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Proverbs 14:9   Fools mock at making amends for sin, but goodwill is found among the upright.

It’s not always easy to follow the logic of the statements in the Book of Proverbs, but Eugene Petersen can be very helpful in ‘The Message’.  This is what he makes of this one: “The stupid ridicule right and wrong, but a moral life is a favoured one.”  This is the direction in which my own thoughts were heading as I meditated on the NIV, so it was helpful to get confirmation from someone whose mastery of the Hebrew language far exceeds my own.

Solomon has a very timely message here for our own age.  As our post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture pursues its agenda of actively rejecting the absolute, revealed truth of God’s Word, insisting that nothing is either ’right’ or ‘wrong’, but we can all make up our own minds about what’s OK for us personally, it is ‘proving’ the truth of the point being made in this proverb!  Our society is becoming more and more a-moral, losing its social cohesion, and producing uncertainty, instability and confusion, particularly among young people who have never experienced the scenario I grew up in, one that, at least, had a general acceptance of the truth of the Bible, even if we decided to take no notice of it!  We found out the hard way, by bitter experience, that ‘a moral life is a favoured one’, and, if we were honest, we could observe that ‘goodwill is found among the upright’.

When our culture takes the direction that ‘I have the right to run my own life, I am entitled to be my own person, and no one has the right to ‘correct’ me by some ‘arbitrary’ external standard’, it does not make for a happy, contented, mutually supportive and caring society – as we are, sadly, finding out, even if we have trouble actually admitting it is so.

Jesus made it clear, by his example as well as by his teaching, that deliberate, conscious obedience to God’s Word and will is the way of peace and happiness.  “When we walk with the Lord in the light of his Word, what a glory he sheds on our way! While we do his good will, he abides with us still, and with all who will trust and obey.  Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.  Not a burden we bear, not a sorrow we share, but our toil he doth richly repay; not a grief nor a loss, not a frown nor a cross, but is blest if we trust and obey.  But we never can prove the delights of his love until all on the altar we lay; for the favour he shows, for the joy he bestows, are for them who will trust and obey.  Then in fellowship sweet we will sit at his feet, or we’ll walk by his side in the way; what he says we will do, where he sends we will go; never fear, only trust and obey.”

– Bruce Christian