Math is math!

Verse: Proverbs 16

Devotion
“That’s…not the way you’re supposed to do it, Dad, they want us to do it this way…”

“I don’t KNOW that way! Why would they change math? Math is math. Math. Is. MATH!”

After a couple years of helping my kids with their school assignments, I can sympathize with Mr. Incredible’s logic in the dialogue above. That’s one of the great parts about math; it’s universal. There are different ways to approach it, sure, but it has guiding principles that don’t change.

Like math, Proverbs tries to provide us with an instruction manual of best practices for how the world and God operates. Proverbs 16 is an incredibly chaotic and disorganized list of guiding principles that we can apply to our lives. Some of these principles are God’s promises, others are aphorisms. Let’s explore a couple.

Old Folks
“Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained by living a godly life.” – Proverbs 16:31

It’s important to be able to pick out the context and reasoning behind these verses, or you may come away believing that Jeffrey Epstein was God’s faithful servant for 65+ years. We often get the cause and effect backwards on these types of aphorisms; it’s not that everyone who has grey hair has certainly been living a godly life, rather it’s the principle that if you dedicate yourself to godliness you will tend to avoid the pitfalls and poor judgment decisions that frequently take people out earlier than their natural life expectancy.

Let’s Get This Bread
“How much better to get wisdom than gold, and good judgment than silver!” – Proverbs 1616

Gold and silver are fine, but wisdom and good judgment lets you buy Bitcoin when it dips and sell when it’s high. The difference here is between wisdom and intelligence, or between wisdom and resources. Intelligence and resources are good things to be sure, but they are like train cars, whereas wisdom is the engine, and that engine can help you get more intelligence and resources. Without analogies: wisdom is what helps you seek and understand God and live according to his principles in this universe he’s set up for us.

You Done Messed Up A-Aron
“People may be pure in their own eyes, but the Lord examines their motives.” – Proverbs 162

Do you remember the last time something bad happened to you? Maybe it was an accident, or you messed up something at work, or fumbled your way awkwardly through a conversation.

How about the last time something bad happened to someone else?

Did you blame your problem on the circumstances and situation, but fault other people for the bad things that happened to them? Maybe they’re an idiot, careless, or boring, in your mind.

This is called the actor-observer bias: we frequently overlook, rationalize, and justify our own issues so that we can feel pure in our own eyes, but God knows what was really happening in our brains, since he’s not subject to biases like we are.

This verse is a good reminder that you’re probably not as good at noticing your own issues as God is.

Personally I find Proverbs to be fairly overwhelming, so I like to just pick one or two verses and stew on them for a while. Try that today—pick one verse, spend 60 seconds memorizing it, and then ask God to help you think about it today.

Author: Jordan Ambra