Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Evil Eyes | The Writings | Proverbs 28

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Do you have an evil or healthy eye? Are you hurrying after wealth? Do you need money or to meet your Maker? In today's episode, Jeff shares how Proverbs 28 reminds us that our greatest desire is for the security that only God can provide. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Proverbs 28

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. There are few conversation topics that make people squirm more than the subject of money. Now, I don't necessarily mean the topic of money as in the status of the S&P 500 or whether cryptocurrency is a wise investment. It's not what I'm talking about. Most people I know are glad to talk about that kind of stuff without batting an eye. talking about money makes us uncomfortable when the issue of wealth intersects with our greatest desires and greatest fears. If you start talking about our desires and fears with money, you'll see grown adults squirm like adolescents hearing about the birds and the bees.

This is one of the reasons why most people get defensive or just completely check out whenever the Bible talks about money. The gospel inevitably and graciously brings us to that intersection of our greatest desires and greatest fears. And one of the ways that it does it is by interacting with topics of money, possessions, and wealth. This makes us uncomfortable because each time the Bible interacts with those topics, it ends up unearthing things that we'd rather keep hidden. But our creator loves us too much to let us stay comfortable. He's not out to make us happy on our own terms. He wants us to be whole with him. Proverbs 28 is among the many, many places where the Bible speaks directly to money as it relates to our great desires and our great fears.

And by interacting with this topic, Proverbs 28 will also unveil the unnamed ways we misunderstand ourselves and the ways we miss God himself. So as we get ready to engage with God's word, let's pause and ask for His grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the mere, marvelous fact that we are drawing breath and living into a new day. This is a gift from you. Thank you. We also thank you and praise you for the life-giving power of your word. Jesus, help us remain and rest in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time in Proverbs 28, to stir our hearts and minds, to think and live differently.

as we read these words, let these words read us and restore us for your glory in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's begin by observing how Proverbs 28 reveals how we can misunderstand ourselves when it comes to the touchy topic of money. Look with me at verse 22. A stingy man hastens after wealth and does not know that poverty will come upon him. Most English translations here have the phrase the stingy man or the stingy person. Some translations like the CSB have a greedy one in verse 22 here. I just want to acknowledge those are all very good, very faithful translations of the meaning of the Hebrew phrase. But many English Bibles include a footnote here that's important because it shows how this literal phrase in English is revealing in a special way. Here's what the footnote says.

a man with an evil eye. So instead of saying a stingy man or stingy, greedy person, what the Hebrew really says is someone with an evil eye. What does it mean that the stingy or greedy person is someone with an evil eye? This Hebrew expression can be confusing to us. So to get some help with that question, let's go to the most famous sermon of Jesus, the sermon on the Mount, where he also discusses the eye in relation to our greatest treasure, just like Proverbs 28. So in Matthew 6, Jesus says that the eye is the lamp of the body, that it's possible to have a healthy eye or a bad eye, metaphorically speaking. So let's just get a little nerdy here for a moment.

I promise it'll be quick, and I hope it'll be worth it. Theologians offer up two possibilities for what it means that the eye is the lamp of the body, and both of them could be true, biblically. First, the eye could metaphorically mean something that reveals what's really inside a person. The eye shows what's really there deep down at the level of our greatest desires and greatest fears. Second, the other big general category here for the eye being the lamp of the body, is that the eye metaphorically reveals how the world creates light or darkness within us. Now, again, both of those could be true at a biblical level.

But the thing to notice here is that a person's metaphorical eye, it reveals. It shows what's largely hidden from the view of that person, either their desires or their fears that are already at play or the ways that their desires and fears are shaped by the world. So at a fundamental level, the wisdom of the Bible in Proverbs 28 is trying to reveal, trying to expose how money is a window into our greatest, most fundamental, most rooted desires and fears.

It's no accident that when Jesus talks about the eye of a person in the sermon on the mount, he talks about what we treasure most and what has mastery over our lives. So here's the thing. Whether you consider yourself a rich person, a poor person, or somewhere in the middle class of the socioeconomic strata, the way you treat money is a revelatory. It shows something that you may not even recognize in yourself. It shows what you really want, what you're really afraid of. And here's the thing that Proverbs 28 is trying to say, if you're not recognizing that and you're hastening, you're hurrying after more wealth,

then you're at risk of experiencing a kind of poverty that is far worse than you can imagine now. Throughout Proverbs 28, there's a concern that we can somehow misunderstand how deeply we're shaped by our desires and fears related to wealth. Yet in that concern, there's also an awareness of how we can miss one another. There's a relational level of play here. So, for instance, verse 27 says this, whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse. So the wisdom here in verse 27 is this, don't let your desires and fear around money cause you to neglect and hide your eyes from the other people who are in need. When our eyes are so focused on our current account balance or our ROI that they cause

us to miss sacrificial generosity toward other people, well then we end up playing the fool. so money causes us to meet and counter the intersection of our greatest desires and fears. Yet it also causes us to meet and encounter others in need. But there's one more way that the wisdom of Proverbs 28 causes us to rethink wealth. And that's in relation to God. For instance, verse 25 says this, A greedy man stirs up strife, but the one who trusts in the Lord will be enriched. Verse 14 says this,

Blessed is the one who fears or lives in awe of the Lord always. But whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity. Here's the big idea. At the intersection of your greatest desires and fears with money, that thing that we don't want to talk about, at that intersection, don't miss the heart of the one who made you and loves you. Don't miss the one who provides for you. It's no accident that in Jesus's sermon on the Mount,

the topic of possessions is followed immediately by the topic of anxiety. Instead of trusting our 401Ks, we need to trust in the Lord. Instead of living in awe of our portfolios, we need to live in awe of our creator. Whether you feel like you have a lot of money or very little money, the narrative of our world is that you and I need more of it. But according to the Bible, while we may think we need more money, what we really need is to meet our maker, to meet him at the intersection of our deepest desires,

our deepest and truest fears, and there in that space, to know him, to trust him, to surrender. Living that way makes us less anxious, more generous, and brings us into a life of true flourishing with Jesus. We find that our greatest treasure is the one who holds our hearts in his love. To reflect more on the wisdom of Proverbs and its depiction of wealth, let's just consider the big categories that the Bible ties to the topic of money.

Remember that intersection, our greatest desires, greatest fears. And for what it's worth, you can really use these categories to prayerfully reflect on any area of life, not just money and wealth, obviously. So let's start by pausing and reflecting on your greatest desires. What do you long for most today? What do you really want? maybe it's a possession, maybe it's a person, maybe it's an emotional state. Honestly name that desire to God right now.

Now reflect on your greatest fear. What are you really afraid of? Not just at a surface level, but deep down. What are you afraid of? Perhaps it's something that you lose. Maybe it's something that you gain. Or maybe you're just afraid of a state of uncertainty. Name that fear with the God who sees you now.

Finally, reflect on what it'd look like to surrender these desires and fears to God. Maybe not in one swift moment of surrender. Sometimes surrender is more of a movement than a moment. It can take minutes and hours and days that overflow into the rest of our lives. So how can you slowly grow in trusting God more than your wealth? How can you transfer your awe from the comfort of money to the comfort of your creator? God, you are gracious to bring us to the uncomfortable and yet real intersection of our greatest desires and our greatest fears. Protect us from treasuring things more than you. And protect us from

trusting and lesser counterfeit masters over our lives. In this space of exposed desires and fears, would you reveal yourself to us? Transform our selfish desires into sacrificial love and our fears into trust. God, we are prone to you. to miss so much. But help us meet you and your love as we head into the rest of this day. We need you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.