I really enjoyed the reading of God’s Not Dead, and I think I am going to do one more book reading before I dive into the next few Bible readings. I have a book I have been wanting to go through called “Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets” by Andy Stanley. I will start that tomorrow and I assume that this will be a quick read, as his books are normally quick and really good.
Today though, finishing up this Proverbs reading, a couple things jump out at me.
First was verse 29: “Do not say, “I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done.” What jumps out at me is how obvious this instruction is - that we aren’t to pay people back. The verse preceding tells us not to be a witness against our neighbor without a cause, but this verse steps it up...don’t repay evil with evil. We see this sprinkled throughout Jesus’ teachings as well, that we should leave vengeance to God, and that once we’ve claimed Grace for ourselves in accepting Jesus, then we’ve also disclaimed our right to hold others to a standard to which WE aren’t being held. It is interesting to see this in the Old Testament context. But think about it purely from a position of wisdom, taking Jesus out of it for a moment...when we are worried about revenge, what are we really doing? We are getting hyper-focused on (a) ourselves and (b) hurting someone else. There is no way to live in love if you we are (a) focused on ourselves and (b) trying to hurt someone. If we are acting in love and truly for THEIR benefit, then we can approach them and can seek correction, but that takes dealing with ourselves and our own issues first...and that’s an entirely different thing. This is wisdom because this is reality - that vengeance hurts us in the end.
The second thing that jumped out at me were verses 33 and 34, “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” This got me thinking about something I have heard often in personal development circles, that you can tell the size of a person by the size of the problem that really compels him, or that really gains his attention. I think we can fall into a trap on both sides of this - that we can be so busy with things in life that we miss the important things, and similarly, we can be so laid back and so uninvolved and unproductive that we are constantly focused on trivial things. There is a balance that we want to find. I tend to be stuck in the former personally, which is no better than that latter...we would be wise to monitor ourselves in this way, and to make sure we are in balance in this area.