Proverbs 28:5 commentary; understand and see God's judgment

5 ¶ Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all things.

All of God’s ways are judgment.

Deuteronomy 32:4 He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.

All of mankind is facing God’s judgment for the sin of Adam, which we inherited, much like a cat inherits its need to hunt or a dog to run in a pack. Sin is one of a human’s few instincts, something he hungers to do. But Christ is the remedy for sin.

Romans 5:19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

Even under the Law of Moses people who walked in God’s ways tried to do right.

Psalm 119:1 ¶ ALEPH. Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD. 2 Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart. 3 They also do no iniquity: they walk in his ways.

Evil men do not get it. They don’t see that they are natural born sinners by instinct. They don’t see the human’s spiritual heart as wicked.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Evil men don’t understand. They simply don’t see that fornication, covetousness, envy, malice, a love of violence, revenge, perversion, etc. are all a consequence of turning your back on God, on who He is, and on His love for mankind expressed at the cross of Christ and, most of all, on His judgment. (See Romans 1:16 to 2:3.)

When God’s judgment is on a person or a nation they often do not understand it and seek to find temporal causes. After more than a century and a half of ripping apart God’s word with so called “Higher Criticism” and destroying the faith of many so called Christians even the Kaiser embraced occultism and Germany was released to a barbaric paganism and Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and suffered horribly in two major wars that nearly destroyed it. And yet, men will look to political and economic reasons for the wars and read back into history their own justifications. Why? They don’t understand God’s judgment.

Great Britain had, perhaps, the greatest empire in the history of mankind. It is said that the “sun never sets on the British flag.” And yet, within a generation of the disastrous revision of the Authorized Version of the Bible and its replacement by the Revised Version on the mission field, within a generation of their genocide of Indians on the Deccan Plateau by starvation, and after attempting to go back on their promise for a Jewish homeland in Palestine; the land given by God to the Jews, their empire began coming unglued. Men, unaware and unbelieving in God’s judgment, will look to purely political reasons or economic reasons but ignore the possibility that God’s view of history by way of the Bible’s statements is different than their own.

Can you, as in individual, see events in your life as God’s judgment steering you toward His will or trying to turn your heart from sin and idolatry to Him? Do you understand judgment? Are you receptive to the Holy Spirit’s leading?

As it said back in Psalm 119:2 I quoted earlier that those that seek Him with the whole heart are blessed. They that seek the Lord may not know who Disraeli or Gladstone were or who Bismarck was but they do know God’s word. They know what He has promised and they know what the eventual outcome of human history will be and if they are immersed in God’s word they know His will for their lives and how they should live before men. They understand all things that are important to God in their lives; their salvation first and then their sanctification; being made a useful vessel for His work and that the affairs of all men are under God’s judgment. They know that, as Ben Franklin said, in a speech he gave to the Constitutional Convention on June 28, 1787, “I have lived sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”

It was Abraham Lincoln who implied in his October 3, 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation that the Civil War was a judgment on the entire nation for slavery. But, most men do not understand why nations are sifted like wheat and why individual people rise and fall. They’ll say, “oh, it was such and such a cause,” and write books about that opinion. But, even the men who engaged in our war for independence against Great Britain knew that a divine hand was involved. If I get the quote right I believe it was John Page who wrote to Thomas Jefferson and said, “Do you not think that an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?”

Now, do you understand what’s happening to America today?