Godlessness & Knowledgeable Freedom By Jerry A. Davidson Jerry A. Davidson lives in Alexander, AR with his wife, Amy. He is a hymn writer and singer, as well as an author. He desires to write stories and songs that bring glory to God through a deep understanding of His Word and design for the world.
“With his mouth the godless man would destroy his neighbor, but by knowledge the righteous are delivered.” Proverbs 11:9 (ESV) We live in a world seeking ever more to be godless. It is taken as a badge of honor for a lot of folks to say they are “spiritual, but not religious” or to say they don’t believe at all in any sort of higher power. Prayer has been taken out of schools, God and His standards are being increasingly taken out of all public teaching, and as a consequence, moral evolution (also known as sinful human nature) is decaying American culture and the world as a whole. This “progressive” repressiveness doesn’t stop at a line being drawn and both sides “live and let live.” The wicked, godless people of this world are building up in their hearts the desire to destroy their God-fearing neighbors. Notice here, I do not say that we should fear them. If you fear man more than God, that is a whole other issue you must deal with first. I am talking about escaping the Biblically prophesied ambition of godless people to destroy the godly. So how do we as Christians escape this prophecy? The answer is right there in Proverbs 11:9b, “by knowledge…” But there is a prerequisite. You must be righteous, which is achieved through faith in Christ, but righteousness alone doesn’t physically save you from those who are seeking to destroy you. There are two things to be saved from in this world, the first being MUCH more important. First, we must be saved from the judgment of
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God because of our sin and guilt, which is now achieved through faith in Jesus Christ, who then retroactively takes on all of our sins to maintain the justness and righteousness of God while simultaneously delivering a chosen people from God’s creation as adopted sons and daughters. Second, those who are not predestined to be saved due to their God-foreseen choice to remain enslaved to sin are so caught up in the twisted lies of sin that they see righteousness as evil and sin as righteousness and therefore seek to destroy those who live by righteousness. But doesn’t righteousness deliver us from evil? Proverbs 11:6 (ESV) says, “The righteousness of the upright delivers them, but the treacherous are taken captive by their lust.” Likewise, Proverbs 11:8 (ESV) says, “The righteous is delivered from trouble, and the wicked walks into it instead.” These two verses show that righteousness delivers from pitfalls, sins, and slavery to the flesh, but it does not always save you from the external influence and deceptively destructive intentions of the godless and wicked. These verses talk about personal, internal sin, and deliverance. So how are we to be saved from the intentions of godless men to wreck our thinking, our marriages, our habits, or our children? “… but by knowledge the righteous are delivered.” To live righteously is a good, even great thing. To live righteously and knowledgeably is an excellent thing! So what is knowledge? The word knowledge in Hebrew is Daath (dah’ath)—from the root word Yada which means “to know”—just as it is used in Genesis in the
