Proverbs 15:29 ESV
The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+15%3A29&version=ESV]
Where do we go when life gets hard? We have a lot of options, in a sense. We could pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, early 1900s style. We could rely on family, on friends, on coworkers, on society at large. We could find solace in nature’s beauty. We have too a whole collage of religions and philosophies, Marxism and Hinduism and being vaguely spiritual. Our instinct, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, children of those who sinned, is to turn to any and all of these before we turn to God. We must learn to discipline ourselves towards Him.
For the wicked, this impulse is natural; it is indeed almost sensical. “The Lord is far from the wicked,” says today’s verse, and so to look to all the pleasures and powers of creation first seems nearly right. It’s not, though, because the Lord may be far from the wicked, but His ear is forever close to those who call upon His name. The wicked, therefore, cannot call upon God as the righteous can, in assurance and as to his Father, but even the wickedest of men have this respite: God saves. He can call upon the God who saves, and when he calls in repentance and faith, the Lord who worked that call in him will answer. Then he will have rest.
This is happy news not just in itself but because nothing else can suffice. Solomon discovered as much: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecc. 1:2). Solomon, of all men, had resources to spend. In his days, “The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stone, and he made cedar as plentiful as the sycamore of the Shephelah” (1 Kings 10:27). Solomon had access to every pleasure and resource of the world, and he turned to them for aid, to find meaning and lasting substance for life.
He tried human wisdom, but that turned out to be a trap, another path into emptiness (Ecc. 1). He tried self-indulgence, temperance, and hard work, all three (Ecc. 2). These too he found only vanity, acrid illusions, bridges that snapped only when his weight was upon them. He pondered the world, and he saw how it continued ever on, not caring for the passing of one man, and he saw that even his great majesty would be nothing to history’s grindstone (3-6). This foundation is a constant theme of Ecclesiastes. All the things of man’s world, all his pleasures and his inventions, they cannot uphold him when he “walks through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4). There, only God our shepherd can keep us.
We have God, then, are our only ultimate refuge. God is better than bread (and He feeds us); He is sweeter than water (and by His grace we drink); He is mightier than many armies (and His arm is to us all victory) (1 Kings. 17:4; Ps. 119:103, 24:8). When all comes to an end around us, when we are weak and failing, when our soul fails within us, God still stands. God still stands, and He hears our prayer. He promises, “Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am,’” (Is. 58:9). We have, however, a peril still remaining to us, on this earth, even when we accept in our minds (if not our hearts) that He is our final port.
We must take care, when we seek Him, that we seek Him as He is. We are prone, all of us, to seek Him not as He is but as we want Him to be. In the modern ‘church’, that generally means avoiding all mention of judgement; in some of us, that means forgetting all mercy (and ignoring our own need for it). In all cases, though, when we fail to seek Him as He is, when we pervert our understanding of His nature (not merely lacking comprehension- that is inevitable with the infinite- but including deception), we violate the Third Commandment: “You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain” (Deut. 5:11). We pray to Him in His name, after all. Setting aside proper reverence to approach God as less than He is, that is to see Him as a vanity, a sign of the evil in our hearts.
The truth, of course, is that we all will fail this standard. We will fail it over, and over, and over. By the very fact that not every second of our life is devoted to Him, whether it be work or play or church or medicine, we indicate a respect that is less than it ought to be. We knew already, though, that we are sinners. The answer to this sin is ultimately the same as to the rest fo sin, the rest of life: God’s mercy. God, in His grace, sent His Son, that whoever believes in Him, all the elect, will have eternal life, true life (Jn. 3:16).
God bless
Written by Colson Potter.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
