“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight. Don’t be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and turn away from evil. This will be healing for your body and strengthening for your bones. (Proverbs 3:5-8 CSB – Read the chapter)

Men are infamous for not wanting to ask for directions. Personally, I hate not knowing where I am, but I also don’t like getting directions from another person. But this is because I need to see a map. Verbal directions are mostly meaningless to me. If I can see it, I do much better. My weakness is that if I actually do think I know where I’m going, I can be pretty stubborn about it. It’s easy to convince ourselves we know where we are going when we really don’t. That’s true on the road, and it’s true in life. Solomon has some wisdom here for the latter. Let’s take a look.

One of the features of Hebrew poetry, and especially Hebrew proverbs is a literary device called parallelism. This is where an author says something and then follows it up with a second line that is meant to emphasize the point in the first line in some creative way to make it more powerful or memorable. For example (and, yes, we’ll talk about this later, but it’s a convenient, random sample right now), Proverbs 21:10 says “A wicked person desires evil; he has no consideration for his neighbor.”

The second line there after the semi-colon supports the first line by further explaining what the first part is getting at. The first line could be taken as merely a general statement with pretty broad implications. Of course wicked people desire evil. So what? But the second line draws us in to consider a specific kind of evil, a specific manifestation of evil. This wicked person shows no consideration for his neighbor. Now we have a clearer picture of the focus of the proverb.

Of course, the first line also supports the second line. A person who shows no consideration for a neighbor, for others more generally is usually seen as a jerk, but not necessarily evil. What we see here, though, is that God takes this lack of care, this lack of love, for a neighbor entirely more seriously than we are perhaps inclined to take it. It’s not simply that it’s rude to run roughshod over a neighbor’s needs or desires, it’s evil. More on that later when we actually get there in our journey.

This kind of parallelism is on beautiful display here in this set of proverbs, the first of which is very well known, but the second often gets ignored. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight.” This is definitely one of those bumper-sticker theology verses we have talked about before, but in being a proverb, taking this one out of context isn’t such a big deal as that is in other contexts. I think I remember memorizing this one in Vacation Bible School when I was really little. You can 100% find this one on a piece of wall art at Hobby Lobby.

As often as it is overlooked, though, the second part of the parallel emphasizes and strengthens the appeal of the first part. “Don’t be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and turn away from evil. This will be healing for your body and strengthening for your bones.”

Our culture places a great deal of faith in our ability to know and do the right thing. If you are in doubt about the path you should take forward from where you are to where you want to go, the only source you really need to consult is your own heart. Look inside yourself. Trust your heart. You are all you need. That kind of drivel is as common as gnats in Oakboro in the summer. The problem is that it is utter nonsense.

A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests rather insistently that we don’t have any idea what the right thing to do is on our own. If we listen to our own heart, we’re going to wind up somewhere rather distantly removed from where we’d like to be. We have a remarkably consistent ability to screw things up for ourselves by the choices that we make. At least, that’s the case when we are our primary source of counsel. As Jeremiah wrote: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable – who can understand it?”

We need outside input. But because the people around us all suffer from the same limitations that we have, looking to just them as our primary sources of input won’t do us any better than listening to just ourselves will. What we really need is someone with sufficient wisdom to give us the kind of guidance that will actually get us to where we are trying to go. What we need is the God who is the source of all wisdom.

Trusting in Him is always going to be our best play. And by “trusting in Him” what I mean is that we need to listen to and obey His words rather than our own wants and desires. Now, where our desires and His words happen to line up, all the better. But when there’s a conflict, we should always default to what He has said. Being wise in our own eyes is a recipe for disaster. Seeking the spiritual wisdom James calls us to in James 3 is the way to go. “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace.”

When we trust in the Lord with all of our heart; when we fear Him properly, respecting fully His power and position and wisdom and authority as God, and letting that fear lead us to reject and turn away from evil; when we refuse to think we know and understand everything, but rather seeking diligently to know Him and His ways, we will find that our paths are straightened out. We will find our bodies strengthened and made whole.

Now, what exactly Solomon meant by that we can take in a variety of different directions, but all of them are good. Of course, we have to keep in mind that proverbs describe how things work, all things being equal, but that there are plenty of times when all things are not equal. Sometimes we do the right thing, seek the Lord diligently, but our path seems to zig and zag like crazy in front of us. Sometimes we trust in Him with all our heart and find our bodies failing us and growing weak anyway. That doesn’t negate the truthfulness of the proverb here, though, because we aren’t living primarily for this world and what we will experience in it. An apparently crooked path in this world may yet still be a straight and smooth path to His kingdom if we keep trusting in Him and refusing to be wise in our own eyes. Straight paths are not necessarily easy paths.

I could perhaps say more here, but at least the first part of this couplet has been analyzed endlessly. Allow me simply this one final exhortation here to drive the point home: You don’t know everything. I don’t either. As long as we live like we do, we will accomplish little more than creating one headache after another for ourselves. We’ll create headaches for the people around us as well – that is, our neighbors. And if we do that, we’ll fall victim to the proverb we started with a few minutes ago. Our lack of consideration for our neighbors will reveal us to be evil, and certainly not fit for God’s kingdom. Rather than knowing we are wise (because we aren’t), let’s commit to knowing well that He is and seeking to live as He has called us to live. Rest assured: everyone will be glad that we did.