Have you ever heard God?

Proverbs 1:23 

“Turn at my rebuke, surely I will pour out my Spirit on you; I will make my words known to you.”

The Lord is not slack concerning any of His promises. He wishes that no one would perish-not entirely or slightly. God wants to save us all from all of our destructions. He wants to be a very present help in time of need. The subject of most of the Proverbs is wisdom. Here, in Proverbs 1, we are introduced to wisdom as a person who is consistently speaking. It would be totally unfair of Father God to ask us, as humans to do something without equipping us to do it. This is why He states directly after He commands that we turn at His rebuke that He will pour out His Spirit on us. We cannot do the will of God without the Spirit of God. Sure we may go through the motions and really want to act righteously very badly but we will always come up short. We must have the Spirit of the living God to assist us and take hold together with us against our own sin, and shortcomings. For those who lived in the time of the law, the most they could believe for was that the Spirit of the Holy One would rest upon them. They were still sinners after all because they had to constantly make propitiations for their sin with animal sacrifices. This side of the cross, the Bible says that we have a better covenant based on better promises. {Hebrews 8:6} Indeed we do find that in this church age, the Holy Spirit comes in and dwells inside the believer. For our Lord Jesus said that we know the Spirit of the living God, that He dwells in us {John 12:17}. We can understand exactly who the Spirit of the Lord is and who we are in our new creation selves by looking into the perfect law of liberty- the Word of God. In particular, Isaiah 11:2- 3 tells us of the characteristics of the Holy Spirit. 

    " 2 The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon Him, The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, The Spirit of counseland might, The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD. 3 His delight [is] in the fear of the LORD, And He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes, Nor decide by the hearing of His ears;”

    See we can see that when we have the Spirit of the Lord, we are as He is in this world {1 John 4:17} and we have the same Spirit  in us that is the Spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. So we don’t have to beg God for wisdom or counsel or might or any of those things because His Spirit comes with those things as standard features for the new creation! What we must do, however, is hear Him. In the second half of our study verse, God promises to make His words known to us. Now in context, they are specifically the words of wisdom, but this promise holds true no matter the content or subject matter the Lord is conveying to us. This statement is a forecast of the statement Jesus made in John 10:27- “My sheep hear my voice.”  

Prior to receiving the Lord’s understanding, I believed that only those of us who were saved could hear the voice of God specifically because of John 10:27 and verses like it. However, I believe that the “sheep” in all of scripture refers to all of mankind. Otherwise, how would anyone get saved in the first place? The Holy Spirit draws the unsaved to Himself using words. One has to be able to hear those words in order to be drawn. Furthermore, Jesus compares people to sheep in Matthew 18 and Luke 15 by stating that a shepherd would leave ninety-nine sheep to go out and find a lost sheep. His implication is of course that He is doing the same thing in coming after the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Moreover, Paul questions how one can believe unless the word is preached to him in Romans 10:14. 

The main point is that God wishes humans to turn at His rebuke- this sentiment has not changed throughout the history of man. In order to make sure that mankind has everything he needs to turn, God pours out His Spirit and speaks to man. This is the only possible way for humans to indeed turn at the rebuke of the Lord. 

    How many times in my life or in your life, have you done a thing and then when it turned out to be a catastrophe did you say inside yourself- “I knew I shouldn’t have done that!” ? If we are honest, we have experienced this type of instant regret many many times. I am here to tell you that the Lord has kept His promises in warning us against those things that would lead to our destruction - it is up to us to hear and obey. 

    We fail to obey this side of the cross because we do not recognize the fact that with the Spirit of the Lord that dwells in us, we have the Spirit of the fear of the Lord that delights in the fear of the Lord- that means that the Spirit of the Lord that dwells in us delights in obeying what God says. Therefore, by virtue of the new creation, we delight in obeying what God says! However, we may not know this about ourselves and what’s more, we may not believe it about ourselves, but it is true, nevertheless. The key, then is to believe what God says about us- that we delight in obeying the Lord and our obedience will manifest- because as a man thinks in his heart- so is he {Proverbs 23:7}!

    God will tell you of things to come- why don’t you listen to Him and look like the hero!!