“For the apostasy of the inexperienced will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. But whoever listens to me will live securely and be undisturbed by the dread of danger.” (Proverbs 1:32-33 CSB – Read the chapter)

As a parent, it’s sometimes hard to know how to punish bad behavior in your kids. You have to figure out a consequence that is measured to the situation, but also one that will be meaningful to them. If you offer up a punishment that doesn’t register high enough on their inconvenience meter, the odds are unfortunately high that they will do it again because their desire for whatever it is you don’t want them to do is high enough they are willing to endure that particular level of inconvenience in order to do it again. This becomes all the more difficult the older they get. Sometimes, though, you don’t have to do very much because the natural consequences of their choices will be punishment enough. Rejecting wisdom is one of those things whose natural consequences can be their own punishment. Let’s talk about it.

This is something we talked about yesterday, but let’s reflect just a bit further on it since wisdom is so much more explicit about it here. This breaks down nicely into three parts; two are warnings, one is an encouragement. Let’s treat each in turn.

“For the apostasy of the inexperienced will kill them.” Now, that’s a pretty hard statement to take at face value, so let’s think on it just a bit deeper. Apostasy is the rejection of a religion. The inexperienced would be those who are not very well-versed in life and how to do it well. To put this a bit more familiarly, then, the turning to atheism of young people will kill them. Will kill them? Really?!? I’ve heard about a lot of students rejecting the Christianity of their upbringing when going off to college. I haven’t heard any stories about such a decision resulting in their death.

How are we supposed to take this seriously? This sounds like something a hyper-religious mother (think: Mary Cooper from Young Sheldon and Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage) would say to a teenage child not wanting to be dragged to church anymore in a desperate attempt to use guilt or emotional manipulation to force them into a pew against their will.

Well, while this seems like unnecessarily extreme language, when we really take it to heart, I’m not so sure that it actually is all that extreme. The thing about so many professed young atheists today, especially those who were raised in the church, is that they don’t really go full bore into their newly claimed worldview. Maybe a number of them didn’t get their big questions about God and the faith answered properly when they were kids, and not that they are on a college campus where it is cool to rebel against things like whatever beliefs your parents taught you at home, and where a charismatic professor has learned to make a few clever-sounding arguments against Christianity combined with a bit of peer pressure, and so they claim atheism now on those grounds. I suspect more, though, got to college, found themselves wanting to join in the general debauchery and fornication of their peers, kept running into the guilt caused by the moral restraints of their upbringing, and finally rejected those restraints and the worldview that held them in place so they could indulge without feeling badly about it.

In other words, they are atheists of convenience. They want the freedom to do whatever they please without being slowed down by moral guilt, but they don’t really want to jettison all of the moral restraints the assumptions of the Christian worldview have worked into our culture. They don’t really want to live fully as an atheist, they just want to be able to have sex whenever they want and get wasted at parties without the cloud of accountability to some deity they never really accepted in the first place hanging over their heads. They are thinking only with their lizard brain and not the full rationality that comes with a bit more experience in life.

Is doing this going to literally kill them? Well, in Solomon’s day, perhaps the likelihood of that was measured on a different scale than it is today. The general moral expectations and restraints of Christianity have done more to shape our culture and its relative safety than we typically realize. But heading off down that particular path has resulted in bringing more pain and hardship to the lives of those who walk it than we talk about in polite company. Several stories come to mind here that illustrate the point, but which I won’t take time to share now. I suspect more than a few come to mind for you as well. These may not have caused physical death for anyone, but they nonetheless caused some pretty serious emotional and relational and financial and even spiritual wounds whose recovery took many long years to experience with any kind of fullness.

The apostasy of the inexperienced may not physically kill them, but when we turn away from the wisdom of God’s word and character, we turn to all kinds of destruction. And the sad part, is that in their inexperience, the people who are most inclined to walk this path aren’t even aware of what is coming toward them because of the ramifications of their actions. That’s the next part of the proverb here. “And the complacency of fools will destroy them.”

Complacency is a twisted cousin of contentment. In a given moment the feeling granted by each state of being is roughly the same. They each come with a general sense of ease and comfort with one’s current circumstances. The difference is, contentment, which is often paired with wisdom, is rooted in wisdom and trust in God and is the result of making wise decisions that will ultimately play out well for the one making them. Complacency, on the other hand, is rooted in foolishness and pride. It is a kind of smug self-satisfaction that is the result of ignoring or otherwise downplaying the real dangers of the foolish decisions a person is making. Apostasy would be one of those foolish decisions.

Essentially, this second part is just repeating the idea of the first part in slightly different terms for the sake of making the idea more memorable. Those who are inexperienced with life and the real consequences of the choices that we make will make a foolish decision without realizing all of the potentially negative consequences it brings with it. This is where things get really tricky or really dangerous or both. Because these negative consequences only exist as potential futures at first, that means there’s a chance they won’t actually come. And if they don’t, the foolish person making them will grow in their complacency as their false confidence about the rightness of their path grows. They’ll point to what they see as obvious evidence that all the warnings of those who called them away from it when they started off in this direction were for naught. They were little more than fearmongering and emotional manipulation. And so they will keep moving in the wrong direction.

This is where the trap gets sprung. As they keep walking, making more foolish decisions that are in line with their newly embraced worldview, eventually one of those negative consequences will leave the realm of potential and become and actual problem for them. Typically, though, one such negative consequence isn’t enough to convince them to turn back from their path, so they keep going. And then they experience another, this one often worse than the first. Then another. Then another. And suddenly they find their lives a complete disaster. It didn’t happen all at once. Rather, it was slow and then sudden.

There is another way. “But whoever listens to me will live securely and be undisturbed by the dread of danger.” The path of wisdom isn’t always the easiest or most convenient path. Taking that path will require us to say no to ourselves in a number of different ways and on a number of different fronts. It will occasionally make us unpopular with the people around us because our refusal to join in their folly will be perceived as judgmental even though that’s not at all our state of mind toward them. But in the end, we will be able to live with the secure confidence that this path will lead to life and all sorts of positive outcomes for us. It will even lead to better outcomes for the people around us because of the spillover effect of wisdom. The various threats from the world that are waiting to pounce on the inexperienced and complacent will not bother us. They won’t be able to reach us. And even when things do occasionally turn hard on us, we’ll be able to keep walking confidently down this path because we have tasted and seen its goodness already.

The choice between these two paths seems painfully obvious when talking about them from a distance like this. It doesn’t feel quite so obvious in a given moment when we are faced with temptation or peer pressure or just our own twisted desires. We need the help of a steady engagement with Scriptures, an open line of communication with God through prayer, and a supportive community like the church helping to lovingly hold us accountable and us them. But when we put these kinds of things in place, the sweet fruits of choosing the path of wisdom will be ours to enjoy. Let’s get walking.