Walking with the Wise #9: Not In Your Own Eyes

“Be not wise in your own eyes;

fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
It will be healing to your flesh

and refreshment to your bones.”

—Proverbs 3:7-8

Walking with the wise means listening to others wiser than ourselves. These are usually individuals who have been around for a long time, who, through experience, understand the ins and outs of life. They have known success and known failure and through those experiences have learned wisdom. Wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge, but it is thinking and acting rightly in accordance with the knowledge of how one is to conduct oneself in a variety of life situations. God, because He is God, is infinitely wise. He is the Creator of wisdom, and gave it to us for our benefit. And although God is the Creator of wisdom, we still, for some foolish and unexplainable reason, believe that we are wiser than God. We have the audacity to question God’s ways and His workings, exalting ourselves over Him while vainly and foolishly forcing God into our own parameters of understanding. And some of us do the unthinkable and attempt to call God “foolish.” Such accusations are pitiable at best, and at worst, blasphemous. To believe that one could ever be wiser than God is to show oneself as one of the greatest fools the world has ever known. Job didn’t think he was wiser than God, but he did have several questions for God in light of his suffering. After questioning many of God’s ways and listening to the counsel of his friends, God shows up. And the LORD says to him,

"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 

Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to Me”
—Job 38:2-3.

And then again,

"Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?
He who argues with God, let him answer it"

—Job 40:2.

We cannot begin to answer or question God for how He has arranged the world. Solomon tells us not to be “wise in your own eyes.” He knew the tendency of man to exalt himself over God, which is why he wrote,

“Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few”—Ecclesiastes 5:2.

We must remember that He is the Creator, and we are the creation. We must learn the fear of the Lord. And part of fearing the Lord is turning away from evil. Fearing God means hating what God hates and doing what God desires that we do. Anything else is telling God that we know better than He does. When man tries to disregard God’s command, he has no idea what he is really doing. He is inviting such incredible and inescapable judgment on his life that when he dies he will beg to remove one sin from his sentence. It will be a horrible time.

When we sin, conviction may begin to occur. And conviction can affect us spiritually, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. David understood that and wrote about the effect of his sin upon him.

He wrote,

“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away 
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer”

—Psalm 32:3-4.

Sin is discomforting, but the opposite is also true. Whenever we are doing what God delights in, we experience “healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.”

God desires that we walk in wisdom, because that is the way that is most glorifying to Him and satisfying to us. We must reject every notion that we can live a blessed life apart from Him. A blessed life is one that is lived in accordance with His Word, not apart from it.

May God enable us to walk in wisdom for the glory of His name. And may the lives we live enable us to experience healing and refreshment as we continually focus on Him. Amen.