Proverbs 17

First, let's talk about friendship and love.

Proverbs 17, verse 9.

And this is something I've been terrible at most of my life and sometimes still am.

Something bad happens to you or you get hurt or someone slights you or whatever and you dwell on it and you get resentful.

The only thing you should be trusting in is your Lord and Savior.

And then let's just jump one more.

Proverbs 17, verse 22.

Again, a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person's strength.

Mercy is treating people the way God treats you.

Proverbs 17 verse nine says this, the Living Bible, love forgets mistakes.

Nagging about them parts the best of friends.

love forgets mistakes that's what it's wise to do in a relationship to forget mistakes i remember hearing the story about one time a woman reminded the the wife of billy graham ruth graham reminded ruth of one of the big mistakes that her husband billy graham had made and ruth ruth was quiet for a minute and then she replied she said oh Oh, you know, I distinctly remember choosing to forget that.

Welcome back to the show.

You know, Proverbs 17 talks about a merry heart is like good medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.

And I always think of how important it is to have a merry heart.

I'm not always great at that, but a merry heart is just an inward attitude of gratitude and hope and even a little joy mixed in there.

Thank you.

So one other thing I wanted to mention in all the discussion about the friendship and specifically about the love wrapped in the lie is I wanted to reference Proverbs 17, 9, which says, whoever conceals an offense promotes love, but whoever gossips about it separates friends.

And I had recently developed this index of our... episodes so that we could go back and look at themes we had done and scriptures we had used.

And I discovered that I had used that scripture way back in January of 2022 when we reviewed Spider- No Way Home.

This is an argument that people make a lot of because there is like the opposite of justify seems to be to condemn, which isn't transformative by its nature, right? Condemnation isn't transformative.

So if it's contrasted with If condemning is its opposite, it seems to be an acquittal, a lack of condemnation, right? And so here are some passages, Proverbs 17, 15, Deuteronomy 25, 1, Isaiah 58, Matthew 12, 37, and then Romans 8, 33 through 34, and then 5, 16.

The Romans passages are going to be the most important ones, not that the other ones aren't important, but but because Paul is the one who uses the term justify in the theological sense, about justification by faith.

So in those discussions, Paul contrasts repeatedly justification with condemnation.

And then third, justify is thus used in a forensic sense without regard to the question whether the cause is righteous or unrighteous.

Isaiah 5.23, Proverbs 17.15. And this is important because the way that the Roman Catholic Church often argues is that justify, as I said, is about an internal transformation.

So to say something is justified or someone is justified or righteous, that person must be inherently internally righteous.

The verdict must align with the reality in the person.

Amen.

So Proverbs 17, nine says, he who covers a transgression seeks love.

It's okay to cover transgress.

Okay.