"The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth do I hate."
Proverbs 8:13
Part 2
Yesterday:
“The fear of the LORD.”
“Is to hate evil:”
If we don’t hate evil, we are not “fearing the LORD.” If we “fear the LORD,” we will love what He loves and hate what He hates.
Today:
Our sin problem, our inordinate human love for it, is wrapped up in the sin nature that we inherited from Adam when he fell into sin.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19).
“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).
“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Titus 3:3).
Our only hope for overcoming our ingrained desire for evil is to have a changed heart through the divine help of the Lord Jesus Christ. Only His righteous sacrifice on the cross can break the power of sin in our lives.
“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil, the evil way, to hate sin as sin, and therefore to hate every false way. Wherever there is an awe of God, there is a dread of sin, as an evil, as only evil”1 (Henry).
“Pride, and arrogancy,”
Solomon mentions some sins we ought to hate.
How do you feel about “pride and arrogance” when you see it demonstrated in someone else’s life? We know that the Lord hates these sins. And probably, for the most part, so do we. That is, we hate this in others, these are such ugly sins. But why don’t we hate our own “pride and arrogance?” Isn’t it just as sinful in us as it is in others? Yes, of course, it is! Being arrogant and self-centered is at the heart of all our sin issues with God. He says we should hate it, and in others we do, but we decide in us these are alright. “I want what I want, and I’m willing to do anything I want too, to get what I want!” This sounds like Lucifer’s heart (Isaiah 14:12-15). God says we need to hate these sins in ourselves.
Tomorrow we will talk about hating “the evil way,” and “the froward mouth.” See you then.
1. Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, the electronic version in eSword.