Proverbs Devotion - Day 21

Our chapter of Proverbs today opens with these verses: "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will. Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart." In a world that exalts human autonomy, these opening verses stand as a profound comfort to the believer as well as a challenge to the unbeliever. In our 21st-century Western civilization, we naturally are inclined to think that we are free to live our lives any way that we please, and we will only be happy, if in fact, we do live in such a way. Yet, the Scriptures are clear that humanity lives and makes the choices that we do according to the desires of our heart. These choices, whether good or bad, are still under the sovereign hand of our amazing God.

These verses declare God's absolute, inescapable sovereignty. The most powerful of earthly rulers (a king), whose will seems absolute to the watching world is ultimately nothing more than a stream in the Creator’s hand. God directs the course of human history exactly according to His divine decree. This should radically shift how we view our circumstances. When we face opposition, cultural hostility, or unpredictable leaders, we do not need to panic. The Lord reigns. The hearts of all people, from presidents to our own neighbors, are governed by His providential grace. In other words, God uses ALL THINGS, including the hearts' desires of individuals, to accomplish His perfect will.

Verse 1 leads so naturally into verse 2 as this verse strikes at the heart of our fallen nature: "Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart." Left to ourselves, we are prone to self-deception and rationalizing our sin. We easily convince ourselves that our motives are pure and so our actions must be good or at least acceptable. Yet, the Lord is not fooled by our external justifications. He "weighs" the motives, judging us not by our own standard, but by His perfect, holy law.

We are all under the judgment of God. Every person is born into sin and has a sin nature courtesy of our father Adam. We live, and we act according to the sinful desires of our hearts, and outside of Christ this is all that any of us can ever hope to do. This truth drives us to the beautiful reality of the Gospel. Because God searches the hidden motives and we fall short, our only hope is the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not just give us a moral example; He lived the perfectly righteous life we could not. He submitted His will entirely to the Father, even to the cross, becoming our wisdom and our salvation.

Today, we can rest in God's sovereign control over the universe. We are called to stop trusting in our own strength—symbolized in verse 31 by the vain hope of relying on war horses—and instead rest completely in the finished work of Christ. I will close by asking a couple of questions for you to reflect upon today: is the sovereignty of God a comfort to you as it is meant to be when described in Scripture, and second, are you living according to what you deem to be right or according to what God has declared is right?