Let me speak to you a parable. There was an angry man, angry at his wife. He was sure she did not respect him.
Some days he was sure she was
the ideal contentious woman of the
Proverbs. So he was angry at her. A lot.
But he never hit her; that was very politically incorrect and besides,
it could land him in jail. So instead he
was just grumpy. He wouldn’t talk to
her. And if he did it was mean-spirited,
terse, demeaning. So ends the
parable. Except to say that this man
considered himself to be a righteous man.
On an average day I would tell that man how
stupid he is. This tactic (i.e. game)
isn’t going to improve your life. The wrath of man does not produce the
righteousness of God (James 1:20). I
would remind him, on an average day, of the 5 principles of Rom. 12:17-21. (Check them out for yourself; this isn’t an
average day.) On this day, which is
unusual, I would take him to the Proverbs of Solomon, a man with 900 wives and
concubines. Here’s what I would tell
him.
·
20:22: I would tell him to quit recompensing
evil. That’s just what he’s doing. He is taking over God’s job, a job that only
God can do; the man just doesn’t have the brains to know what true recompense
is. Only God does. The man’s recompense isn’t going to save him. Like Jesus said, the man who tries to save
his own life will lose it. The man’s
anger is going to make his life just that much more miserable. (Turns out this is one of the 5 principles in
Romans 12, vs. 17-19.)
·
20:23: I would tell him he is living his life on
the basis of diverse weights and dishonest scales. He is evaluating his wife on the basis of one
set of weights, and it is precise, a judgment with no mercy. At the same time he is judging himself with a
different set of weights. It’s the way
it always is: what you criticize in others is what you don’t like in
yourself. Truth is, he doesn’t respect
his wife, to put it mildly. He’s using
different weights on the scales. And
that is an abomination to God. Abomination. Used in the Bible of idolatry,
cross-dressing, sodomy (homosexuality) and a bunch of other sins. So turns out the man isn’t near as righteous
as he makes himself out to be.
·
20:24: I would tell him he needs to put himself
back in the Lord’s hands, the Lord he professes to know and serve. Ultimately, relatively, actually the man
doesn’t know what’s really going on; he can’t because he’s only a man and not
God. His only hope of getting things
right is to yield his expectations and rights and desires to God; to plead with
God to direct his steps; to be joyful and at peace with where God has placed
Him for this day, this moment.
That’s what I would tell him. What kind of man would be like that? Day after day sometimes. Year after year. I’ll tell you: a man like me. That’s the kind of man who does this kind of
thing. I hope that man is listening as
he writes.
No comments:
Post a Comment