Prophecy

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What a curious statement appears in the fifth chapter of Proverbs verse fourteen: “I was on the verge of total ruin, in the midst of the assembly and congregation.” Taken in the context of the verses before, it makes more sense. Those verses speak of hating instruction and correction, of not obeying teachers and not submitting to them.

That is the only way you can be in the middle of the congregation without benefiting from it. For other places in Scripture speak of the assembly as the haven of understanding and the fount of a larger, wiser perspective. But these lines speak of someone in the right place at even the right time who fails to profit by it, as though oblivious to what could be gained by simply hearing and applying the truths being presented.

But it’s not just a matter of failing to benefit. It’s a matter too of having to suffer the consequences of that failure, which in this case have driven the embattled individual to the brink of disaster. It’s not a situation totally without similar parallels in the Bible. Recall in the time of the good king Josiah how the Book of the Law was lost in the temple of all places. It was recovered by the priest Hilkiah by the way, whose name means “Yahweh is my portion.” This was a foreshadowing of the time hundreds of years later when Jesus himself, the living Word, would be “lost” by his human parents and about His heavenly Father’s business in the temple and sitting st the feet of the rabbis.

But wait, it was only on the “verge” of ruin that we found the writer in Proverbs, the BRINK of disaster, as if something or someone called him back from the cliff’s edge and into submission to the truth he needed to learn. And now he is able to testify for our benefit all these years later, so that we don’t ever have to find ourselves in the same position, here surrounded by such abundance of truth and revelation in the church in America. May it be so, may it be so for all of our sakes.

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