a minimal amount of light that scatters. The sensitivity of these aspects of the eye allows it to adjust to 10 billion-fold changed in brightness that come to it every day - while its circuitry of nerves enables it to automatically adjust and enhance contrast in what is detects. The ability of the eye to analyze color is breathtaking. The eye can distinguish millions of shades of color while also allowing it to adjust to lighting conditions such as incandescent, fluorescent, as well as natural light that would require a photographer to change filters, films, and housings on his camera. The eye does this instantaneously. All this works together to produce a depth perception that is beyond the range of anything we can imagine designing. In spite of all the technology that we currently have, engineers are still unable to design a system that can calculate the exact force necessary for an athlete to shoot and make a basket, on the run, from 25 feet away, in a split second. Take a moment to consider the array of nerves, sensory cells, lens, muscles, and tissue in the eye. Light passes through our cornea to deal with issues of focus. The cornea is a living, one-cell thick tissue that requires food and oxygen. This is gets through tears that are produced by our tear glands. These tear glands not only feed and lubricate our eyes, but they also inject enzymes into our tears that kill bacteria in our eyes. As light passes through the iris - a lens further focuses the light, fine-tuning it as it passes through until it strikes the pigmented retina. This God-given aperture is so intricate that we can make a biometric scanner that can serve for identification purposes. Whereas our fingerprints only have 35 measurable characteristics, the iris has 266 of them. This makes the chance of any two people having matching irises statistically impossible. It is a one in 10 to the 78th power that this could happen. Then we come to the retina itself. It has 127 million photovoltaic receptors. Only 7 million of these are used to provide color awareness and fine detail. The information gained from these 127 million receptors is then converted from light to electricity and then transmitted to our brain's cortex along one million nerve fibers in our optic nerve. How sensitive is this retina? As little as one photon can trigger these cells. Since a flashlight can fire 10 to the 18th power photons per second, this means that the eye can see a solitary candle flame from as much as 30 miles away. A scientist, trying to describe what happens in our eyes used this illustration to help us understand the incredible things that are happening in our eyes every second of every day. If you were to thnk in terms of a camera that could shoot incredible amounts of pictures, it would require a camera to take 100 photos per second for every one of the one million fibers of the optic nerve. Each of these individual 100,000,000 photos would be represented mathmatically by 50,000 nonlinear differential equations that would have to be solved simultaneously. Taking into consideration two eyes and only allowing five synaptic connections to other nerves from the retina to the cortex of the brain - it would require a 1983 Cray supercomputer a hundred years to process the information that our eyes can transmit every one hundredth of a second. What is even more amazing that all this is the fact that men posing as serious scientists expect us to believe that chance alone produced such a precision instrument with its interdependent parts. Remember in saying this that a retina would be useless without a lens and a lens without a retina. Even Charles Darwin himself said this about the human eye when he considered the possibility of it evolving from a single cell. "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, culd have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." Mr. Darwin, we agree with you 100% that when looking at just the human eye we also find your theory absurd as well. What is even more mind-blowing to me while writing this is that we've only examined the human eye. It declares the glory of God - just as the Bible tells us the heavens do. It was by understanding that God established them - and when trying to consider both their vastness and intricacy we would once again ourselves lost in wonder, amazement, and awe. But then again - that is exactly what wisdom desires for us to do. Then you will discern righteousness and justice And equity and every good course. Proverbs 2:9
How do you know when you are doing the right thing or going in the right direction in life? Here is a question that everyone would love to be able to answer. The fact is that God says that we can know this. The way that we know it though is definitely outside of the mainstream of ideas that exist today. Let's take a look today at how we can know whether we are on course or not. Solomon tells us here that there is a time when we will be able to discern some very important things. The first in his fourfold list is righteousness. Before we jump into those four things, we should see that discernment is involved. The word discern means that we are able to look at things and distinguish between them. We see differences between two or more things - and use that knowledge to understand them from God's vantage point. Here is our first very important lesson - things differ - and you can tell the difference. Most would agree with you on this truth - until you begin stating what you can distinguish between. The last thing we should address before we go into our list is that Solomon is stating what he does in verse 9 as a conclusion to all he has said before. What is it that allows us to have this discernment? It is the Word of God. All through this chapter he is calling for us to receive the Word, store up the Word in our hearts, cry out for God's work in teaching it to us, and to seek for the Word as one would buried treasure. The discernment of which we speak here is a discernment that comes only because of the way the Word works in our hearts. As I said earlier, the first in his fourold list if righteousness. We will be able to discern when something is right or not. Now is the moment when the postmodern among us throw up their red flags. They assert someone might know right and wrong for themselves - but consider it the height of arrogance to think or state that anyone might be able to discern right and wrong for everyone. But that is exactly what Proverbs asserts here - and more by the time we finish with the four things Solomon says can be discerned. The second in our list of four is justice. Our society cries out for justice - but unfortunately the justice they want ignores the Word of God. It ignores what God calls just in many cases - and completely ignores the problem of how we can be just before Him. Whereas the world cries for social justice - God offers absolute justice. These are not always opposed to one another - but - God ultimately wants us to be able to stand before Him just and righteous - and that requires the person and the work of Jesus Christ to happen. The third thing we will be able to discern is equity. Here, my friends is a loaded word. "Meysar" is the word the Hebrews used to describe equity. It means rightness, correctness, and fairness. The word meant something smooth and level. Communism is man's way of trying to make everything equitable. Pure communism takes from everyone and then redistributes it so everyone gets an equal share. It does not take into account work ethic or whether someone has truly earned their share with hard work. And since pure communism would require pure hearts to work - we see that in practical communism - the ruling class takes and redistributes so everyone is equally as poor - while they live in the lap of luxury and take care of those who most honor and support their rule. When God speaks of equity He is speaking of how a state should judge fairly and honorably. He is speaking of how His promises are available to all. To "discern" equity we need to see things as God does - for fairness and correctness begins with what is fair and right in God's eyes. When we bring God into this equation - we have serious trouble for mankind. Man is sinful and rebellious - and what is fair for him is God's wrath and judgment. What we should find amazing about God's equity is that He chose to pay the price of equity for us - and instead of giving us what is fair, He gave us grace instead. Finally, through the Word, we can discern every good course. We will know the right ways to walk - and God will indicate to us wrongs ones as well. This right and wrong will correspond to what He says in His Word. Thus we have the ultimate aggravation to the modernist. We assert that through God's Word we have an "absolute standard" upon which all things in life is to be measured. If actions and choices and lifestyles do not measure up to what God calls good, right, just, and equitable - they are wrong. And thus begins the clash of worldviews. True Judaism and Christianity will always find themselves at odds with the rest of the worldviews that come from men. They end up at odds because they have the audacity of claiming that God's Word is a revelation of THE truth. For those who reject this claim - the world is a mish-mash of conflicting morals and ideas. We all get along by ultimately stating that both everything is right, as well as everything is wrong. It might be right for us while at the same time being wrong for others. The resulting public moral quicksand creates a world in which all things are to be tolerated except the arrogance of Judaism and Christianity who assert that their worldview is absolute. That view - that view that states that there is absolute truth and it is found in God's Word - is the one that absolutely cannot be tolerated. Too bad though - because it is the only worldview that creates the stability of actually knowing whether the path you are taking will ultimately lead to blessing or destruction. |
Proverb a DayEach day, we'll take a look at a verse from the chapter of Proverbs for the day. Our hope is to gain wisdom each day - and from that wisdom - to have understanding to make godly decisions in the throes of everyday life. Thank you for visiting our website! Everything on this site is offered for free. If, however, you would like to make a donation to help pay for its continued presence on the internet, you can do that by clicking here. The only thing we ask is that you give first to the local church you attend. Thank you!
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