Proverbs 1:28-30
“Then they will call on Me, but I will not answer; they will seek Me diligently, but they will not find Me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, they would have none of My counsel and despised my every rebuke.”
At first glance, it appears that God is refusing to help people who need Him. That, however, is not the case. People have free will and not everything that happens is Gods will. Immediately prior to our study verses, God - presenting Himself as wisdom- illuminates how He {wisdom} is always obvious, He is always trying to direct us, guide us and save us from destruction. However, if we choose not to listen to Him, then we absolutely will have calamity to follow. God is a gentleman He is not a nag. Once a human makes up their mind to do things the way they want to do them with respect to a certain situation, God will back off. When God removes Himself from offering wisdom from any situation, we are in trouble. This trouble will manifest not because God wanted it to but because we did. It’s humility to see and admit that we choose, daily, almost momentarily to listen to Him or not to. When we become so hardened that we fail to listen to Him, it is our choice.
With respect to the above passage, the word for “choose” is defined as an action to prove, to try or to examine. God is saying that when He cries out at the beginning of a situation in the form of wisdom and we decide to listen to Him, we are essentially proving that what He told us was the right action, the perfect course.
Incidentally, the type of destruction and calamity that ensues from not yielding our will to God’s direction is different in nature than destruction and calamity that is created toward us simply because we are alive or because we are following Him. It is not that they are existentially different, it is more that our opinions of them are different which evokes drastically opposing responses from us. On the one hand, when we come under attack for nothing at all other than breathing or for following the Word of God, it is remarkably easy for us to become enraged and resist the work of the wicked one. We fight because we know we haven’t done anything to “deserve” the attack and that just provokes a defensiveness in a person that is fierce. On the other hand, when we come under attack because we did not listen to God, there is inside of us the knowledge of good and evil. We become acutely aware that it was our choice to get into the mess we find ourselves in so that we do not resist it as hard as the first scenario. We somehow feel that “we deserve it” because we have sown to the flesh and reaped death. Do not be deceived, if we were still under the law of sowing and reaping, we would all be dead! But Jesus Christ turned that around for us and fulfilled the whole law- including sowing and reaping- We sowed sin but in Him, we reaped righteousness. The opinion that we must ourselves pay for our wrongdoings as a way of humbling ourselves and “taking responsibility” is antichrist because it discounts what He did. That of course does not mean that we should continue in sin, because true humility runs to God and says, “ I was wrong, can you please forgive me, save me, and teach me not to do that again.”
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