My son, if you receive my words
and treasure up my commandments with you,
making your ear attentive to wisdom
and inclining your heart to understanding;
yes, if you call out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding,
if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God. | Proverbs 2:1-4
This Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching at one of our covenanted 3strand churches: Restoration Road Church in Snohomish. I preached on Proverbs 2, which is an encouragement for the people of God to seek out and find the wisdom that God gives. It lays out the fact that God’s wisdom protects us, produces discernment, and gives the tools for flourishing.
It is important for us to know this, because in a broken world, it is easy to fall for the lie: God’s way isn’t enough. When we see so much suffering and evil, we can begin to imagine that God’s wisdom is not adequate for the complicated problems we face. The very reason why we face these issues is because human beings decided that they know better than God. People are in a terrible feedback loop.
The best way to get out of it is to submit to God’s order and put His ideals to the test. We spend so much time focused on problems that we miss out on the good. Or as GK Chesterton puts it in his book, What is Wrong with the World: What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. I spent my sermon pressing people toward God’s good order, as it applies to sex, marriage, parenting, being a member of a community, as an employee (or employer) and how we understand some of the controversial issues in our society. If the whole world would obey God, then we would not have any problems to deal with (and this is why heaven has no pain, no tears, and no mourning – Revelation 21:4).
Christians should love God’s good order and view it as a gift of grace to us. While I think that we should do everything that we can to invest in God’s way, there is a danger in idolizing it. To idolize God’s order is to give it the honor that only God deserves. It means loving the benefits of His gift more than we love the giver. In this, His commands and statutes become detached from his character and operate without His careful balance of justice and mercy. When this happens, people are justified by how well they follow the law, rather than by the grace of the gospel.
The way that this operates in the church is: people are not shown the love and mercy that they deserve when they fall short of the ideal. When girls turn up pregnant out of wedlock, teens struggle with gender identity, or marriages end in divorce, they are treated as damaged rather than hurting. Too often, they end up receiving a heavy dose of judgment and very little grace. This is because God’s law is being applied apart from His love. God’s order has been idolized, in this, it has been distorted.
How do we prevent this? Some people would say that the best way to avoid judgment is to get rid of the standard. But pretending that God’s order doesn’t exist helps no one; this would be like trying to protect people in a minefield by convincing them that there are no mines. People are still going to experience the destructive results of sin, they just won’t know why. This leads to the foolishness and futile thinking of Romans 1. It is not loving and gracious not to warn people of the destructive course of their life.
We need to keep the law connected to the holy source. God never suspends His justice, but He does extend His grace to a people who have sinned against Him. By worshipping God for who He is, we keep these two aspects of God’s character together. When we idolize God’s order, we elevate His law above His mercy. In doing this, we create a god of our own making; one that can be used for our own sinful ends. It is only by submitting to God completely that we can be a people who both: love the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind and love our neighbors as ourselves.