6. With a Little Help from Our Friends
6
With a Little Help from Our Friends
Where there is no guidance, a people falls,
but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.
Proverbs 11:14
Let’s look back for a moment.
What we have seen thus far is that the God who loves us—the Triune God who in his own being is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, working in every believer’s life as a team to save us from sin and shepherd us home—has promised to guide us along the paths of righteousness, as one aspect of his tripersonal covenant care of us. So in making our decisions, in living with the decisions we have made, and in trying to please this great and glorious God wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we should always look to him for help and strength. Even when our starting point is our wish that we had made different decisions so that we would not be where we are now and even when we cannot change our present circumstances, much as we would like to (how many of us start there!), we can still count on his presence with us, his readiness to show us his way for us, and his power to help us move along it, next step by next step. Slow as we may be to seek his guidance and strength at each bend or intersection of the road, he will not withdraw from us and leave us to our own devices. On the contrary, he has pledged himself to lead and look after us, “for his name’s sake,” meaning in a way that displays the goodness, mercy, faithfulness, forgiveness, and forbearance by which he defined his love long ago when he proclaimed his name to Moses (Exod. 34:6–7), and this he will most certainly do. God’s “name” means his revealed nature, to which he is always true, and when he makes a promise he can be relied on to keep his word. So believers should not think of their quest for guidance as an expanse of black ice where ruinous accidents constantly take place but as the central arena of our real life in which God is poised to be gracious to us, over and over again.
God, however, guides through his appointed means: that is, through direct Bible teaching, to start with; then, through biblically formed wisdom that discerns, digests, and applies biblical principles of action in light of a biblically focused overall view of God and life; and then, as we shall now see, though corroboration and/or correction from fellow members of the body of Christ. Just because we all have flaws and blind spots in our thoughts and outlook that left to ourselves we would never detect, we all need in humility to seek advice from others when we have to make significant decisions. Wisdom itself tells us to let our present thoughts be tested and assessed by theirs and to review our options in light of what they suggest. The world knows that if we are to avoid making mistakes time and time again, we must constantly consult and be advised; that is why so many experienced professionals set up in the business world as consultants, and in the sports world as coaches. It is the same in the Christian life. Advising and mentoring fellow believers is one of the ministries in which Christians should regularly serve each other, and that is what the present chapter will discuss.
Individuality and Individualism
Here, though, we run up against a problem that must be faced squarely. Samuel Johnson, the pontifical compiler of the first English dictionary, once declared that he did not like Scotsmen, and when his buddy Boswell protested that he was a Scotsman himself, Johnson said he recognized that as something Boswell could not help. Similarly, we have to recognize that none of us can help being children of our time, constantly conditioned by the milieu in which we move and the cultural air we breathe every day. And one thing contemporary Western culture does not know how to do, and cannot therefore teach us to do, and indeed actually hinders us from doing, is distinguishing between individuality and individualism. Our culture tells us that developing one’s individuality means becoming an individualist—that is, a person consciously detached from external authority and external consensus, thinking one’s own thoughts and doing one’s own thing in disregard of the patterns that one is expected to fit into. Popular existentialism a generation ago, with its idea that you only become a person by standing apart from the crowd, and popular postmodernism today, with its idea that all claims to assert universal truth are power plays in disguise and that my truth must not be expected to match yours, are products of this mindset, which in fact they serve only to articulate and reinforce.
The bottom line for this way of thinking is that individuality means individualism: isolated, defiant, and seeking in the name of spirituality to explore and express the depths of one’s own being all the while refusing in the name of integrity to dance to any tune save one’s own. It is a familiar mental mood into which our contemporaries are massaged by the lyrics of pop singers, debunkings of the past by school and university teachers, self-help gurus and their programs on the media, loose talk about freedom, and much else along the same lines. Conditioned by such a culture as ours, it is hard for Christians to learn the humility that should lead them to suspect themselves of insufficiency and therefore to seek advice when they should and value it properly when it has been given. This is our problem.
Individuality and individualism are in fact two very different things, and it is a matter of prime importance for us to grasp that the gospel of Christ forbids the second while fostering the first. How does the gospel individualize? By making us see ourselves here and now as alone before God in the way that we shall be on judgment day; by making us face our sins and follies and what Yeats described as “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” whence all our perversities emerge; and by forming and consolidating within us our personal bond of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, so that henceforth we live as forgiven sinners, consciously and conscientiously accountable to the Father and the Son in all that we do, and endlessly giving thanks for the “amazing grace . . . that saved a wretch like me.”
So how does the gospel bar the way to individualism? By making and keeping us humbly aware, on the one hand, of our frailties and limitations, which guarantee eccentric lapses if we try to walk alone, and aware too, on the other hand, of God’s purpose of fellowship in the body of Christ, in which harmonious helping of each other where help is needed is the rule and constant goal. As self-sufficient pride produces individualistic independence, so humble realism produces mutuality in community, whereby each one seeks to help others along at all points where they see that they can, and each one depends on others to help him or her in just the same way. Asking and accepting advice, giving and receiving counsel, being as open to correction as one is to encouragement, and recognizing that the traffic of this two-way street is essential to the well-being of all, is thus one aspect of faithful discipleship.
But this is very different from the way of our contemporary Western world, individualistic within its institutionalist frame as it is, and that world is constantly seeking, if we may echo J. B. Phillips’s happy rendering of Romans 12:2, to “squeeze us into its own mold.” As a result, learning to follow this path of fellowship that we are describing, so as not to stray into bypaths of self-sufficient conceit and worldly isolationism as we seek to see and do the will of God, calls for determined effort. Isolationist infection constantly gets into our spiritual system, and has to be detected and unlearned over and over again. For pride is at the heart of all spiritual individualism—pride that proclaims self-sufficiency and hates to act in a way that suggests inadequacy and whispers dependence; and that pride of ours needs to be humbled. It is here that the present chapter, we hope, will give help.
Fellowship and Friendship
But there is some more ground clearing to be done before what we have to say can be properly heard. We spoke of taking advice from within the Christian fellowship to help us make the best decisions. When we used the word “fellowship,” what did we mean? For many of us, fellowship is no more than a cup of coffee or tea and a relaxed chat before or after church service or some other Christian meeting. If that is how we think of it, the suggestion that wise counsel will be found through consulting the fellowship will carry little conviction. But fellowship as the New Testament writers envisage it is far more than a casual chat at the refreshment table. The Greek word for it is koinōnia, which signifies the act and consequence of sharing what God has given to each of us: I give you what I have to share, you give me what you have to share, and we both end up enriched and encouraged beyond where we were when we started. When we practice this koinonia we benefit from it together. Love, respect, goodwill, and a desire to be of service constitute together the motivation of fellowship. Fellowship is the risen life of Christ activating and coordinating the regenerate, who are his body parts; literally and precisely, it is Christ ministering to his people through his people. This grace of Christian fellowship is a supernatural gift operating strictly between those whom Christ has taught to see each other as his brothers and sisters, and therefore ours, in the family of God. Concern that the other person’s needs be met and care for that person’s well-being shapes the practice of fellowship; the mutuality of seeking to give as well as take and take as well as give is the spirit of fellowship; and being variously enriched—in the present case, in wisdom for decision making—is fellowship’s fruit.
Ideally, the congregation to which we belong will be our primary field of fellowship, where our ideas of God’s will for us are tested and, if sound, confirmed and where from time to time indications of God’s will for us are directly given. When the leadership group (apparently) in the church of Antioch in Syria received God’s call to second Paul and Barnabas for missionary service, the whole congregation (apparently) laid their hands on them and sent them off (Acts 13:3). This symbolized their koinonia in the decision, and to Paul and Barnabas themselves the gesture must have meant a great deal. Surely the explicit association of the local church with major decisions involving its members ought to be a regular part of its in-house Christian fellowship.
It needs to be frankly acknowledged that the church in the West has been slow to appreciate the strength that comes from drawing on each other’s wisdom and insight within the local congregation for personal direction on major decisions. It might well be that congregations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America could lead us into a more corporate (and biblical!) practice at this point than we have yet attained. Part of God’s provision for guidance evidently is putting people of different age groups, social, cultural, and racial backgrounds in the same congregation. In their togetherness they then make up the body of Christ in its local manifestation, with the diversity of the body parts on full display. The homogeneous unit principle (like attracts like, or birds of a feather flock together), on which the pioneer church growth leaders laid such stress, may be valid for beginning a church plant, but once a congregation has grown sufficiently in numbers to become self-supporting, adhering to that principle will quench the Spirit and arrest the congregation’s qualitative growth into spiritual maturity. God does not want established congregations to consist of people who are all alike any more than he wants us as individuals to limit our close friendships to people just like ourselves. On the contrary, he wants each congregation to contain a wide variety of the human race, and he means us to find that the help we need in discerning his will comes to us through the minds and souls and voices of this wide cross section of Christian believers.
We need people to point out to us all the relevant facts for making our decision, some of which we may have overlooked. We need people to help us make sure we are abreast of all the interests our decision must serve, and to remind us of those whose concerns we may have failed to take into account. We need people who know us well to tell us, with loving honesty, whether we are being realistic about our own abilities and inabilities, and whether we are actually up to the task that we contemplate taking on. We need people to help us explore our own motives, including the self-serving motives that are there but which we are tempted to gloss over. God means us to seek and find much of the help we need here within the fellowship of the living, breathing, many-faceted, multitalented local body of Christ. As it is within the church that God guards and guides us, so we are called to consult the congregation in matters of personal decision that would in any way affect its life and to view it as our corporate, spiritual friend as we do so.
It must be admitted that the practice of koinonia, like every other Christian ideal without exception, can be and has been misused and cheapened to the point of absurdity. For example, a young man wrote, lovingly for sure, to a widowed missionary whom he had not yet met to say that God had shown him she should marry him, and he hoped she would gladly follow God’s leading. (She did not reply.) Our readers might well be able to tell other stories of nutty advice or proposals or directions given as from God in the name of fellowship. We shall discuss later in this chapter the discernment that is needed to process advice given in good faith. Good faith, however, does not guarantee good sense! So not all well-meant advice will be good advice, particularly when it comes from fellow believers who do not know you well. The advice of close Christian friends, however, is a different matter.
Friendship in Christ is fellowship plus, and it is very precious indeed. Loneliness brings misery; we all need friends! That is a truth about human nature which is doubly true in the Christian life. Friendship grows out of shared interests, attitudes, purposes, and skills, along with temperaments that both parties find stimulating and enriching, so that they love being together to enjoy each other. Christian fellowship, as we have seen, means what has been called “one anothering”—being at the service of one’s fellow believers to care for them, share with them, and walk beside them for their good. Christian friendship is all of that, along with the enriching pleasure that comes as the parties draw affection out of each other and refresh each other simply by being natural with each other. There is no friendship without trust in each other, and no deep-level trust without honest transparency with each other. Fellowship is a discipline of sympathy that can be draining, but friendship is an experience of sympathy that is invigorating. Friendship is close and, in intention anyway, permanent; distant and temporary friendship is really a misnomer and a contradiction in terms. Acquaintanceships can be casual and short-term, but not friendships. Fellowship is goodwill shown in the here and now, but friendship adds the desire for continued, ever-deepening connection. The self-giving of Christian fellowship may be one-sided, as in some of Paul’s pastoral relationships (see, most strikingly, 2 Cor. 6:11–13; 7:2–3; 12:14–15), but the self-giving of friendship is fully mutual, as with David and Jonathan (see 1 Sam. 18:1–4; 19:1–7; chap. 20; 23:15–16; 2 Sam. 1:26). We may regularly be in fellowship with dozens, maybe hundreds of other believers, but the number of our chosen, cultivated, and cherished friendships will be much smaller because the relationship demands so much more of us, just as it gives so much more to us.
It is right for us to hope and expect that God will guard and guide us through our friends. A godly friend sees us in the light of God’s grace and so treats us kindly, magnifying our strengths and making up for our weaknesses. A compassionate friend shares our pain and in so doing lessens our suffering. A joyful friend laughs at us—and with us. A loving friend sees us through the eyes of our holy God, and so confronts us when we need it, pointing us to what is involved in a life worthy of friendship, even the friendship with God that we profess.
But our human friends are, well, human. And so we chuckle as we remember that if we drop the r from that cozy word, we are left with fiend. Our friends lighten our days and challenge us to godliness. But one of the things that we have to be aware of when we think of help from our friends is that their well-meant help is not always marked by well-digested wisdom. Friends can be more fiendish and less truly friendly than they mean to be and certainly more so than we hope to find them, particularly when it comes to discerning the will of God. Yet it is true wisdom for us to turn to them and ask their advice, for all of us easily overlook things and as the epigraph text for this chapter says, “in an abundance of counselors there is safety.”
Two far-reaching reminders are now in order, however, before we go further. First, God’s way of wisdom for us, when found, may not look wise to outsiders or even to our own friends whose advice we have sought. Does it, for instance, look wise that Christian parents Harold and Jeanette, having raised three children born to them, should then adopt three toddlers from troubled genetic backgrounds and of a different race and at middle age begin again the difficult task of child raising? Or does it look wise for retired missionary Robert to live in frugal independence while donating almost half his income to mission causes that he can no longer serve in person? Or for Mary, a Christian grandmother in an AIDS-striken section of Kenya, to take in her five orphaned grandchildren and attempt to ensure their care and survival by growing vegetables on her tiny plot of land?
Here and elsewhere, brave Christians seek God’s wisdom in every case by pursuing a quest for the best. Our line of questions must ever be: “What is the best that I can do for the glory of God? And for the good of others? And for the advancing of God’s kingdom? And for a witness to God’s truth and power, and to the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ? I must not tempt God by rashness, but equally I must not dishonor him by apathy, laziness, and always taking the course that is easy and comfortable. So, Lord, show me: what is the best I can do for you?” What distills in our heart as we live with these questions may well fail to match the self-protective wisdom of the world and of the worldly, but that will not mean that it is not the wisdom of God.
Second, taking advice from others will not excuse us from hard thinking of our own. What it will do, rather, is set before us options and considerations to think about. It is a mistake to suppose that the way to receive God’s guidance is to sit down and wait passively for it, doing nothing until God is felt to “speak.” It is only a variant of that mistake to think that advice from one’s friends ought to be taken uncritically and without further thought or prayer, just because it has been given. Hard thinking before the Lord is often undervalued when we consider the range of spiritual disciplines, but, as we shall shortly see in the case of Paul, evaluating the advice given us is vital if we are to find and follow the will of God. Bishop Ryle’s experience illustrates some of these principles.
Guidance for J. C. Ryle
J. C. Ryle, the Anglican evangelical leader who became Liverpool’s first bishop, 1880–1900, was a successful country clergyman in his early sixties when he was offered (as from the Queen through the prime minister, which was and remains the Church of England’s way of granting bishoprics and deaneries) the deanship of Salisbury Cathedral. The idea evidently was that this would be an honorific appointment in which Ryle could work out his last days as a minister without having much to do. Deans of cathedrals only had to keep the round of services going in those days, and the rest of their time was their own, as is portrayed in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers.
But Ryle had no wish to leave his thriving parish in Norwich diocese for Salisbury, where as an evangelical clergyman he would be in a minority of one. Conscious of needing wisdom to respond to this offer, therefore, he consulted his friends, and in a letter to another friend he reported the result. “Flesh and blood were utterly against it [that is, moving to Salisbury] but almost every one of the sixteen men I consulted said, ‘You ought certainly to go for the sake of Christ’s cause in the Church of England.’ So who was I that I could withstand? I prayed for light and signs from God, and this was all I got. If three [of the sixteen] had said ‘Refuse,’ I would have refused. Cathedral music is not congenial to me. I go into a nest of hornets and shall stand alone.” Reluctantly, then, but believing the consensus of his consultants showed this was the right course, Ryle accepted the offer and prepared to move to Salisbury. He announced the move to his congregation, and a solemn send-off was prepared.
Then a telegram from the prime minister summoned him to London on a particular day (April 16, 1880), and Liverpool’s member of Parliament met him on the platform, to tell him that before the government went out of office in less than a week they wanted to appoint him first bishop of Liverpool, a new diocese recently carved out of the overlarge diocese of Chester. Realizing what an enormous scope for establishing evangelical ministry citywide and evangelizing Liverpool’s half-million people this would present, and being poised to leave his present congregation already, Ryle found it easy to say yes, without further consultation with anyone. The consulting about Salisbury had established in his mind the rightness of being open to a new post “for the sake of Christ’s cause in the Church of England,” and having led him to that openness God was now giving him a far more influential role than the Salisbury deanship would ever have been. Against the odds, and starting from scratch, inheriting no diocesan institutions or infrastructure at all, he single-handedly established Liverpool as the most robust and significant evangelical diocese in England, which arguably it remains today.
Looking back, it is not hard to see the hand of God in all this. If the difficult decision to go to Salisbury had not been faced and taken, Ryle would not have been in a position to say the immediate yes to the offer of Liverpool that the government required, and if he had not consulted in the first place but simply followed his own inclination, he would never have accepted Salisbury. God’s vocational guidance frequently takes a step-by-step form, as here, with lessons on self-denial, humility, and patience being taught through the intermediate steps of the process, and God’s overruling wisdom not becoming apparent until the process is complete.
We now turn to Scripture to explore three principles that have already woven their way into our discussion: seek advice, weigh advice, and practice prudence.
Seek Advice
We have not yet done with the book of Proverbs—or, perhaps we had better say, the book of Proverbs has not yet done with us. In addition to its sustained summons to seek wisdom, on which we have reflected already, Proverbs urges repeatedly that the way to wisdom is to take advice from those who are wise already and thus to avoid slipping into the self-sufficient arrogance that marks fools and constitutes their foolishness or folly. So we read:
The way of a fool is right to his own eyes,
but a wise man listens to advice.
Proverbs 12:15
Where there is no guidance, a people falls,
but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.
Proverbs 11:14
By insolence comes nothing but strife,
but with those who take advice is wisdom.
Proverbs 13:10
Without counsel plans fail,
but with many advisors they succeed.
Proverbs 15:22
Listen to advice and accept instruction,
that you may gain wisdom in the future.
Proverbs 19:20
The tongue of the wise commands knowledge,
but the mouths of fools pour out folly.
Proverbs 15:2
The more momentous and far-reaching the decision, the more urgently necessary the taking of advice becomes. A man’s choice of a wife, or a couple’s choice of each other, is a far-reaching decision, needing therefore to be made, as the old Anglican Prayer Book put it, “not unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly . . . but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God”—which means taking advice from people who know both parties well and can tell them, with loving honesty, whether they are really suited to each other long-term, or whether they have unrecognized limitations and skewed motives that would threaten their bonding.
Again, one of the most momentous decisions, with the potential for great harm to a great number of people, is the decision of national leaders to take their country into war. The same was true three thousand years ago; so it should not surprise us when Proverbs declares: “Plans are established by counsel; by wise guidance wage war” (20:18).
The principle, then, is clear. Look now at some Bible narratives that illustrate it. Jethro was a priest in the land of Midian, and in Exodus 18 we read how he came to visit the Israelites after they had come out of Egypt. Evidently Jethro had heard how Moses his son-in-law had struck out across the desert leading a horde of people with him. So Jethro gathered up his daughter Zipporah, and his two grandsons, and headed out into the desert to meet Moses. The two men bowed to each other and went through the usual Middle Eastern pleasantries of hospitality and food. Then they sat down in a tent together, and Moses filled Jethro in on all the details that led to the exodus from Egypt. By the end of their catching-up conversation, Jethro is praising the God of his son-in-law, “Blessed be the LORD, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh. . . . Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods. ” (Exod. 18:10–11). Jethro offered a burnt offering to the God of Moses, and later Aaron and the elders of the people joined them for dinner.
The next day Moses went to work, and Jethro went with him. It was a tough day for both of them. Here is how it went: “The next day Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. When Moses’s father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, . . . “ ‘Why do you sit alone, and all of the people stand around you from morning to evening?’ And Moses said to his father-in-law, ‘Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.’”
God had empowered Moses to lead several thousand former slaves out of Egypt and into the wilderness toward a land that would be new to all of them. And, as is typical when any large group of people get together and are under any sort of stress, they developed a huge variety of interpersonal tensions. So Moses, being the hardworking, responsible leader that he was, set himself to solve their problems: He acted as spiritual guide helping them to discern God’s will; he served as judge, settling their disputes; and he worked as a teacher, interpreting God’s laws to them. It was an all-day job, every day, and the people waited in line to see him. Each evening Moses must have felt exhausted, but that fatigue no doubt blended with a sense of accomplishment and duty and maybe even a smidgen of pride. The people revered him. He was leading his people into righteousness, faithful following of their holy God. Certainly God must be pleased with him! But his father-in-law was not. Here is what happened next.
“Moses’ father-in-law said to him, ‘What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone. Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you!’” So much for in-law tact! Not only was Jethro interfering with the most important task of Moses’s life, he was doing so as a relatively new convert, attempting to tell his son-in-law how to do a job that God had been preparing him to do for all of his life. But Moses had himself paved the way for Jethro’s interference. What would he expect to happen after his intimate tent conversation about the work of God over the past weeks? He was in effect, even if not in intention, inviting his father-in-law to interfere. Under the circumstances interference is what one might expect—and that is precisely what Moses got. Now observe the unsolicited advice that Jethro offered, advice with the term “obey” attached to it.
“You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do.” That was what Moses had been doing all along: no disruption yet. But with the next word out of Jethro’s mouth, “Moreover,” Moses’s datebook was to take a major hit, and his power a major plunge. “Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people will go to their place in peace” (Exod. 18:13–23).
Can you delegate? Moses had to learn to delegate. Do you know what to look for in wise leaders for your church? Adhering to Jethro’s description of the sort of people Moses was to look for will go a long way toward providing good pastoral care in a church. Do you find it difficult to take advice, especially if it comes in the form of an unsolicited and overbearing order as it did here? Moses, however, was sufficiently humble and clearheaded to accept the wise directive he’d been given. “Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said” (v. 24), and his people received better care because of it. Moses and Jethro together provide us an example of advice given, advice taken, and wisdom resulting. Perhaps Solomon had Jethro in mind when he wrote, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver. Like a gold ring or an ornament of gold is a wise reprover to a listening ear” (Prov. 25:11–12).
But not all advice, even from friends, will work out for our ease and comfort. God’s ways are far more complex than that—and so is life. Some three hundred years after the time of Moses, kings began to rule over God’s people. These kings always surrounded themselves with counselors, some of them wise and good, many foolish and evil. When the great King David (second king in the long line of kings) suffered a momentarily successful coup by his son Absalom, two counselors offered advice to their new king.
Ahithophel had been David’s number one counselor, that is, the person he always had by him to consult in cases where decisions had to be made for the kingdom and the people. Ahithophel’s reputation was such that the recorder of 2 Samuel comments, “Now in those days the counsel that Ahithophel gave was as if one consulted the word of God; so was all the counsel of Ahithophel esteemed, both by David and by Absalom” (2 Sam. 16:23). But Ahithophel had secretly given allegiance to Absalom. Ahithophel, one supposes, was a man who always looked after himself, and he had decided that Absalom’s revolt was likely to succeed; so he transferred to Absalom’s side (15:12).
But David had a friend named Hushai, an Archite, who had wormed his way into Absalom’s inner circle and presented himself as a man willing to give Absalom advice although actually he hoped to listen in on the battle plan in order to send information back to David (16:16–19). Meanwhile, David, feeling the terrible loss of having his main counselor turn traitor, prayed that Ahithophel might lapse into folly. “O LORD, please turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness” (15:31).
Absalom had already chased David out of Jerusalem and was now occupying it. He asked Ahithophel, as the most respected counselor, what he should do next. Ahithophel said in essence, “Well, you should show everyone that you are in charge here and that your father is powerless to do anything about it. You will make that as plain as possible if you have sex with all of his concubines and make sure everyone knows about it.” So Absalom did just that. He set up a tent on the roof of the palace, in clear view of the people, and one by one these hapless women were sent inside. Then Absalom, having (one supposes) rather liked his first experience of Ahithophel’s advice, asked again what to do. And Ahithophel, we can assume now wishing a hero’s role, said, “Let me choose twelve thousand men, and I will arise and pursue David tonight. I will come upon him while he is weary and discouraged and throw him into a panic, and all the people who are with him will flee. I will strike down only the king, and I will bring all the people back to you as a bride comes home to her husband” (17:1–3). We can almost see Ahithophel’s eyes gleam with the intensity of his ambition. And, as verse 14 tells us, it was in fact good advice; had Absalom followed it, David would have been permanently ruined.
Absalom, still David’s son, may have gulped a bit when he heard Ahithophel’s words and so said something like, “Well that’s something to think about, but let’s see what Hushai has to say.” Hushai, buying time to get a message through to David, dismissed Ahithophel’s advice as “not good,” following this with a plausible explanation: “You know that your father and his men are mighty men, and that they are enraged, like a bear robbed of her cubs in the field. Besides, your father is expert in war; he will not spend the night with the people. . . . [E]ven now he has hidden himself in one of the pits or in some other place. And as soon as some of the people fall at the first attack, whoever hears it will say, ‘There has been a slaughter among the people who follow Absalom.’”
Now Absalom began to think that if he followed Ahithophel’s advice, David and his people would defeat Ahithophel’s party, and that the victory would raise David’s morale and so he himself would be worse off. Recognizing the progress in persuasion he had made, Hushai continued with an alternative battle plan. “My counsel is that all Israel be gathered to you, . . . as the sand by the sea. . . . and that you go to battle in person.” In essence Hushai was advising Absalom: Wait. Don’t go right away. Make sure that you have an overwhelmingly powerful force to outnumber David and company before you start the battle—and then lead the battle yourself (17:4–14).
Hushai must have known that what he said about David and his men being in a ferocious state of mind was not likely to be true because they had all gone out of Jerusalem with their tails between their legs. David was in deep grief that his beloved son was leading a revolt against him, and he had bowed before the curses of Shimei and felt the sting of stones on his back as he left the city. David was in no mood to fight. Hushai was bluffing, but Absalom bought his story. So Absalom took the wrong advice: Hushai’s rather than Ahithophel’s. And we are told that when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not being followed, wounded pride and realistic expectations combined to drive him to suicide. He saddled his donkey, went home to his own city, set his house in order and hanged himself. He couldn’t risk what he foresaw for himself if David and his troops were given time to recover and retake Jerusalem, as he thought they were sure to do if given the breathing space Hushai’s plan allowed them (17:23).
All of this illustrates the point that while we all need counselors from whom to ask advice, we also need good sense ourselves to evaluate what those counselors say. That truth leads us straight into our next section.
Weigh Advice
Some forty years after King David died and immediately following the death of Solomon, David’s son, the people sent a delegation to Rehoboam, son of Solomon, who was next in line to take the throne. First they stated the obvious, “Your father made our yoke heavy,” which he did. Solomon had built the famous temple that was to bear his name for the next four hundred years. To do this, he centralized the wealth of a whole nation, with high taxes, forced labor, the skills of artisans, and the gathering of gold and jewels (much given voluntarily). The building, commissioned by David but built under Solomon had drawn on the resources of every able-bodied citizen and every stockpiled domestic treasury. That was of course very grand for Solomon, but it was pretty rough on Israel. Solomon’s subjects had been glad that God was so prospering their king and his kingdom, but they were less than thrilled about the way that they had been mobilized in order to make it happen. So the request to Rehoboam was to make things easier for them. Rehoboam consulted the old men, the circle of counselors with whom Solomon had consulted throughout his life, and they told him to do what the people asked. He should give them a break, take it easy on them. “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:7).
Before making a decision, however, Rehoboam also consulted the young men whom he had grown up with: dashing young bloods, no doubt, to whom man-management was a closed book, just as it was to Rehoboam himself. They said, No, no, no. You are the king, so swagger. Be big. Make it obvious that you are in charge. Go out and tell them, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions” (12:10–11). It is as if Rehoboam had said, “My father made it bad for you, and I’ll make it worse. I’m the king, you’re my subjects, so there. Go home and prepare for further exploitation from your new royal master.” Rehoboam was a fool, as his later reign confirmed. He did not adequately weigh the two sets of advice he had received, took the wrong counsel, and headed his country into civil war and eventually two separate nations, which never again united at any point in Jewish history.
In view of these last two stories—the story of Absalom deciding how to war against his father and the story of Rehoboam deciding how to rule his people—we have to ask a question that any careful reader of the texts will raise. Why does bad advice sometimes come to people, as it seems, from the Lord? This was true of Hushai’s advice to Absalom and also the advice of the young men to Rehoboam. Hushai’s advice got Absalom killed in the battle that resulted from acting on it. The young men’s advice brought about a national schism. Both stories have textual clues which show us that God had something to do with each of these events. In 2 Samuel 15:31, we hear David praying against his former top counselor: “O LORD, please turn the counsel of Ahitophel into foolishness”—which God evidently did, by letting Absalom conclude there was superior wisdom in what Hushai said. And we read in 1 Kings 12:15, “So the king did not listen to the people [those who had asked Rehoboam to lighten their load], for it was a turn of affairs brought about by the LORD that he might fulfill his word.” In each of these stories, things went badly for the person who was looking for advice (with their own flawed motives bedeviling them), and both of them in the outcome received the comeuppance they deserved, but their acting on the bad advice worked toward God’s larger purposes. David was duly returned to power. And later, the kingdom was duly split, as God had already declared it would be (see 1 Kings 11:29–39) because of idolatrous worship of the goddess Ashtoreth and the gods Chemosh and Milcom. As ever, God was overruling and his will of events was being done.
What should we learn from these stories? First, that it is certainly right for us as God’s people—indeed, as God’s children—to seek the best advice from those whom we see as the wisest advisors, to weigh the advice we get as carefully and thoroughly as we can, and to follow what thus appears to us the best course of action; but, second, that right at the outset we need to ask ourselves before the Lord why we want the advice we are going to ask for. What is our motive? What is the goal? Is it to advance our own ego at the expense of a family member, maybe a parent, whom we want to put down, as with Absalom? Or at the expense of people whom deep down we despise, and over whom we are happy to ride roughshod, as with Rehoboam?
If our purpose in seeking guidance, and hoping God will show us through advisors the most fruitful course of action, is anything less than God’s own glory in our own lives and in the lives of others, it will be no wonder if God leaves us to make misjudgments prompted by our own false motives, misjudgments that will bring home to us the sick and bitter nature of our chosen path. If our professed quest for wisdom boils down to a pursuit of success in self-aggrandizement, as it did with these two men, it deserves to be blasted, and God can be expected one way or another to blast it. As he is constantly active in grace, so he is in judgment. Both Absalom and Rehoboam received wise advice, which they failed to weigh properly—realistically, that is—because a vision of personal grandeur (Absalom leading his army to a huge victory, Rehoboam dragooning cowed Israelites to serve his personal prestige) led them astray. Both of them were puffed up with pride, and we know all too well that pride goes before a fall.
The New Testament adds to this wisdom about weighing advice in two ways. The narrative in Galatians 2:11–14 of Paul rebuking Peter, like the story of Jethro directing Moses, shows how God will use one person to minister to another, and how a person being taught wisdom may have to rethink and change his ways. The new element here, however, is Paul’s demand for the consistency of wisdom, that is, the resolve to express one’s beliefs in honest, transparent, straightforward action and to ensure that one’s actions square with one’s beliefs.
Peter had compromised. Following the conversion of Cornelius, recorded in Acts 10, Peter knew that Gentiles have a full and equal place with Jews in God’s kingdom; so he could eat at table with non-Jewish believers, ignoring the food laws under which he had lived all his life. But when Jewish Christians arrived from Jerusalem, men of standing one supposes, he stopped doing this. Why? No doubt because he did not wish to risk any kind of confrontation with headquarters. To Paul, however, Peter’s action was a devious deception, obscuring a vital Christian truth, and he would not let Peter get away with what he was doing. “I opposed him to his face,” says Paul of their encounter (Gal. 2:11). If Peter could eat with Gentiles when Jews were absent, he could and should eat with them when Jews were present. Said Paul, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (2:14). Both Peter and Paul continued as Christian missionaries, and the churches continued to grow full with both Jews and Gentiles; so we can assume that Peter heard, weighed, and acted on Paul’s advice—even though he didn’t seek it.
The second new lesson is quite different. As we weigh the counsel we are given, we may on rare occasions find that even unanimous advice from God’s people may not guide us in the direction God is pointing. It takes genuine sensitivity to the people, to our own interior, hidden motives, and to the voice of God’s Spirit within to discern God’s guidance in so difficult and unusual a circumstance. Late in his ministry, Paul experienced just this kind of conflict, and it is deeply interesting to watch him handling it. In Acts 20:22, we hear Paul confide to the Ephesian elders, “I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.” From that point on Paul headed toward Jerusalem, giving farewells and receiving dissuasives at every stop. When he “sought out the disciples” at Tyre, “through the Spirit they were telling Paul not to go on to Jerusalem” (21:4). When he arrived at Caesarea, a prophet took Paul’s belt and tied up his own hands and feet and said “Thus says the Holy Spirit, ‘This is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt’” (21:11). And Luke, who is in Paul’s party at this point, writes “When we heard this, we and the people there urged him not to go up to Jerusalem” (21:12).
Still Paul persisted, weighing the advice he heard, but sensing ever more certainly that God himself was sending him to Jerusalem. Luke finally wrote, “And since he would not be persuaded, we ceased and said, ‘Let the will of the Lord be done’” (21:14). Luke at least had come to a resigned recognition that God was taking Paul to a place where none of his Christian friends would advise him to go. So Paul went to Jerusalem, against their advice, not having accepted it, but not having ignored it either. Processing it had undoubtedly made him surer than ever that God was directing him to Jerusalem, and to Jerusalem he must go. Of course, there was trouble for him, as had been foretold, and that was how he got to Rome—which is where God was sending him all along. In this, God’s mysterious plans once again came to light, but only long after Paul had decided to listen to God’s voice within in spite of advice given by his friends. Their advice had assumed that a key man like Paul should avoid trouble whenever he possibly could. You could call that assumption common sense. But his, as events were to show, was an exceptional case. We shall say more about exceptional cases later. For the moment we simply note that on rare occasions a heart tuned to God will find that he or she must reject even the good advice of godly friends.
Practice Prudence
Prudence is a quality which C. S. Lewis describes as common sense sanctified for the glory of God. In Mere Christianity, Lewis speaks of the four cardinal virtues which people like Aristotle had already distilled out from their reflections on life and which in due course became part of the Christian heritage. Prudence is one of the four virtues, along with temperance, justice, and courage or fortitude as Roman Catholics commonly call it, though these would hardly rank as virtues at all if prudence was not their foundation. Lewis expands on this cardinal virtue as follows:
Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays, most people hardly think of prudence as one of the “virtues.” In fact, because Christ said we could only get into his world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are “good,” it doesn’t matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of “prudence” about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, he told us to be not only “as harmless as doves,” but also “as wise as serpents.” He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single minded, affectionate and teachable, as good children are, but he also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job.
We return to this topic now, as we near the end of this chapter, because, while prudence is an all-time, all-place, all-weather virtue without which we cannot live well in any situation or relationship at all, it is in weighing and evaluating advice from friends, peers, relatives, pastors, professionals, strangers, or whoever, that our prudence is supremely tested, and any lack of prudence on our part will appear most clearly. Prudence is the classical Christian name for the hard thinking that, as we said earlier, the assessing of advice requires. This is, of course, a two-way street: our own advising of others, however good, shrewd, and spiritual in itself, will go for nothing if they lack the prudence to process properly what we say. Deep-level, fully-formed prudence is an absolute necessity for all aspects of the wisdom and discernment that this book commends.
Deep-level prudence involves three things. The first requirement is a clear grasp of the gospel of Christ, with its liberating message of full forgiveness through Christ that begets grateful bond service to him and his Father, who is now our Father too, and therewith an outgoing love to all our fellow humans as well. Prudence cannot grow in a heart that is ruled by any mode of legalism, lawlessness, or lovelessness.
The second requirement is a conscience that functions clearly and consistently in terms of biblical truths and values. Such a conscience will always be countercultural to a degree, and we today in the West need all the time to be inwardly battling the secularism that surrounds us if our consciences are to be well-formed and always in good working order. It is to help us here, where we are all so vulnerable, that God’s moral laws are laid out in the Bible at what sometimes feels like laborious length. The seemingly endless contrasts of right and wrong, just and unjust, in the Pentateuch, the prophets, the proverbs, and the psalms are there for a reason, namely, the educating of fallen human consciences up to their full stature, and we must let them all have their way with us to that end.
The third requirement is a resolute realism that insists on finding and facing the true and full facts of every situation regarding which we are called on to take action, pass a judgment, or express an opinion. Being honest with oneself and others in facing facts is far from easy; wishful thinking, rationalized emotions, prejudices and hurts, selective and sometimes deceitful memory, and a desire to be told only what we want to hear easily seep in to muddy our decisions with selfishness. But all facts are God’s facts, and any unwillingness to learn and practice the habit of being objective about matters of difficulty or what is felt as a threat will keep us out of the path of godly prudence all our lives.
The bottom line, then, is that there are moral conditions of spiritual discernment. We shall not achieve clarity about God’s will for us, either through the clamor of well-meant advisors or through the working of our own thoughtful hearts in times of quiet withdrawal, unless our hearts are set first and foremost on following, obeying, and pleasing the Father and the Son. Basic to true wisdom is an unending quest for holiness—purity of heart and perfection of love to God and men. The writer to the Hebrews warns us that without holiness no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14), and we are saying that without holiness no one, however well advised and faithfully admonished, will adequately discern the will of God at any point in his or her life. Holiness, which is fundamental to prudence, must always come first.