Godlessness & Knowledgeable Freedom

By Jerry A. Davidson

“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 god- less. 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 in- creasingly 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 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 re- main 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 marriag- es, our habits, or our children?

“… but by knowledge the righteous are deliv- ered.” 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 name of the tree of Knowledge (daath) of good and evil, and it is similarly used in Genesis in the phrase “and they knew (yada) that they were naked.”

So quite literally, by information or informed understanding of the nature and methods of good and evil will we be delivered. The knowledge of the ways sin and death operate reveals how godless men may attack our ambitions to live righteously, and knowledge of righteous living under God’s law reveals and delivers us from the world’s destructive influence. The knowledge we need is the knowledge of God’s Word and His freely given wisdom about what sin is and how it works and how to live righteously.

What do we know from the first half of Proverbs 11:9 about these godless people? Quite a lot! First, it says, “With his mouth…” Proverbs and other Scripture make a clear distinction between the mouth of a man and his normal speech. For example, in Proverbs 10:31(ESV) it talks about “The mouth of the righteous…”, and in the very next verse it says “The lips of the righteous…” There is a difference in Hebrew between one’s mouth and one’s speech/lips. The Hebrew word Peh means “mouth” and has to do with the root of the output of our speech or the portal through which we receive things which then come to define our output. The Hebrew word Saphah means “lips/speech/edge” and has to do with literal speech. Just as the edge of the knife is what cuts, it is the actionable speech of a person that defines the external influence of that person. Therefore, this verse is saying that the root of a godless person seeks to destroy his neighbor. Now the reference of “neighbor” would also refer to a relationship. There is a reason that the word for “lips/speech” is not used, because the actual words of a godless person may not be the destructive thing.

Often, especially nowadays, the root, words, and actions of a godless people seek to destroy Christians and their neighbors all over the world. We see this in day-to-day violence across the world, but also in the people who seek to shut down churches by declaring them “non-essential.” But in this verse, we are going to a deeper, more subtle level of violence. The Bible is saying that the root of a godless person is seeking to destroy us. Sin is so knowledgeable and deceptive as to know that if you can make your enemy hate itself, it will destroy itself or at the very least become ineffective. Proverbs 10:11b (ESV) says, “the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.” This means that the root of the wicked is violent, yet conceals it in their actions (or in their speech). Subtly dismantling the faith of a Christian is a violent act by a godless person. THIS is what we must watch for. What godlessly based ideologies do you follow or tolerate? What wicked sins do you not fight back against wisely and firmly in the power of the Holy Spirit?

The fall in the garden revealed unknown evil and lies to us, but those evils and lies mixed with the God-given free will to build and create things of our own (as God did, and we are made in His image) begot in us a willful enslavement to methods of arrogant self-worship achieved through the prideful building up of ourselves by sinful means. But informative understanding/knowledge alone does not deliver you. The difference between freedom and enslavement comes by whom you serve: do you serve God in righteousness, or do you claim no god and therefore worship yourself?

Self-worship looks less like a religious bowing down to yourself and more like what you investigate and attempt to draw your center from. Do you practice meditation, attempting to draw some sort of spiritual calm or energy from within yourself? Do you study yourself intensely, as in constantly taking personality tests and studying every facet of what your “number” means or whatever your result is? Are you ruled by the fastest reacting emotion, quick to speak in defense of yourself, or edify yourself with “empowering,” self-expressive slogans? Is it any wonder why God didn’t put Earth as the center of our galaxy? God designed all life in this world to rely on a power source that is 1.3 million times larger than the Earth and placed that power source at the center. The sun is constantly at the center, but we spin and circle around it, and then we get extreme heat or extreme cold. God doesn’t move; we do. He is always there, and we forget or ignore Him.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves, what are we knowledgeable about? We know a lot about movies, shows, stories, books, random facts, statistics, politics, baking, cooking, health, fitness, writing, etc. But what knowledge do you actually seek out? A good way to tell is to look at what sort of things you follow and consume: channels on YouTube, podcasts, shows, the memes and pictures you post, FB pages, twitter threads, hashtags, books on your shelves, the slogan shirts that you wear, or the things you decorate with. By the Biblical standard set by this verse, even if you are a saved-by-grace, righteous person, your deliverance from the destructive ambitions of the godless people of this world will be determined by the knowledge you pursue.

Seek righteousness. Pursue knowledge according to God and His Word, and you will be delivered.

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.