“The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out.”
Water is calm and placid, when contained. When let loose, though, when given a single small egress, water destroys; it rushes and tears and cuts through the land like a knife, riving apart any who stand against it. Swift waters have a weight and a ferocity which man cannot well stand against. If you ever doubt this, go stand in ocean breakers when they are calm, then imagine what that overwhelming force is like when the ocean rises in wrath. This being the case, we should pay close attention to the advice of this proverb: to set aside discord before it becomes enmity and strife, lest we find ourselves standing athwart the water’s rage.
Let’s consider another metaphor to get the idea more clearly fixed. A disagreement is a snowball; resentment or anger is a push; the end result is the house-sized boulder of snow-squished-to-ice that cores out the house at the bottom of the hill.
A devastating fight doesn’t need to start big, and it won’t, in all likelihood. I say I want pepperoni pizza; you, like (I aver) a lunatic, say you want olives on it too. I’m in a bad mood- I stubbed my toe two hours ago and never got over it- so I stick to my guns. It’s pepperoni or nothing, and I’m paying anyway. You, a little surprised by the vehemence, retort that it’s your birthday; by this point, you’re feeling a little wounded. I hear your point, and it hurts. I don’t want to admit I’m wrong though, so the guilt becomes anger, mixed with fear of being made a fool of, and I say something back, something rude. You reciprocate the rudeness, as is natural, however foolish. The accusations, the questions, the insinuations, they bounce back and forth, and every time one lands, it is thrown back a little harder, becoming heavier and heavier with the metaphorical blood of the participants. In the end, we have a fight that splits the relationship for a decade and involves every wound either party knew about. All from a disagreement over pizza. For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.
Is that going to be every argument? Absolutely not. Is it a pattern of escalation fights tend towards? Yes. Every time I am hurt, I want to hurt the other person just a little more. Lamech had the honestly to say, “If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then [mine] is seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:24). We have that same impulse in us. Fights start small, with a little bit of immaturity, a little wound, intended or unintended, and if the fire is not caught then, it spreads. Every old controversy becomes fodder; every old failure becomes fuel; every old wound becomes a target, in time.
Why?
Fights become bigger and bigger and bigger because sin is their fuel and we’re sinners. We grow angry and afraid; we find our pride pricked and our feelings bruised. So we lash out to hurt the one who hurt us, to protect ourselves (for the best defense, we instinctively feel, is a good offense). This is perhaps the clearest in children, who lack the self-control to conceal, when they throw tantrums. It is most damaging, as a rule, in adults, when immaturity has been papered over and given control of reason and intelligence. Adults, when we do not control their hearts as we ought (1 Cor. 7:37; 2 Tim. 3:3), have the capacity to inflict great harm, turning our minds and our logic and our skills to the task of harming each other. Back-room politics, whether in government or academia or business or church or family, will attest to this.
So the best time to stop a fight is at the beginning. This doesn’t just mean ‘stopping’ the actual progress of the fight. If I press ‘pause’ on the movie, the rest of the film will still play out eventually. I need to actually turn the TV off or eject the DVD or close the browser window or whatever you do to exit a film in the days of streaming. Stopping a fight means forgiveness; it means reconciliation; it means setting aside hatred and fear and pride and resentment and envy and possessiveness in submission not God in order to work through the basic issue.
I am responsible for doing this from my end, even if the other person isn’t. If a fight starts and I’m a party, my job is to set aside and destroy my hurt and my pride. I must look at the issue and the controversy from as close to God’s viewpoint as I can get. I must, in order to do this and as part of it, forgive any harm done to me and seek forgiveness for any harm I have done, particularly if it was intended harm, even if it was merely negligent. This does not mean compromising the truth, but it does mean ensuring that it is God’s truth, not whatever falsity I’d prefer.
Not all fights should end at their beginning. A quarrel is deadly; strife between brothers is a great evil. Fights over wrong and right, however, fights for that which really matters, those are always a part of life. Christians are in perpetual warfare with the world (Heb. 11:7) for the souls of themselves and of their children, for the state of the culture they inhabit and create, for the nations and institutions they man and live beneath the authority of. Fights for these are necessary and good, but even here we should apply this principle. To pollute righteous striving with sin’s strife is an evil; to fight the good fight with an evil heart ends in fighting for evil, at least for a lesser good, at least in fighting foolishly, to hurt instead of to sanctify. So let us stop quarrels at the beginning (James 4:1-10), and purge the sin of quarrelling even from our Christian soldiery.
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.