Proverbs 15:31 ESV
The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+15%3A31&version=ESV]
To listen to reproof is an essential life skill, more important than making the bed or driving or good manners (though helpful for all three). Wisdom is not innate to sinful man. In fact, sinful man intensely dislikes wisdom, in his native state, and so he does not keep it when he finds it. He must be taught, then, to heed reproof. We all have sin in us, and therefore reproof is to us bitter indeed. This proverb, like many other passages of Scripture, emphasizes the importance of heeding reproof but also of discerning what type of reproof it is: reproof which leads to death or which leads to life.
Death-dealing reproof is half-a-cent-to-the-gallon in most places. You can pay more, sure, and plenty of people want you to do just that, but really all you need to do to find it is go outside or open a popular website or read a famous book of philosophy. It hammers into us, soaks past our skin to our bones, and dribbles out of our mouths unnoticed. It’s marinade, and we’re a pork chop, waiting to fry. What is it, though, that makes ‘death-dealing reproof’ deal death?
The reproof given by fools and the wicked does not have to be intentionally malicious to be lethal. No, all it has to be is a rebellion against God’s wisdom. Fallen man rebels against God body, mind, soul, and strength, loving anything more than Him, and therefore he hates his neighbor as he hates himself- not always consciously but in every word and action (Prov. 12:10). The best works of the wicked are not merely dirty (Is. 64:6) but actually harmful, evildoing restrained by God’s grace alone. Christians, thanks be to God, do not have this sin so woven into them, but we still sin. We are imperfect, on this earth, blind and foolish and mired in the petty sins of Adam’s nature (Rom. 5:12). Thus, Christians too can deal out deadly advice, deadly in one all-important respect: it does not look to God as God.
What do I mean by looking to God as God? To look to God as God is to set Him in the place He actually occupies in reality. He is the “first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13), the fulcrum of reality and its sovereign Creator (Gen. 1). His nature is the fullness of morality, standard for all good (against which all evil fails), and of existence, for what is of Him persists and what does not is revealed by its ephemerality for nothingness. All reproof which does not heed this standard will lead in some way to death.
The world has a voice, though, and it speaks loud, if not very clear. Christians are ‘rude’ and ‘backwards,’ ‘behind the times’ and ‘bigoted.’ Some of its voices, often with ‘Reverend’ before their names, echo the these sentiments, calling for ‘kindness’ and ‘winsomeness’ and ‘the blessings of liberty (read: transvestite story hour).’ This reproof is reproof, but we must not judge it merely by that standard. We must ask if it conforms to God’s law, God’s standard, and quite honestly it doesn’t.
Usually it doesn’t, but occasionally somebody makes a good point. Occasionally the world gets ahold of a real flaw and pounds on it (or praises it, but that’s not what we’re talking about here). Sometimes I have been cruel or hard-hearted or greedy. Sometimes I have let myself grow angry and acted on that anger unrighteously. In this day and age, that’s a constant temptation. We recognize, of course, that even here the boundary between right and wrong isn’t what the world (and many ‘churches’) would tell us, given that Paul wished certain false teachers would castrate themselves (Gal. 5:12) and Jesus called the Pharisees ‘white-washed tombs’ (Matt. 23:27). But sometimes the world has a point; sometimes there is truth mixed into that ‘death-dealing reproof’.
So what we must recognize here is that reproof comes in a mixed back. Even the best counselor among fallible man will give some bad advice, will mix in a little tare with his wheat. Even the worst counsellor may (occasionally, rarely) have a bit of a point hidden off to the side of his diatribe or manipulation. What are we to do then, if we can’t cleanly categorize everything? We must sift through, separating the wheat from the tares, and for this we need a sifter, a standard to test each part of the reproof against. Our standard (and you’ve probably already guessed it) is God’s holy word, Scripture, all 66 books thereof.
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.