Open your Bibles, if you would, to Proverbs 30. Proverbs 30. After this sermon, we will be done with Chapter 30. We'll have two more sermons to finish off the book. Proverbs Chapter 30. Let's read the whole chapter. The words of Agur, the son of Jacob. His utterance. This man declared to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Eucl. Surely I am more stupid than any man and do not have the understanding of a man. I have neither learned wisdom nor have knowledge of the Holy One. Who has ascended into heaven or descended? Who has gathered the wind in his fist? Who has bound the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name and what is his son's name, if you know? Every word of God is pure. He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words lest He reprove you and you be found a liar. Two things I request of you. Deprive me not before I die. Remove falsehood and lies far from me. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food you prescribe for me. Lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. Do not malign a servant to his master lest he cursed you and you be found guilty. There is a generation that curses its father and does not bless its mother. There is a generation that is pure in its own eyes, yet is not washed from its filthiness. There is a generation, oh, how lofty are their eyes and their eyelids are lifted up. There is a generation whose teeth are like swords and whose fangs are like knives to devour the poor from off the earth and the needy from among men. The leech has two daughters, give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, four things never say it is enough. The grave, the barren womb, the earth that is not satisfied with water and the fire that never says it is enough. The eye that mocks his father and scorns obedience to his mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out and the young eagles will eat it. There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I do not understand. The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a virgin. This is the way of an adulterous woman. She eats and wipes her mouth and says, I have done no wickedness. For three things the earth is perturbed, yes, for four it cannot bear up. For a servant when he reigns, a fool when he is filled with food, a hateful woman when she is married, and a maidservant who displaces her mistress. There are four things which are little on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their food in the summer. The rock badgers are a feeble folk, yet they make their homes in the crags. The locusts have no king, yet they all advance in ranks. The spider skillfully grasps with its hands, and it is in king's palaces. There are three things which are majestic in pace, yes, four which are stately in walk. A lion, which is mighty among beasts and does not turn away from any, a greyhound, a male goat also, and a king whose troops are with him. If you have been foolish in exalting yourself, or if you have devised evil, put your hand on your mouth. For as the churning of milk produces butter, and as wringing the nose produces blood, so the forcing of wrath produces strife. Grass withers, flower fades, the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Father, give us the humility to learn humility, from this chapter. Give us the grace not to be arrogant fools, not to be vicious, greedy, or self-important. Help us, Lord. Humble us, we ask. We know that that's a dangerous request. Give us the humility to hear your word and the humility to live humbly in light of your word. Don't let us be foolish in exalting ourselves, most especially in our thoughts. We ask these things, Lord, praying that you would help me to humbly proclaim the good news about Jesus from this text. We ask it in his name. Amen. Well, Auger has written in this chapter something very different from the material found in the rest of Proverbs. He loves these numerical sayings. He has a number of those, and they seem to be a collection of disjointed observations about various items in nature. That's not because he's an early kind of botanist or scientist, but rather his point is the glory of humility. Augur starts his text by telling us, I'm stupid. Surely I'm more like an animal than a man. We looked at that last week and how in order to gain knowledge, Augur teaches, you need to know God. You have to attach to him by faith. You have to listen to his word. You have to speak to him in prayer. We talked about that, but Alger goes on from that and he tells us directly in so many words in the final two verses of our text, don't exalt yourself. Don't be arrogant. Don't be the fool who lifts yourself up above everybody else. Quit doing that. And in fact, in between, you can see I've bolded on your outline the structural verses here. The first verse of our text, verse 10, tells us plainly, honor your social inferiors. Don't curse a servant to his master. The middle verse, verse 17, tells us honor your father and mother. Honor your social superiors. And then the final two verses tell us Honor the people that you just really want to fight. The people who make you mad, the people that make you want to get angry, those are the people you need to honor. So, Auger is talking throughout about humility. In the first nine verses, the humility that finds wisdom, and in the last part of the chapter, the humility that learns from the natural order. So again, both halves of this chapter talk about the humility that leads to knowledge. First is the humility to listen to the word of God, and then the second part, starting at verse 10, is the humility to look at the works of God. Augur looks at the natural world, he looks at the moral world, and he demands and exemplifies a humble learning attitude. And in this, he's like the Lord Jesus, the wise son who looks at the natural and moral world and humbly learns what's to be seen there. Well, let's look then at Augur's teaching. First point, honor your social inferiors. Don't malign a servant to his master. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means I have a complaint about some low-level flunky, so I call corporate headquarters and denounce them. This barista at Starbucks used a racial slur against me. You have the power as a customer to destroy the career of all kinds of people. by telling a lie like that about the racial slur, or sometimes even by telling the truth. I got such awful service from so-and-so that I would really like you to fire him, and I'm going to make a big stink about it. Of course, these days, people actually engage in social media campaigns to do this very thing, to denounce a servant to his master, to call out the bad behavior of somebody in an organization and try to get the big bosses of the organization to turn their guns on that person. Auger says that is not acceptable for the Christian. You may not exploit a power differential like that to get what you want. If you have a problem with the way somebody's serving you, tell them. And you're free to not go back to that location. What you're not free to do is try to call in somebody with the power to make or break that person's career and get your way by doing that. Because if you do it, Auger says the person you mistreat like that is going to curse you and the curse is going to take hold. A couple of chapters ago, I think chapter 26, yeah, says that a curse without reason won't bite. But if you're guilty, the curse does bite, and if you malign a servant to his master, then you can expect to be cursed, and rightly so. In other words, be humble when you're dealing with your inferiors. Children that means right don't rat out somebody to mom and dad or to the teacher Don't always go try to find the person in the room with the most power and say he did Don't denounce somebody to his boss don't denounce a child to his parents Now there's a place for honest and legitimate whistleblowing that's not what this is talking about I This is talking not about the work of humility, but about the work of arrogance. Don't call the cops on a problem you can solve yourself. Paul talks about it in the other civil context. Don't take fellow believers to court with a problem you can solve and should solve yourself. Honoring your inferiors is the first commandment of humility. How you treat the person who's talking to you from a call center in Indium, how you interact with the cashier and the janitor, that matters. Honor goes on from this first observator, this first moral command, honor your inferiors, to talk about people who don't do that, essentially. There's a generation that curses its father and does not bless its mother. All of these people, the four generations, show symptoms of having missed humility's demand to honor your inferiors, superiors, and equals. Instead, they dishonor their parents, they are arrogant, they're pharisaical, their eyes are lifted up, and They're greedy. One of you was telling me last week, I am convinced that abortion is all about getting rid of poor people who will be a drain on society's resources. The only explanation that makes sense, well, what does verse 14 say? It describes the generation that does that. They devour the needy from off the earth, the poor from among men. Now, why would they do that? Well, they can profit by squeezing the poor, right? If you can extract $5 out of 100 million people, then you're a pretty wealthy individual. On a large scale, there's profits to be made off the poor. And whether we look at the abortion industry or whether we look at the opioid and pharmaceutical industries, it's easy to see that kind of thing happening, right? And what generation is it taking place in? our generation. Which generation is it that's described here? We shouldn't be too quick to say, well that's some other generation. That's not us. In his humility, Augur looks around and he says, servants will curse you if you denounce them, but there are people who curse those who bless them, that curse their father and their mother. And this generation, that doesn't know humility, that doesn't know how to honor superiors or inferiors, is exemplified as well in the blood-sucking leech that has the mouth on each end, the two daughters, and both mouths suck. Sucks blood out here and here. The names of the two daughters or the words of the two daughters are give and give. That is a symbol of greed. Auger looks at that in the natural world and he says, I see the correspondence in the human world. And it's not just the leech. There are actually four other things he can think of that are similarly always greedy. And he doesn't say here, the corporation whose stock price can never rise high enough, He doesn't say here the individual whose net worth can never get large enough. He doesn't say here a person who can never eat enough tasty food or have enough pleasurable sexual experiences, but he could. Right? There are three things. There are actually many more things that are never satisfied that never say enough. But he thinks of four. One of them is Sheol, the grave. No matter how many people you bury, the earth can always take more. Right? We cannot imagine. It's completely absurd to think, well, so-and-so couldn't die today because hell was full. There was no room, so they're stuck in bureaucratic limbo. They're still here on earth. It doesn't work that way. Sheol is always accepting new patients. The grave doesn't say enough. The barren womb. You can fertilize a barren womb endlessly. The child never comes out. There's never enough fertilizer in there to produce a new human being. Or, of course, the earth. No matter how much water you pour onto the dirt, Dirt soaks up more. And we know that in our desert climate just like Solomon and Augur knew that in their desert climate. No matter how much it rains, the earth can always take a little more. And finally, of course, fire. We all know how insatiable fire is. Fire never says, OK, that's good. I've had enough for now. You don't need to feed me anymore. Fire just keeps burning and burning and burning. So the greedy and the arrogant are two sides of the same coin, which of course is what Auger already said in his previous section. Remove falsehood and lies, don't give me poverty or riches. Arrogant, bend the truth to their advantage, and they want riches. They don't want just the right amount of food, they want an infinite amount. They don't pray, don't give me riches. They pray, give me everything. And then more. I'll take more and more and more and more. So Auger adds then that the second structuring saying, the demand, honor your father and mother. The eye that mocks his father and scorns obedience to his mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out and the young eagles will eat it." What is that talking about? Well, it's talking about the scavenger birds of prey eating a corpse. This is a threat that if you don't honor your father and mother, you won't be honored with a proper burial. Instead of going in the ground, You'll just go out on the hillside and the vultures will come by and take whatever they want. Especially, of course, the eyeballs, which are the scavenger animals' favorite. Dishonor your father and mother. Expect a gruesome death and no burial. And of course, in the ancient world, to not be buried was basically the worst thing that could happen to you. People lived in fear of not being buried. Aeneas and the Aeneid actually has this guy haunting his ship, the ghost of one of his comrades that he failed to bury. And he has to go to great lengths to get this guy buried. People took this very, very seriously in that day. And Augur says, you want to be arrogant? You want to blow off your parents? You won't be buried. You won't get to lie out on a cold, hard ground, dishonored, and rot like a dead fish. So from that, he moves to more observations. Humility observes. Arrogance doesn't notice. Arrogant don't need to be bothered with actually looking around and seeing what's in front of them. they already know everything they need to know. And so they don't care to look, they don't care to listen, they don't care to learn. All of us have dealt with these kind of people. You can always tell the English, you can always tell the Dutch, you can always tell the Yankee, but you cannot tell them much. You can't tell them anything because they're convinced they already know. The arrogant despise creation because they despise the Creator. It's better to be of a humble spirit with the lowly because then you can see the glory of Christ. Chesterton puts this so well, I've shared this quote with you before. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are, of immeasurable stature. To the spirit which is stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards, the grass is an everlasting forest. What is Chesterton saying? If you're humble, you're small, you're so small that you don't look over the grass and say, oh, it's just grass. You imagine yourself down inside as this little tiny creature at the base of a giant grass blade. And you're in this amazing forest of grass. What is that humility that is astonished by the front lawn? It doesn't say, oh, I'm much bigger than this grass. This grass is pointless. There's no need to look at that. No, humility gets small and delights in everything that the creator made because ultimately it delights in the creator. Chesterton says, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is like a giant becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance. He rises always through desolate eternities. He discovers fresh universes and learns to despise them. Ogner says, yes, those people are out there. Don't be those people. Be the humble who see the glory of Christ reflected in the glory of a November afternoon. Arthur looks around and he sees these three, or actually four, wonderful ways. The way of an eagle, the way of a serpent, the way of a ship, the way of a man with a maid. All of these things are too wonderful for him to grasp. He doesn't say, oh, it's just a ship. Ships have been navigating the ocean for millennia. Oh, it's just an eagle. Obviously, it knows how to fly. It's just a snake. I guess it's able to move. And human beings, man and woman, well, it's happened for a long time. Nothing too impressive there. No, he has the opposite attitude. He has the attitude of humility, which finds things wonderful. These things were beyond his ability to comprehend. As is this fifth thing, maybe the most wonderful or the most terrifying of all, the adulterous woman who eats and wipes her mouth and says, I've done no wickedness. Oliver Goldsmith in the 18th century wrote this famous line in English letters, this famous little poem, when lovely woman stoops to folly and finds too late that men betray. What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away? Just here's an adulterous woman and she's just crushed. Nothing can help her. And T.S. Eliot comes along in the 20th century and rewrites that for the modern liberated woman. When lovely woman stoops to folly and paces about her room again alone, she smooths her hair with automatic hand and puts a record on the gramophone. Well, Auger, long before either of those, had described the 20th century woman. Only, she doesn't even have to distract herself by listening to music. She just pulled out her napkin, wiped her mouth. That was easy. Let's move on. It's a way that is even more astonishing, the ways of these majestic things that God created. Those are overwhelming. But the way people can sin and blow it off, that's the way that really concerned Augur. And of course, he has observed that about all kinds of different sins. And this too is a sin of greediness in the adulterous woman who eats and wipes her mouth and doesn't even smooth her hair with automatic hand. Just moves on. That was not wrong. Auger goes on to talk about four arrogant things. Things that are so nasty that the earth itself can't stand them. A servant when he reigns. This is not saying that somebody who's a slave should never rise to reign, right? Somebody like Joseph in prison should never become grand vizier. That's not what he's saying. Rather, he's saying somebody who has the slave attitude, somebody who has a bad attitude, a chip on his shoulder, is not going to become a worthy ruler just by rising in social status. If you promote a bad attitude, it's going to remain a bad attitude. And so the earth itself is disturbed under this kind of arrogance, or a fool who's well-fed. That's the last thing you want, is a well-fed fool. A hateful woman, when she's married, this woman has no concept of how to get along with people or please people, and you give her some status, a husband, and she just lords it over everyone right and left, same as the maiden who succeeds her mistress. We can think of Hagar succeeding Sarah in Abraham's bed. Wow, that did not go well. Augur looks at this arrogance that he sees in the world around him, but then he matches it with the power of wisdom to make up for disadvantages, for little things which are exceedingly wise. So the ants aren't strong, but their wisdom lets them plan ahead. The rock badgers aren't strong either, but they live in very strong houses. They hide in the rocks. The locusts have no leaders, but they have the advantage of moving in rank and advancing in an orderly fashion, eating up everything in a systematic way. And then finally, the spider or lizard, we don't know which it is, you can take in your hands. It's so small that it fits in the palm of the hand, and yet it lives in a palace. Wisdom can make up for deficiencies, but arrogance creates deficiencies. So Auger ends by talking about four things that show arrogance, or at least a certain amount of pride and dignity in their body language. He's been focusing on humility. He says, here are four things. Go ahead and let the lion swagger. The lion can strut. You shouldn't. The greyhound or the rooster, they can strut. You shouldn't. Don't be a swaggering Christian. Which has been his point all along. If you're a swaggering, proud person, you don't get it. You don't have understanding. You don't have wisdom. It's humility that looks around and notices what's happening in the world. It's humility that's able to learn. It's humility that's able to honor inferiors, honor superiors, and now he finishes up with its humility that doesn't force the issue. He ends with this little parable of three kneadings. Kneading always works. If you knead cream, you get butter. If you knead noses, you get blood. If you knead wrath, like dough, you can start a fight. Don't do that. Close your mouth if you're arrogant or a wannabe evildoer. If you've been foolish in exalting yourself, put your hand on your mouth. It doesn't mean put your hand on your mouth and keep talking. No, put your hand on your mouth and stop talking. I'm done. I'm arrogant. I have no more to say. I've had evil plans. I've wanted to do wrong things. I've actually sat here and thought about how I'm going to accomplish something that I know I shouldn't do. Lay your hand on your mouth. So Auger starts by saying, I'm more like an animal than a man. And he ends by saying, if any of you have the same symptoms that I had, If any of you are showing signs of being a fool, repent, and you will know you've repented by you no longer spouting off folly, and doing things that make people so angry, or saying things that make people so angry. It works every time. If you churn cream, you'll get butter. You beat the nose, you get blood. You push on somebody's anger button, you'll get a fight. Not that hard to understand, except for the arrogant. The arrogant don't get it. The arrogant think that their way is the only way, and anybody who disagrees with them needs to have their wrath button punched a little bit. So as we go into election week, As we think about this, remember Auger's lesson of humility. That means, of course, in one sense, listening to your political opponents, but much more observing them. Don't be too proud to notice, don't be too proud to hear. And, you know, you'll see whether people are proud, You'll see whether they fit the definition of folly and failing to honor that Augur talks about. Don't be this. Don't vote for this. As we've said many times throughout the book of Proverbs. Instead, learn the wisdom of Jesus who honored his inferiors, us, by coming from heaven to die in our place. Learn the wisdom of Jesus who honored his father by doing everything his father said. His superior, the only superior Jesus has, and he honored him. And though his death was brutal, his burial was good. Anybody notice that? Jesus was dishonored in death, naked on a cross outside Jerusalem for the world to mock at, but he was buried in a very respectable rich man's tomb with full burial honors. Why? Well, the eye that mocks his father, vultures will eat that, but the eye that honors his father will be honored even in death. And then finally, Jesus never exalted himself, never picked a fight, He did fight at times when it was warranted, but he was never foolish in exalting himself. He never devised evil, and he never needed to put his hand on his mouth and stop talking. Learn his wisdom. You'll find that his yoke is far lighter than the burden of arrogance. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Help us, give us the humility that sees the grass as a forest. Give us the humility that doesn't look down on anything as too small or unimportant, but rather that recognizes that you made everything and that you lavished care and attention on the protozoans and bacteriums just as much as you did on the blue whales and the planets and the stars. Father, help us to have the humility to notice the world, like Augur did, the humility to learn from what we see, and the humility to honor our inferiors, our superiors, and to refrain from picking fights with anyone, no matter how infuriating they are. Teach us the wisdom of humility. Help us, Father. Help us. We need your help. We are naturally proud people, naturally very impressed with ourselves. But those who walk in pride, you are able to humble. Do it, Lord, so that we can be like your son who honored you, and whose grave was with a rich man in his death, and who now sits at your right hand, highly exalted, Help us to put our necks under his yoke humbly and to live as his people this week. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, let's sing together hymn 616.