Overtaken by Wisdom: Understanding the Consequences of Actions

~ Uncommon ~ The Common Sense of God Wisdom for Beginners Proverbs 10 Overtaken! 1

This second half of Proverbs 10 is a scattergun of wisdom sayings hitting a number of seemingly unrelated topics from being wealthy or poor to the opposite results of a wise mouth or a wicked tongue! But one word fairly leapt of the page for me as I was trying to find a title for my sermon. It was the word, overtaken . What Solomon is trying to teach is that things catch up to us. It s funny that the culture has borrowed a term called Karma from the eastern religions and is related to one s reincarnation in other words, what form a person s life, or persona comes back as. It could be that a person s life comes back as another person - advantaged or disadvantaged, or perhaps a cow, a tiger, a monkey, or a bug depending on how the person had lived their life, and upon whether they did good to people or animals during their life, or whether they did evil to them! Now the western cultures have highjacked the term to name a perceived phenomenon that is like a mysterious cause and effect. It is the what goes around, comes around idea, and there is some circumstantial truth to it. For instance, if you are mean to someone, don t be surprised at being turned down by them when you beg them for their help in your hour of need! But karma retains this mysterious aura around it, like as if there is this otherworldly spirit of revenge or reward hovering about with an all-seeing eye, that will reward good and bad behavior with what they deserve! But that is foolish! We all know that good deeds are often not rewarded with good results! *For instance a man drags another person out of the burning wreckage of their car at an accident site, not knowing the victim s neck is fractured, resulting in the spine being injured and the person being permanently disabled. Then that poor victim sues their poor rescuer for three million dollars so they can get the lifelong care they will need! *Or a morally bankrupt super athlete finds all kinds of success on the playing field, and he is earning championships and receiving the accolades of an adoring public! Meanwhile, behind the scenes he is hurting and abusing women and being violent with men, and doing and dealing drugs, and doing dishonest dealings with all sorts of criminal types and none of it gets reported, because his money and high-end lawyers protect him! And soon, with great fanfare, he is inducted and enshrined into his sport s hall of fame! Now, sometimescharacters like this are caught and exposed and disgraced, but the smart ones aren t! They go on hurting people! Sometimes, in fact, often,... karma doesn t work out the way we think it should. It is not unusual for the good die young, and the truly villainous live on into advanced age with excellent health! Now, God assures us that there will be a reckoning, and no one gets away with anything! But, in a sharp departure from conventional wisdom, Christian theology teaches that it doesn t help if we even have lots of good deeds, because we all are sinners! The issue is sin, not good deeds! Good deeds cannot counteract sin in God s courtroom! We ve all done wrong! Sin has to be paid for under God s condemnation and wrath, and the only provision that God has made for payment for sin has been through His Son, Jesus, who suffered terribly on the cross, a substitute payment for what we owed God! His requirement of us to access this payment of debt for our own needs is that we trust Jesus enough to put our life in His hands and ask Him for His provision against sin! Then we commit ourselves to His leadership! Never forget that part! We love/trust Him more than we anything else! In fact, our other loves do not compare! Then we have passes from death to life,.. from darkness to light! 2

So this chapter, as with most if not all of the chapters in Proverbs has nothing to do with earning the respect of God, and/or earning a special dispensation toward salvation. It is simply a book of observations. Solomon saw that if wise and good, these kinds of things generally happen to them. But if a person gives themselves to foolish thinking to corrosive, harmful ideologies, and to the destructive attitudes and actions of foolish or evil behavior, Solomon saw their behavior trigger some negative consequences that made their lives miserable like people not respecting them, or despising them, or rejecting them utterly! For instance, when people say stupid things. A lot of these verses of chap. 10 have to do with the mouth/the tongue being overtaken by consequences the way in which we communicate and the content that we have communicated! [vs 11, 13; 18-21; 31,32]. *I have to say that this is a new age of communication! I have lived through an age (and not very long ago) where when people wanted to communicate with the general public, they wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper to voice their opinion on local issues, on politics, religion, social trends, on relationships, etc If they had an issue with a friend or relative, they didn t publish it in the newspaper. They hashed it out face to face, or they wrote handwritten letters, or they made a phone call. But social media has unleashed the beast within the human soul! People seem to have to comment and give their dumb opinion on everything, from a recipe someone published, to commenting on a political position someone has taken! And the things people say in these comments are atrocious. Most comments can be made anonymously, or they are made from so far away that there is no reaching them for any physical confrontation - there is just no accountability, so people just do war with the written word! So the insults and name-calling, the innuendo and sarcasm, and slander have all become commonplace! I look at it and grieve! People are revealing themselves to be angry, perpetually outraged, frustrated by virtually everything and everyone, terribly opinionated, and hopelessly confused! The things that are said are so unnecessary and come from such a dark place of foolishness! But it does expose the human heart! The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? said the prophet Jeremiah [Jeremiah 17:9-10]! In [James3:6-8], the apostle said some scathing things about the human tongue! They didn t have the internet back then that revealed these dark truths about humanity. But James had God s Holy Spirit guiding his thoughts and observations, and the Spirit saw into the depths of ruined and pain-wracked human souls! He saw that the human soul is often a festering boil and that the tongue can serve as a surgical lance that opens it and lets the pressure off, exposing all the soul s wretched filth and stench! Today, people are lost in this dark world of the social media wars every day - every chance they get! It is now a mass insanity, an infectious infestation and so this is our world now, and there is no going back! Solomon tried to warn against foolish words, but fools are not interested in listening to wisdom! Fools just keep venting! Fools will be overtaken by the consequences of undisciplined words! 3

! There is another theme scattered throughout this chapter the theme of God s activity in rewarding and punishing human wisdom and folly. We tend to think that God is not active in a person s life until they give their life to Jesus, but there is no indication in scripture that God is only involved in the lives of His own people. John 3:16 is a sweeping declaration that God SO loved the world . People don t know Him, but He knows and loves them despite their foolishness and folly but generally God has to love them from afar! *There were a few girls I loved/liked from afar when I was a teenager. I was attracted to them, but I wasn t stupid enough to approach them! I could tell that they had no interest in me! I mean, it was unbelievable, especially considering all I had to offer, but there was no breaking through that tough shell of,.. disinterest. God runs into this in most people. Jesus said, in trying to explain why relatively few responded to His person and His teachings in faith and belief, that Men preferred darkness to light because their deeds were evil [Jn.3:19-21]. But there is no question that sometimes He intervenes in people s lives anyway. If He knows someone is weakening in their self-certainty, and faltering in their resolve against Him, wallowing in consequences God may do a little something to push them further in the direction they are already going - away from themselves and toward Him! Maybe they will experience another failure, something that piles on guilt and regret. Did God send that? No, of course not! But He can use it when it occurs,.. and He does! When a person has a track record of acting the fool, they also wrack up a looong list of regrets and rejections, of guilt and of shame! It all catches up with a person! The smartest ones start looking in the mirror and wondering why they keep making the same mistakes over and over, and wondering why they have become so miserable and laden down with wretched amounts of guilt and regret?! But God does reach down and leads them to people that can lead them to Jesus! You remember Cornelius, the Roman centurion in the Book of Acts, and the story of theEthiopian eunuchthat didn t understand what He was reading in the book of Isaiah about the Messiah, and there was the Philippian jailer. God sent Peter, Philip, and Paul and Silas to these people respectively to help them on their journey to Jesus! So, yes, God is involved, and He will lead seekers, searchers, to obedient Christ-followers whose generosity, and gentleness, and kindness of spirit impresses, and moves them to envy (in the best sense)! God IS involved! Verses [10:3,22,27,29] speak to this! vs. 3 the hand of the Lord is employed in favor of the righteous, and against the the wicked. Same thing in vs 22, where it speaks to the blessing of God upon the righteous, prospering them with surplus, but He also teaches them how to handle wealth properly, so that it doesn t hurt them as it hurts most!! Vs 27 speaks to the fear of the Lord being instrumental in extending ones years on earth, a natural result of self-discipline and restraint and harmonious relationships! But, conversely, God actively shortens the number of years on earth of wicked fools presumably years of excess and self-indulgence! That overtakes a person! Vs 29 speaks to the benefits of the way of the Lord that it is a refuge where God s people can cling to a solid place of safety where we can return again and again, where the principles of God will preserve and prosper and spare a person again and again. But then the implication here is that the evil-doers may try to go to the fountain of wisdom and righteousness, and it will work the opposite for them ruining them! How can that be? Well, evil-doers hang with other evil-doers! The ways of the Lord will not work in the world of the evil-doers! Everyone in that world will turn against a person who tries to do what is right in their presence! So, that whole world of darkness must be repudiated and abandoned for the righteousness of God to be of any benefit! Righteousness only works in the light. The two worlds do not mix! Come out from among the and be separate! , it says in [2 Cor. 6:17]! The attempt at mixing them doesn t work! Sadly, folly always wins, because this is the way our fallen human nature is wired! God in His wisdom makes it clear that we can t have both! To give our heart to Jesus is to give up the dark, and not try to find and excuse to hang on! So we crucify/purify our old selves, devoting ourselves forever to pursuing the life of the risen Christ! 4