My Least Favorite Verse

“He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.” (Pr 29:1 KJB)

This is one of those verses I would prefer was not in the word of God.  It is quite bleak.  The understanding is not complicated at all.  Consequences for choices are designed to either affirm good ones or change bad ones.  It is the latter that is addressed above.  Our faults have consequences.  They are built into God’s creation.  They are part of it.  There is no discrimination.  What is wrong for one is wrong for another and they will suffer similar consequences.  These inevitabilities start small.  The more they are ignored, the more severe they become.  If completely ignored, the consequences of poor choices become our undoing.  This is the law of God’s creation.  The LORD states in another passage,  “For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life:” (Pr 6:23 KJB)  This continues all our lives.  No one is immune.  In another passage, the psalmist calls these sins presumptuous.  Paul calls them the sin which doth so easily beset us.  These stubborn temptations that seem to get the better of us dole out some harsh penalties.  Those who are wise will abandon the sin before the penalty becomes unbearable.  Those who are not will suffer more and more until the sin beats them completely.

How many of us have seen crows in the middle of the road, eating something left behind?  Maybe some trash, or more than likely, roadkill.  The road kill is there for a reason.  It failed to learn a lesson that the crows are not ignoring.  I have seen crows disperse in plenty of time.  They escape being hit by a passing car.  Then there are the greedy birds who get clipped but survive.  These do not learn.  They are right back at it.  Some will disperse in plenty of time.  The stubborn usually do not.  What was once a single roadkill is now piling up.  Maybe it was a squirrel.  Now it is a squirrel and a crow.  Like the crow who tempts fate and does not learn, we do the same.  Only we do not tempt fate.  We tempt to laws of blessing and cursing.  We continue in harmful life choices thinking we can either escape harmful consequences or tolerate them and adjust.  Neither happens.

When we see this in others, we are moved by all sorts of emotions.  We may have compassion.  We may have disrespect.  We may have biases or preconceived ideas of how someone got to that place.  We may be stirred to do something about it.  We may run a gamut of responses towards someone in the depths of sin who is not learning from the hard knocks that come from it.  What we rarely do is arrive at the realization there may be strongholds in our own lives that we are ignoring.  These strongholds, if not conquered, will become that enemy that destroys us.  Somehow, we think our stronghold is not nearly as serious as someone else’s.  We gaze upon their stronghold as more immoral.  Because their stronghold seems to be far more obvious along with the consequences from which they suffer, we are blind to our own.  This is not wise.  The admonition above is for all of us.  Maybe our stronghold will not harm us physically.  There are spiritual and emotional consequences that can be equally harmful.  The point is if we do not seek the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome the strongholds that cause harm, the harm which they cause may be our undoing.  The wise saint will pray and seek the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome that which has become our worst challenge.