Posted on 02/12/2020 5:47:43 AM PST by Pilgrim's Progress
“A prudent man concealeth knowledge: but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness” (Proverbs 12:23).
“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,” just as we that are fathers don’t teach our children everything we know when they are seven-years-old, God imparts truth to us a little at a time when we are ready for it. At the same time, He doesn’t just unscrew the top of our heads and pour new truth into us. He expects us to search it out. The reason we see many ignorant Christians that really don’t know what they believe is because they haven’t opened their Bibles in years, except for perhaps an hour on Sunday morning, assuming their church even encourages them to carry one to services.
Human beings are pretty brutish and are true simpletons in comparison to God who knows everything and has a perfect understanding in all things. And so, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,” but we are called kings and priests, and as such, it is our glory to search out a matter; it's our glory to pray about something for years sometimes before the Lord showed us some answers.
Did any of us grasp everything in the Bible the first time we read it through? You could read it thirty times and still be unclear of all that is therein. Perhaps, as a young person, we read Calvin and Hobbes and Moby Dick and you knew the story from beginning to end and you know the punch lines and the jokes and the ends and outs and just get it from reading them once. The Bible is not like that. It is nothing like that at all.
There are things in Proverbs that are plain and simple: “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,” what don't we understand about this verse? Yet, at the same time there are depths to Proverbs and their interpretations.
“To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings” (Proverbs 1:6).
The disciples came to the Lord one night in John 16 and He told them there is coming a time when He was not going to talk to them in proverbs, and He in fact that night he was talking so plain to them they said “Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb” (John 16:29).
Daily Bible study is necessary if we are going to begin our day with the right attitude and the right spiritual diet. Proverbs has 31 chapters, and most months have 31 days, so let’s read a chapter of Proverbs a day and see what God might have for us. As the Lord leads, share with us what God has shown you in a special way and by His grace let us build up a devotional repository. Let’s keep our knives and forks handy for some daily bread! Ideally, a chapter or two of Proverbs will fit in nicely with a good plan of reading our Bibles through each year.
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