A Word in Season: Weighing the Spirits (Proverbs 16:2)

Proverbs 16:2 and the Deception of Self-Justification

I'm pretty sure you think you're right. I'm pretty sure of that because most of us think we are right. Proverbs 16 and verse 2 tells us that all the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes. After all, most of us will tell ourselves we wouldn't do it if it weren't right.

We reason things out for ourselves and we're quite ready to defend the convictions that we have, the conclusions we've reached, the decisions we've made and the actions that follow them. In fact, most of us are quite quick to judge the rightness or wrongness of others by their relative distance from ourselves.

After all, we're the people of quite perfect balance and real understanding, genuine insight, and so the further away from our decisions and actions somebody else is, clearly the more wrong or flawed their decisions and actions must be.

And sadly, we become experts at telling ourselves this story. So we're very quick to use a standard that sheds a light upon us, that puts us in a good position. We're very quick to dismiss challenges to the assessments that we make and the decisions that we have.

We're very rapidly resistant and we'll reason it out and we've got all kinds of means and methods to explain why this challenge just isn't reasonable or fair. It's part of our fallen pride that we are so confident that we've got it right and even more so when we react sometimes quite aggressively, negatively, vindictively even, toward those who bring any kind of challenge against us.

The Lord Weighs the Spirits and Sees the Heart

But the Lord weighs the spirits, says the wise man. The Lord God looks on the soul and he has perfect insight. He has absolute understanding. He weighs the spirits. Yes, certainly he considers the actions but the Lord God goes deeper.

He looks at the motives, at the intents of the heart. He knows what's taking place in the inmost recesses of our being and it is there that the judgment is properly made. Now if you're still in a state, a spiritual condition where you think you're right and you've got no case to answer, perhaps even in the absolute sense, surely I'm not a sinner.

I mean look at all those other people who do the sorts of things that I wouldn't do. This verse is a painful corrective because however pure you may think you are in your own eyes, you have to do with a God of penetrating vision who sees into the very depths of your being and who sees and assesses not only what you think you are but what you really are.

If you're careless and thoughtless, if you're just going through life without much regard for whether or not you're doing what is right, then you need to remember that the Lord weighs the spirits. It's important that we think carefully and humbly about our disposition, our motives, not just how we live but why we are living that way, that we are doing the right thing but also in the right way and for the right reasons.

Humility, Self-Examination, and God's Word

And it's a reminder too to those who are healthy believers that we still need God's word to guide us, that our instinct will always be in this fallen world to assume that we're thinking clearly and acting rightly because all the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes.

That's our instinct and it's important then that we remember that the Lord weighs the spirits. Perhaps you remember how the man of God prayed when he asked the Lord to test him and to try him to see if there were any wicked way in him and to lead him in the way everlasting.

There ought to be in a wise heart a healthy suspicion of the self, a readiness to check our own thinking and feeling and acting, a readiness to be checked, a humility in considering whether or not we really are as pure as we imagine ourselves to be, a recognition that we live ultimately before the eye of God and it is his holy standard, his righteous law, his glorious person with whom we ultimately have to do and to whom we are accountable and by which we must be measured.

And so though the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, it is good for us to remember that the Lord weighs the spirits.