I preached again!

Pastor Scott is out of town on a much deserved family vacation. It also happens to be Father’s Day, and, being the only elder without kids and barely mentioning Father’s Day, it was fitting I was the one preaching.

Be forewarned: I step on all the toes.

As usual, below are my rough notes and not necessarily everything I said.

Proverbs 6:1-19 – Practical Warnings, or The Heart of the Matter

Intro

25 years ago, I was a fairly typical teenager. Like many, I dreamed of being a spy.
A major difference, possibly, is that I enjoyed rooting for the Bond villains and other bad guys. I would point out where they went wrong and how I would do things differently. I was quite adept at coming up with very plausible stories to help me get away with all sorts of bad decisions, and I almost enjoyed interfering with others’ relationships, starting fights and arguments with “innocent words.”

What made me truly want to become a criminal mastermind was learning the story of Leopold & Loeb. 100 years ago (and three weeks and five days, as of this message) these two young men, at the ages of 19 and 18, committed a crime. They were very intelligent. They were graduate students at the University of Chicago, their hometown, and in 1921 they began an intimate relationship with each other. (Yes, that kind.)

They believed in the teachings of Nietzche’s Übermenschen (supermen), humans that were more evolutionary along than other mere humans. To prove it, they planned on kidnapping and killing someone to show how much smarter than everyone they were. They settled on Leopold’s distant cousin who happened to live down the street, and this way they could be close enough the investigation to watch it unfold. So, on May 21, 1924, they lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks into a rented car, killed him with a chisel and rope, and dumped his hydrochloric-acid-drenched face and nethers (to slow down identification) in a drainage pipe near Hammond, Indiana.
Then they watched what happened, enjoying the lies and intrigue.

And I wanted to be better than them … at crime.

Thankfully, God got a hold of me not long after hearing this story for the first time.
Today, I like using my mind to see how God’s Word changes lives.
If you’ve been around long enough, you probably know one of my favorite things about biblical literature: chiasms – the hinged parallelisms of writing.

We elders were discussing the interesting ordering of Proverbs, that there seemed to be several passages about adultery, then today’s section, Proverbs 6:1-19, and then more passages about adultery. We saw it was a giant chiasm, hinging on what is found in this passage. Ultimately, we are all faithless adulterers toward God, but Proverbs 6:1-19 gives more details about this.
Let’s look at it, starting with the last four verses, 16-19.

Message

We start with the chiasm of what God hates in vv. 16-19
vv. 16-19 [Read]

• The first and last: Haughty eyes and sowing discord
  • the prideful, know-it-alls, and never-wrongs. I think of my own dad who is very smart, often the leader wherever he works, but with a rebellious pride issue. His know-it-all attitude and pride had gotten him into many fights in his life, and, while we were growing up, he often reminded us that he knew things better than we did. I think we can learn from him, though, in that after I became a Christian he reminded me he was raised Catholic. However, he was willing to put his pride aside to hear what changed his son.
  • This prideful, know-it-all mentality can also be the preachers/teachers that give false gospels and teachings.
  • Compare this with vv. 1-5 [Read]
    • This can be used to say avoid loans. Why does it line up with haughty eyes and sowing discord.
    • The latter 4 verses show this is pledging yourself to help someone. I can be financial, but it can be offering to help accomplish a task or even defend someone – taking sides in an argument.
  • Jesus explained this more clearly in Matthew 5:21-26 [Read]
  • Add in Jesus’ pronouncement of woes against the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:1-12, that they set standards and rules that are impossible to live by while not helping the people they demand perfection from, tithing money and food (which was required for the Temple Tax) but not helping those in need.
  • Think, then, of this passage as saying “If you helped someone to make yourself look good, or you realized you couldn’t actually help them, you have sinned and need to confess!”
• The next match-up in: A lying tongue and false witness
  • doesn’t need much explanation. This definitely includes false preachers/teachers, but it is the people who just lie. It can come from fear (FOMO, losing/not getting friends, not being capable, possible consequences.) Like the previous part, it can come from pride: “I don’t have to lower myself to do that!”
  • Compare this with vv. 6-11 [Read]
    • It doesn’t seem to line up at first. Obviously, this is about laziness, which is true.
    • Lazy people also don’t want to put in the hard work required of … LIFE! So they come up with excuses, like in Proverbs 26:13, the sluggard that says there is a lion in the streets! [Or a bear at Safeway!] Laziness and lying often go hand in hand. “It’s not my fault!” “Why should I have to do this?” Remember that we are to love our neighbor to love God. Not working hurts our coworkers, bosses, employees, and ultimately ourselves. It also goes against the first command of God given to Man: “WORK (… the land and care for it.”)
    • Again, going back to the first match-up of haughty eyes and sowing discord, it can also look like Proverbs 26:17-19, meddling in someone else’s argument/fight or throwing firebrands and arrows into a crowd is like the person who gets situations heated up or flat out lies and then says “Just kidding!”
  • When we act like a know-it-all or insert ourselves into situations we have nothing to do with, we claim knowledge and help we can’t really offer, so we make matters worse and then act like we didn’t mean it or even get offended. (Sounds like much of our culture today, eh?)
    • The most dangerous are the people who claim to speak for God – teachers, preachers, pastors, prophets, and apostles – [2 Peter 2:1b-3,18-22] who twist God’s Word, “secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. . . . For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves[h] of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”” (Proverbs 26:11)
  • Which leads to the last pair in our chiasm …
• The innermost pair: Hands that shed innocent blood and feet that run to evil
  • We see that false teachers mock the blood of Christ as they lead people into death.
  • Compare this with vv. 12-15 [Read]
    • False teachers are described as “worthless people, wicked men.”
    • How much do we see this in our world today, though, both inside and outside the church?
    • It all continues as a thread throughout, people who ask the same question as the serpent in Genesis 3, “Did God really say,” so that any lifestyle and sin can be justified. It is lazy interpretation of God’s Word, wicked deception from the pits of hell, and it literally costs lives.
    • It is like the fanaticism of Left-versus-Right politics, never listening to the other side, “because they’re all evil.”
    • “For ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God!” (Romans 3:23)
    • It is attacking another country, raping, torturing, and killing, and acting like the victim. (Yes, like Hamas against Israel or Russia against Ukraine.) It is also like acting like the ones defending themselves are innocent victims. (Ukraine still has many socialistic practices, and Israel is “the most woke nation” in the Middle East.)
• Which all leads to the heart of the matter

• A heart that devises wicked plans.
  • All these other things listed come from our own hearts!
  • We are not much different from “the days of Noah” nor Israel in the time of Judges, when we live as independently as we can (“No authority over me!” Which really means we live like we don’t need God, even as we claim to be worshiping Him.) while “all the thoughts of our hearts are wicked continually.”
  • Jeremiah got it right calling our hearts deceitful and desperately wicked (17:9). Yet, many people love repeating today, “Just follow your heart!”
  • When people ask why everything is wrong in the world, we can point to sin – and it’s in everyone’s heart. Only the grace of God through the blood of Christ can redeem us, but we must trust in Christ and follow His example with the help of the Holy Spirit to be able to live a life pleasing to God.
  • Otherwise, we find ourselves to be living worthless, wicked lives. As Isaiah reminds us in 64:6, even our good works apart from Christ are like filthy, used bathroom tissues, but in Christ our works are sanctified and meaningful.
  • When we try to do things on our own, God can use them for good, but we are lying to ourselves if we think we can earn any grace or goodness or the favor of God.
• Here is the thing: on our own, we will sin. We need God to be able to do truly good things.
  • James 2:9 reminds us that if we stumble slightly in one area, we are guilty of breaking the whole Law of God.
  • Back to Leopold and Loeb, they were caught. How? There were only three people with the specific prescription glasses Loeb had. When they were dumping the body of Bobby Franks, his glasses fell out of his shirt pocket into the mud, and he didn’t realize it until they were back home in Chicago. He was also killed in prison by fellow inmates.
  • The connection here is that it only takes a little mistake to mess everything up. These two definitely highly intelligent men followed their hearts, and it led to murder, prison, and death.
  • However, like my own story, God can redeem lazy liars and rage-filled people. He does this as He described in Ezekiel 36(:26), when by the Spirit He replaces our heart of stone with a heart of flesh. He doesn’t just melt it. He replaces it.
  • The only work it takes on our part is the faith He gives us to trust in Christ and be transformed into His likeness.
• We can learn from this.

Conclusion

To close, we see that Leopold and Loeb were the example of being haughty, prideful, deceptive, violent fools, and in many ways we are just like them. It feels icky to think that we are little better than Hitler, but compared to Jesus, that is what we are.

We commit crimes of pride and laziness, twisting God’s Word and serving our own hearts. We want to be helpful and faithful, but we serve out of self-interest or fear more often than not.

We thus learn from this that we should seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33), and the love of God will guide us in all things, redeeming our selfish, fear-filled actions to become truly good, Spirit-led works for the glory of God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The only “supermen” we tend to see in human history are liars, tyrants, and murderers. The only truly Super Man was the God-Man, Jesus Christ, the one who didn’t go out to kill but was killed for us. When we seek Him, He not only saves us from ourselves and God’s wrath, He makes us like Him.

Jesus is the wisdom of God.

Should we be wise with our money, our words, and our actions? Absolutely. And God helps us with that. Most importantly, we are wise with our hearts and souls, seeking the Wisdom sent from above to redeem us, letting Him work in and through us to redeem this world.

If He can take a violent, lying, adulterous, horrible sinner like me (and like Paul, who persecuted the Church) and turn my life around, He can do that for anyone.

You. Your family. Your friends.

Your enemies.

As Proverbs has already said multiple times, seek God. Fear and love Him, and His wisdom will come to you.