“Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.”
Proverbs 3:7-8, NIV
There are many sayings in the book of Proverbs which link the fear of the Lord with godly living. One leads to the other. But this proverb takes the principle a very significant step further. It’s saying that there can be a definite link between our behaviour and our health.
There are three steps to wholeness explicit within these sayings. The first is simply a recognition that the wisdom of God is more important than the supposed wisdom of man. We can make assessments of a situation and, even though our conclusion is different from what God has said in His Word, if we decide that we know better than God, we are being wise in our own eyes.
A good example of this in today’s amoral world is having sexual relations before marriage. The world says it’s OK – and almost everyone does it. Even, sadly, many believers who, instead of being salt and light in the world, have brought the darkness of the world into the church. Man, supposedly, knows best and now that we have reliable contraception, “why not?”, people say. If you do not understand that when man and woman are joined together in sex that they become part of each other – and both are now different people than they were before the relationship occurred, you will not have any understanding as to what the consequences might be.
It is only fear of the Lord that will keep people from sinning (Exodus 20:20) and give us the courage and wisdom to avoid evil – not just the evil that man might consider to be bad, but what God defines as being evil (sinful) in His Word.
By shunning those things that God defines as evil, we avoid walking on Satan’s territory. If you walk through mud, your shoes will carry the stain onto the carpet when you go into your house. If we walk on Satan’s turf we will carry the stain of sin, and sometimes the powers of darkness as well, into our inner being, even our body which should, as described by Paul, only be “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19).
We can now see how the health of our body can be affected by the consequences of not avoiding evil. This helps us to understand how it is that sometimes people are physically healed through repentance and deliverance. For when a spirit which has brought infirmity into the body is driven out, then healing can follow – something that I have seen on many occasions as we have prayed for God to deliver and heal. These important principles are carefully taught and illustrated in my book Healing Through Deliverance (Sovereign World and Chosen). James, also, was very explicit about these matters when he said, “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16).
So, there is not only an eternal spiritual benefit of living a godly life, there is also the temporal physical promise of good health. I am sure that when Solomon wrote these words, he had no idea that the blood is made in the bones. But the knowledge and wisdom of God was in what he was inspired to write. We read in Scripture that “life is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11) and now, also, have the knowledge of medical science, so we can more fully understand the significance of these words. Healthy blood leads to a healthy life. If our bones are being nourished, then all of us is being blessed!
Prayer: Thank You, Lord, for the detail that You have placed in Your Word. I am sorry for the times when I have not avoided evil and I have suffered as a result. I pray that You will forgive and cleanse me, so that I may be free to be healed. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
