Proverbs 3:5-6: Part IV
(Monroe)
Proverbs 3:5-6 states: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
“Lean not on your own understanding.” Don’t put too much weight on what you understand. Why not? Because: what you and I understand is phenomenally small.
Some years ago when I was in Chicago I stopped at my all-time favorite bookstore which is adjacent to the University of Chicago. It’s in the basement of an old building, and it’s filled with books you’d never find at Borders or Barnes & Noble. This bookstore is an academic wonderland of brilliance. On this particular day as I wandered around this store I had a sense of of my own great ignorance. I’m not trying to be humble now. The truth of how very, very little I know was revealed to me. I felt like the self-made man in Sartre’s novel Nausea, whose goal was to read every book in the library beginning with the ‘A’s’ and working through to ‘Z.’ At the end of his life he hadn’t gotten out of the ‘A’s’ because more books with titles beginning with ‘A’ kept being published. I looked at all these old and new scholarly books on every subject you can think of, and realized I’ve read hardly any of them. And if I did read them I wouldn’t come close to understanding them all. If ever I thought I understood a lot of things, this bubble got burst that day.
If you live long enough the time will come when you will face a situation that no human understands. I meet people in such situations all the time. Drug addicts, sex addicts, terminally ill people, impossibly broken-down marriages and families, and the dirt-poor. The collective wisdom of humanity cannot help. So where can one turn? And as they come to me for answers, where can I turn when all understanding fails? My experience is that we are not left hopeless here. Here’s the answer of Proverbs: 1) Lean not on your own understanding, precisely because there’s not much there to lean on anyway; 2) Instead, trust in God. Place your trust in God today.