Proverbs 8:13

Fear God and eliminate evil

Our text tonight is Proverbs 8, 13. We'll begin by readings. Please listen.

The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.

So this is our second session today, studying the fear of the Lord in Proverbs. Last week, Matt taught us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. There is no true understanding or knowledge of what is good, or what is evil, or what is wise, or what is foolish, aside from the consideration of God. And we learned that God's nature is what defines good. God is omnibenevolent. And so evil should be seen as all that is against the nature, character, and design of God. Evil is all that's distorted in the world God created good. It's all that's distorted in us, the beings he created to bear his image. And if we understand our identity as those who are made to bear the image of God, We see that the most logical response to an understanding of God's goodness is to appropriate his desires as our own. To hate evil is to mirror the affections of the being we were made to image. And if we hate evil, That desire necessitates action. A response to our hatred of evil is to eliminate it from our lives. If I were to tell you to hate evil and do nothing about it, that hatred would be limp, meaningless, and ineffectual. A true hatred of evil would result in an action to remove it. And so in one word, I think what Proverbs 8.13 calls us to today is repentance. This verse reminds us that a central facet of walking in the fear of the Lord is repentance. For all of us by nature love what is evil. None of us are immune from pride. None of us possess sinless tongues. And we see that wisdom speaking here, personified here in verse 13, targets three specific areas of our life for us to fight our sin. And so if you're taking notes, this is going to be the heading of our study tonight. Fear God and eliminate evil in three areas of your life. Firstly, in yourself. We should fear God and eliminate evil in our self. And what's explicitly named in this verse is an attitude of pride and arrogance, and both of these convey a sense of self-exaltation in this context, particularly against God, in contrast to a fear of the Lord, a humble, reverent terror that leads to a sober life before God. Pride at its root is an attitude of resistance. It's an attitude of superiority rather than humility, an attitude of self-sufficiency rather than submission and dependency. And as we mentioned, it's a vice that's baked into all of us in our fallen state as descendants of Adam. We, like Adam, the builders of the Tower of Babel, the judges, the rebellious Israelites, we all seek to do what's right in our own eyes rather than submitting to the law of God. In our pride, we reject his definitions of good and evil and substitute our own. And we see that most obviously played out in the cultural revolution of the world around us. Ironically, the self-named pride movement in the world seeks to redefine marriage and morality against those given to us in the word of God. We even see this pride in churches who seek to redefine qualifications for pastors or elders to be more woke and culturally appealing. And while we can hate that sort of evil in the world, it's important in light of this first that we recognize that same sort of pride, our own tendencies to redefine good to suit our own interests in ourselves. And that's where we're supposed to direct our hatred. Pride is why the Pharisees attempted to justify themselves by their obedience to twisted forms of the law, and we can easily fall into the same vices. Maybe you gave to a person in need when others passed up the opportunity, and while that is a good thing, maybe that suddenly makes you believe you're more worthy of acceptance before God than your neighbor. Maybe your devotional habits are more rigorous than that of your spouse or the people around you, and that makes your view of self inflated. You measure your worthiness before God by your ability to meet your own metrics. And that kind of pride ruins our relationships with our neighbors. We don't see them as equals who bear the same image of God, but we evaluate them based on our own metrics, their religious fervor, their education, their looks, wealth, family life, the number of kids they have, and the list could go on. And that sort of subjectification of the worth of another is why we become arrogant. It's why we think we're better than other people. It's why we compare ourselves to other people. And in the context of a community, the way I've seen that kind of arrogance play out is in holding grudges against each other. We hold grudges because we think too much of ourselves. We don't want to let go of our sense of moral superiority over our brother. We don't want to restore them. It's why we withhold forgiveness and postpone reconciliation. We plead upon the blood of Christ to cover our own sins, but in our arrogance act as if it's insufficient to cover the sins of another. Pride is a vice that subverts the authority of God in our lives and disrupts the unity of a church. And so it's a form of evil that we need to hate and get rid of. And as with most things in Christianity, as with most cases against sin, I think the most effective antidote to our pride is to take a good and long look at the cross. The cross is a reminder of how sick your heart really is, how foolish it is to hold a grudge against a fellow believer, how foolish it is to think that you're better than anybody before the face of God. And so if you want to grow in your hatred for pride, the solution is to view yourself not through the lens of your own standards of righteousness and worth, but to view yourself through the lens of the cross. And when the truth that you are a sinner given grace becomes the first and most important aspect of how you view yourself, you'll see your unworthiness Before the face of God who is good, you'll be happy to submit to all he defines as good. You'll see your neighbor as a peer rather than a rung on a ladder to step over. If we fear God, we should hate any manifestation of such a pride in ourself and kill it by means of the cross. And so that's the first area of our lives where we're called to eliminate evil inside the self, The second aspect of our lives that this verse points us towards, guides our eyes towards, is the evil around us, the evil in our setting. That's our second section. Fear God and eliminate the evil in your setting. Wisdom in this verse says that she hates the evil way. And the word for way here connotes the idea of a road, a pathway, a journey, a direction. And so if we're to hate the evil in our way, we need to remove the evil in our setting, our surrounding, our environment. If we fear God and hate evil, we'll avoid putting ourselves in the presence of it. And practically, that might mean if you're at work and you walk into an office where your coworkers are gossiping, the best thing for you to do might be to leave the room. If you're tempted to sin while you're alone in your room, you can fight evil by leaving it, by moving your feet, by changing your setting. Another practical way for us to stay off the evil way is to walk with the right kind of people. Solomon says later in Proverbs 13, 10,

whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.

Again, in Proverbs 22, 24, he says,