SERMON: Proverbs 9:7-8 (Rules For Rebuking Part 1 - Who Not To Rebuke)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you. There's a stretch of country along the Tug Fork River Valley, where the hills kind of rise up in the early morning fog, a place in the back hollers of the Appalachian Mountains in Pike County, Kentucky, where two families lived some time ago.

And the names of these two families have become sort of infamous in American tall tales and folklore, but they were real families, and perhaps you've heard of them as the Hatfields and the McCoys. Now, at first, they were neighbors who shared a property line.

They drew water from the same water supplies, and they even sang out of the same old hymnals in the same local church. But over time, they became fierce rivals, sworn enemies, and even killers of each other.

The feud as we know it today started with petty, small, tiny grievances. A little slight here, a little sideways word there, an aggravation that turned into passive aggressivity, hurt feelings that eventually entrenched themselves into a kind of lingering bitterness.

And after years of carrying these bitternesses, the feelings eventually erupted into an all-out war between these two homes. Now, some say that it was over a property line dispute. Others claim that it was a secret pregnancy between a Hatfield girl and one of the old McCoy boys that ended in him abandoning her, the child, and unfortunately, the child ended up dying of measles several weeks later.

So some suppose that this, oh, and also he married her cousin. So some say that this was what launched the family into this great feud. But actually, the most credible story is somewhat ridiculous. The story that is most likely that started the feud is that they were fighting over a prize-winning pig that both houses were claiming as their own.

And because neither house was willing to relent from the claim, the matter got elevated to the local Pike County courts where accusations were hurled at each other, insults flew, words turned into cutting razor blades, and despite the outcome of the legal proceedings, the matter became worse and erupted.

Suspicions settled down into hardiness like advanced cases of tuberculosis in an infected set of lungs. And when apologies were never spoken and resentments were left simmering, the two families reached a point of no return.

There were people in Pike County who told them to bury the hatchet, as the idiom goes. There were people who said, let bygones be bygones. I'm sure that there was some responsible person who said, it's just a pig.

But all of those good intention warnings fell on deaf ears as the two families got to a place where they drew guns on each other, six were killed, and members of both families were sentenced to life in prison.

These two families got to where they were because they could not be rebuked. These two families got to where they were because they could not be corrected. And when they became hardened by their thoughts of being right, they warmed over into a bitterness that made repentance impossible.

And this teaches us something about the efficacy of rebuke. Number one, it teaches us that we ought to have soft hearts that repent constantly so that we don't go down the same path, but today, we're gonna look at a different side of that.

Because there are times when people reach a point where rebuke doesn't work. There are times when you will try to correct a person in love, in the most righteous ways, out of care for them, out of love for their own soul.

And there are times when they will hear it and they will receive it. And as Jude says, you've yanked them out of the flames and praise God for that. But there are other times when rebuking someone will not aid their repentance.

It will not soften them. It will harden them. It will cause them not to flee their sin, but to become entrenched in their own folly. And this is because not all correction brings peace. Sometimes when a person has become so calcified by their own sin, by their own rigid opinions and dogged preferences, attempting to correct them will only bring seething ire from them or volleying musket rounds across the Kentucky fields.

And Proverbs 9, seven through nine is a perfect passage that exemplifies this reality. Because it's not merely a plot in an Appalachian story from history, but it's a point that we must consider that if we are to live in wisdom, we must know what it means to offer good and helpful rebuke for one another.

And we must also know what it means when we can no longer offer rebuke and we must withhold wisdom from those who have been so calcified in their sin. If you remember seven weeks ago, we started chapter nine a little prematurely.

If you remember, I accidentally, I absolutely and accidentally skipped the ending of Proverbs 8 and we saw that as providence from the Lord because it was that week, the week of September the 10th that Charlie Kirk was murdered.

And we stayed in Proverbs 8, 34 through 38 for six weeks talking about what it means to be men at the gates, men who are righteous and men who win the world. We ended that last week and we come back to Proverbs 9.

So if you remember in Proverbs 9, we were looking at two houses in verses one through seven. Two houses, not the Hatfields and the McCoys, but two houses, one was Lady Wisdom and one was Lady Folly. And here's the interesting thing.

Both of them stand at the doorway, calling out for men and women to come. One calls out for you to come into the house of wisdom and feast on wisdom. And the other loud and reckless invites you into her carnage.

And what we saw is that those two invitations go out to all the world. From those two houses comes the invitation to come, one or the other. Everyone will go to one or the other. And it is interesting that those two houses are always and perpetually in conflict with one another.

Unlike the local feud in the Kentucky mountains, this feud between Lady Folly and Lady Wisdom is a feud that concerns all people on earth because all people will be called to choose a side and to choose which house in which you will dwell.

Will you come to the house of Lady Wisdom, we said seven weeks ago, or will you instead live in the folly of the reviling woman? And here is a very interesting feature in Proverbs chapter nine, because in Proverbs nine, it begins with these two women and in Proverbs nine, it ends with these two women, but sandwiched right in the middle of these two houses is our passage today on how to rebuke, which I think is a very interesting feature, because you will watch folks who are walking towards Lady Folly's home, and you will call to them and you will plead with them.

And you will say everything that you can to persuade them and they will not listen. And there comes a point where Solomon says, stop rebuking, stop reproving, withhold your voice, and let judgment do what only judgment can do.

So today we're gonna be looking at the rules for rebuking. We're gonna be looking at what does it mean to withhold wisdom from someone who has now gone too far. We're gonna be looking at a sermon on discernment.

Next week, we're gonna be looking at the rules for rebuking someone who is a Christian. And how do we do that righteously? And how do we do that in a helpful way? And how do we do that to care for people so that they can grow up in their faith?

But today we're gonna be looking at two kinds of people who will not receive rebuke. Maybe one of them's the Hatfields, maybe one of them's the McCoys. The scripture calls one of them the scoffer and one of them the wicked man, but neither of them will receive rebuke.

And Solomon says, don't give it. And with that, will you join me in Proverbs chapter nine, verses seven and eight A. If you're new to those types of terms, it means only half of verse eight. So seven and half of verse eight.

If you will join me there as we read. This is the word of the Lord. He who corrects a scoffer gets dishonor for himself. And he who rebukes a wicked man gets insults for himself. Do not reprove a scoffer or he will hate you.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, it's an interesting passage that we are looking at today. It's a passage that strikes at the heart of our own humanity. The same spirit that you've given to us that causes us to care for people and to yearn for them is the same spirit who authored this passage that calls us not to rebuke this kind of person.

Not to call out to them once they've reached a certain point. Lord, I pray that you would help us understand this passage in the way that it's intended to be understood. Lord, I pray that we would see it as good truth from your holy word.

And Lord, I pray that it would be practical for all of us here as we navigate how do we follow Christ in a Christless world. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.

So the first person that we're talking about in this passage is the scoffer. It says, he who corrects a scoffer gets dishonor for himself. The passage ends by saying, do not rebuke the scoffer. And if we're gonna talk about our rules for rebuking, we have to understand what does it mean when it says don't rebuke them?

What does it mean that you can waste correction on a scoffer? Because it will not sanctify him, it actually will end up scorching you. In the scriptures, especially in the Hebrew, the Hebrew word is lace here.

It's not merely someone who disagrees, it's not even someone who is a little curmudgeon-y. The scoffer is the one who despises correction. The scoffer is the one who mocks truth and who hates authority and who weaponizes his own arrogance against you.

The scoffer is not ignorant. He's usually intelligent, full of great ideas and confident, but he is unteachable. He doesn't lack information, he lacks humility. He's not weak, he exists in a posture of hardened pride.

And in Proverbs, the scoffer is the apex predator in the home of Lady Folly. He's the royal cupbearer to the reviling woman. And this is because in the book of Proverbs, the fool sometimes repents. The simple will grow if they are taught, but the scoffer is spiritually cemented.

He sneers at reproof, he spits at the face of wisdom and sharpens his teeth against the one who would dare confront him. As one commentator said, he, the scoffer, is so full of himself that he will not humble himself under any authority, even the authority of the Lord.

And this kind of man can be found all over the scriptures. This is why Solomon tells us, a scoffer doesn't listen to rebuke, Proverbs 13 .1. A scoffer seeks wisdom but finds none, Proverbs 14 .6. A scoffer does not love the one who reproves him, Proverbs 15 .12.

Judgments are prepared for scoffers and blows for the back of fools, Proverbs 19 .29. The scoffer is an abomination to men, Proverbs 24 .9. And then Solomon says, drive out the scoffer and contention will go out.

Even strife and dishonor will cease, Proverbs 22 .10. And that's not the only place that the scoffer is spoken about. Those are direct passages that use the term scoffer, but the example of scoffers is all throughout the scriptures as well.

Remember Ishmael, Abraham's own flesh. He mocked Isaac, the son of promise. And it was for that reason that he was cast out.

And driven away.

You remember the sons of Eli. It says in 1 Samuel 2 .25, they did not listen to the voice of their father, they despised rebuke, they treated the holy things with contempt, they abused God's people and God killed them in a single night.

You'll remember Ahab who imprisoned Micaiah for daring to speak the truth to him. He says, I hate Micaiah because he always tells me what I don't wanna hear. Ahab would rather surround himself with flattering men than listen to a single word from a truth telling prophet.

And it was that truth telling prophet that said, sir, the dogs will lick up your blood in the Valley of Jezreel. And it happened. These are the mockers in Psalm chapter one, the scoffers in Psalm 22, who wagged their heads at the righteous man, who sneered at Jesus.

This is the scribes and the Pharisees who refused to hear anything that Jesus said, who became enraged when he rebuked them and even mocked him as he was dying. In Matthew 27, you'll remember that Jesus promised them 40 years, 40 years to live in their hubris and to believe that they had won by killing the author of life before he would destroy their city and burn it to the ground, Matthew 22, one through 14.

And then we see the quintessential picture of the scoffer, which is Judas Iscariot. He's the man who heard every sermon Jesus preached. He's the man who listened and heard every parable, who saw every miracle and every healing, all the fish and bread multiplying.

He walked with Jesus himself and he saw Jesus walk on water. And yet he hardened his heart until Satan entered him. And it says in the scripture that it'd be better for him if he had not been born. Not once do we see Judas receiving correction.

Every word slid off of him like water on a smooth stone. And that is what a scoffer is. It is the man or the woman who will sit close to holy things. Maybe they will hold a Bible and attend a church. Sometimes they will even serve in leadership.

They're always listening, but they're never hearing and they're never receiving and they cannot be taught. And this is why we struggle with the scoffer. Because in Christ, we have a heart to see all people come to know him.

And we have a heart that all people would submit their lives to him and love him and worship him. And when we see someone who is living in that kind of pride, it evokes a kind of empathy in us that makes us want to help them.

Because you love the Lord, you begin to love God's people. And because when you see somebody going the wrong way, entering down the wrong path, you wanna intervene. You wanna help them and counsel them.

You wanna care for them and show them the path of righteousness. Your words may wound them, but you want it to be a part of their healing. I'm not talking about you didn't take out the trash. I'm talking about you see a sin and you bring God's wisdom from the Bible, from the scriptures, you bring it to them because you love them and you wanna see them repent and they hate you for it.

You will offer the scoffer counsel and it will be rejected. You will try to give them wisdom from the scriptures and you will be spurned. You will correct, and that word correct is yoser here in the Hebrew.

It means you will try to bring discipline into their life. You will try to bring reproof into their life, confrontation into their life. You will try to reason with, warn with, and expose sin for that person's good.

And you will, by all accounts, in every part of your heart that you can even discern, you will say, I'm doing this because I love you and I don't wanna see you die and go to hell. And I don't wanna see you continue to walk away from God.

You'll have righteous motivations as much as your heart can possibly have and you will be rejected. This is not, this word correction is not nagging. This word correction is not busy bodying. This word correction is not offering petty critique.

This is loving biblical correction where you're asking and calling someone to turn from their ruin to the paths of life, but with the scoffer, God says, withhold your wisdom. God advises you when you discern that someone is a scoffer to withhold your charity because it will not produce an effect in the scoffer's heart.

It will only further entrench them in their sin and it will further make them hate you for uncovering it. In fact, this passage says that the only thing that you will accomplish in rebuking a scoffer is bringing dishonor upon yourself.

Solomon says that you will get dishonor for yourself, which carries the idea of shame, of stain, even blood on your hands humiliation if you rebuke this kind of person. And that's because correcting a scoffer does not elevate the situation.

It brings contamination to the situation. It's like wrestling with a hog in the mud. The hog loves every minute of it, but you only end up filthy. As one ancient writer put it, he who touches the dirt will get dirt.

There's profundity in the simplicity. And that's exactly what happens to you when you engage with the scoffer. Your motives will be questioned. Your character will be smeared. Your words will be twisted.

Your integrity will be maligned and mocked. Your telling of the truth will be ridiculed and the scoffer will walk away croaking and not knowing like a victor, not realizing that judgment stalks him like a vulture.

And this is why once that you have discerned that someone is a scoffer, that you immediately stop counseling them. You stop giving them wisdom. You stop rebuking them because you are wasting righteousness on them.

You have to remember that to speak to these things.

Is to obey scripture.

God is not asking us to try harder. God is not asking us to work more diligently. God is not asking us to be more creative in bringing the scoffer to see the error of their ways. God is asking us in this passage that once we have identified that someone hates the truth and hates rebuke, that we would no longer give it to them because at the heart of it, brothers and sisters, you're not their savior.

As a wise old preacher once told me in my 20s, stop trying to build a bridge that the Holy Spirit hasn't built. Because when you do that, you end up falling in the river and you end up getting saturated in all kinds of frustrations.

And this is because godly rebuke inflames the scoffer. And this is why your kindness to them is interpreted as hate. Because when you rebuke the arrogant, they do not repent, they respond with rage. They interpret your love as an attack upon them, your wisdom as an insult to them, your counsel as trying to control them.

They can't imagine your mercy as anything other than a threat to their sovereignty. Reproof does not prick the conscience of the scoffer, it provokes the pride. And it's as if their soul cries out, how dare you tell me that I am wrong?

How dare you presume to teach me? And then suddenly, you go from the one who's trying to help to the one who's an enemy, which certainly begs the question, how do we avoid this kind of person? If the Bible says avoid this kind of person, we ought to, we must.

So how do we do it?

We simply obey the scriptures. If you discern that someone is a scoffer, do not correct them. Do not correct them, that is biblical obedience. When you realize that someone is unteachable, stop chasing them.

When what you're saying from scripture, when you're giving godly counsel, and that counsel remains deaf upon their ears, refuse to give it to them any longer. Don't try to pour scripture into a clenched fist.

Don't try to throw pearls at swine, which is what Jesus says in the first, or in the gospels. Walking away from a person like this is not cowardly, it is obedience. To argue fools into heaven is a foolish endeavor because you cannot, it's like trying to plant seeds in the middle of the ocean.

God commands you to plant, God commands others to make, or to water it, but only God can make anything grow. Too often with the scoffer, we plant the truth, we water the truth, and we forget to accept the fact that only God can make it grow.

That only God can bring life to that person's heart, that only God can regenerate, that only God can save. And we enter into a kind of self, or a kind of salvation complex, a kind of Messiah complex, where we say that I must continue to do this.

But according to this passage, you mustn't. Some ground is not fertile soil. There are some people, maybe some people in your life right now, and if not, tuck this away for later. That until the Lord does the work in them, you cannot help them.

Sometimes the godliest thing that you can do is to hold your tongue, and to pray ardently for them, and to let time and providence do its work, a work that your words can't do. That's the first person that we're told not to rebuke, and we're told not to rebuke them, not out of posture of hatred.

The passage doesn't say, because they've made you so angry, withhold God's grace from them with vengeance. No, vengeance is mine, says the Lord. You withhold from them wisdom with tears in your eyes. You withhold wisdom from them with your heart breaking, and instead of wasting your words on them, you give your words to God, who alone can save.

You redirect your effort to him, because the scoffer will not hear you. That's the first person we're told to rebuke. The second person we're told not to reprove is the wicked man. Solomon says, and he who reproves a wicked man gets insults for himself, which is a great understatement, actually.

The wicked man in this passage is not the scoffer. They're different, different words. They're not synonyms. The scoffer causes issues inside of the covenant people of God. He's the Judas and the Ahab.

The wicked man, however, is the one who's outside of the covenant community of God. He's the pagan. He's the hater of God. He's the one who is no friend to the people of God, not a member of God's people in any shape or fashion, but shares the inability of the scoffer to hear the truth.

The word that Solomon uses here is rasah, which is different than a prideful rebel among God's people, which is who the scoffer is. And this is talking about a man outside of the kingdom, outside of the covenant community, who loves evil and who hates righteousness.

He has no fear of God before his eyes, Psalm 36 .1. This is different than the unbeliever who will listen to your words and who will hear you. This is one who is turned with hatred against you. The wicked one in this passage is the one who boasts in his sin and boasts in his rebellion.

According to this passage, he's the one that we ought to avoid sharing wisdom and the truth with when we understand that this person is a wicked person. And here's the rub, because when you think about this, you're like,.

But wait a minute.

Aren't we supposed to share the gospel with the lost? Aren't we supposed to go into all the world and tell everyone about Jesus and call them to repentance?

Yes, and amen.

But we're told here to avoid the wicked, to not reprove them, not rebuke them. And you ask yourself, how do those things work together if we're called to share the gospel with every creature under heaven, but we're to avoid the wicked?

And then in Romans says that we've all fallen short of the glory of God. How do you square that circle? Well, this passage does not contradict evangelism. This passage does not contradict contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

This passage is consistent with Jesus's own words that we will see in a moment. When Solomon refers to the wicked here, he is not prohibiting prophetic witness. And by that, I don't mean prophesying the future.

I mean, telling the scriptures. He's not instructing the church to create a separatist community that avoids the world. He is not advising us to muzzle our voice so that we never proclaim the gospel. He is not calling us to spurn the great commission and to refuse to make disciples of all the nations.

He's not telling us to take him up on his offer that if we are silent, even the stones will cry out. He still commands us to call sinners to repentance. To call individuals to repentance. To call families to repentance.

Leaders and governments and nations and institutions to repentance in Jesus's name. Solomon is not abrogating any of that because we must herald Christ every creature. We must speak the truth in the public square.

We must preach outside abortion mills. We must go in front of Beacon Hill and call them to righteousness and to the law of God. We must, as a nation, call the men at Pennsylvania Avenue and the women in Pennsylvania Avenue to serve God and his law.

We must declare the supremacy of Christ over all things. So what's being prohibited here? It's not evangelism.

It's not preaching.

It's not righteous confrontation. What Solomon is forbidding here is entanglement. He's warning against sharing the truth with the same person over and over and over again, even after they've rejected it, even after they've rejected you, even after they have now turned with hatred towards you.

Solomon is warning you of the continual appeal to a man or a woman with a granite heart. The principle here is actually simple. When you share this gospel with someone who is living in lies, what you are doing, brothers and sisters, is you are not trusting in your winsomeness or your intelligence or your, that fact that I have memorized the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God and they will come to faith if I can just ever craft my words in such a specific way.

And you're not walking away from a situation where someone does not hear the gospel and think, I messed up, I didn't say something right, I didn't do something right. What we're seeing here is when you share the truth, even if poorly done, because guess what?

God uses foolish things to shame the wise. God uses the simplest baby in order to declare his gospel in the womb. It is not about your performance in sharing the gospel. What it is here is if you share the gospel with someone and the Holy Spirit does not cause their heart to awaken in truth, to love the truth, to hear the truth, to respond in contrition, and causing them to actually have a sincere interest in the things of God, if you are not seeing that, then why are you continuing on and on and on and on with them?

If God is not awakening them, if the Spirit of God is not regenerating them, and if God through Christ is not drawing them, then there is no fear of God in them, there's nothing you can do to save them.

All you're doing is causing them to scowl, growl, and howl at you like shrieking devils being tormented before its judgment. And that is why as soon as you realize that someone is rejecting Christ and their heart is hard, you move on.

You don't keep going on and on and on. You move along to the next soul who needs to hear Christ, and you plant and you water, and you see if God will bring the growth. As is consistent with what Jesus said in the New Testament, Jesus told his disciples, if they go to a certain town and a household rejects them, to shake the dust off of their sandals and to go to the next town.

Jesus has a kind of urgency about him that we need to be telling people about Christ. But here's the thing, when we share the gospel, we look and we watch and we see if the Spirit does a work, and if the Spirit does not do a work, you go on, you move on.

You don't continue berating them, you don't continue dragging them, because the only thing that's gonna happen is you're going to inflame the hatred of God inside of them and you are going to be a recipient of their ire.

The principle Jesus is communicating is that you are not God. We proclaim the gospel, yes, but we don't chase people down who reject Jesus. We don't corner them into ceaseless quarrels. We don't badger them hoping that our words will be the meat tenderizer that brings them to faith.

We don't imagine that our finely worded, masterful on the level of Billy Shakespeare argument that we give on X is gonna do anything without the Spirit's work. If you discern that someone is happy to live in their sins and they hate the things of God and they're flat out rejecting Him, leave them in their sins, because the only hope that they have is that the Spirit of God would awaken them and you are not Him.

And all of this brings us to the gospel, actually. Because at the end of the day, brothers and sisters, it was you and I who were the slanderers, the scoffers, the mockers, the evil, and the wicked. At the end of the day, you and I were the ones who were hard in our sins.

You and I were the ones who had the heart of stone. You and I, maybe you remember times when somebody came to you and said that Christ is Lord and you tell them, I don't want that. But by a miracle of the resurrection, Jesus authored life in you and made you a new creation.

And when He did that, then the words of life took root. Then the words of life bore fruit. So what Proverbs is saying is that remember that there is a Christ and you're not Him. And remember to use that energy and that effort and that passion that you have for your loved ones and for your friends and for your neighbors and for your coworkers, even for your children who continually reject the gospel.

Use that passion, that energy, and that fervor to storm the throne of grace, to pray for them, to ask God to awaken them, to ask God to breathe life into them, because you can't. Stop wasting your words on trying to convert someone who is entrenched in their sins and start using your words to pray that God would awaken them.

That's the heart of what Proverbs 9, 7 through 8a is saying. Don't rebuke the scoffer, don't reprove the wicked, but take your words to the one who can, the one who died for the wicked and the one who died for the slanderer and the scoffer.

Take your words to him, amen?

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you that in this passage we do not see a desperation from the people of God that it is all on us to save the world. It's all on us to memorize fine-sounding arguments and theological statements and axioms and to sound clever and wise and winsome and stand with a microphone and gain large followings in order to win people into the kingdom of God.

It's not.

Even Charlie Kirk, one of the most winsome speakers of our day was shot by a wicked man who hated the truth because there's some hearts that the word doesn't embed itself in. And Lord, also help us to remember that we don't have hatred for those who hate you because we once were haters of God too.

We don't revile the reviler. We don't scoff at the scoffer and we don't execute wicked upon the wicked. But Lord, we look at them with pity and then we look inward with gratitude and then we look upward with prayer.

And Lord, let that be where we spend our energy and our effort as we seek to make you known in every tribe, tongue, and nation. It's in Jesus' name we pray.