Faithful Are the Wounds of a Friend, and the Other Half of That Verse

He has built a life in which nothing can refuse him, and it took about twelve years and he never once decided to do it.

It happened by ordinary subtraction. A man said something hard to him one year and he did not stop being friends with him, he just saw less of him, and then less, and there was never a moment. Another one moved. A third became somebody he sees at things.

And the people who came in to fill those places were easier. Not worse people. Easier. People who agree with him, or who do not know him well enough to disagree, or who need something from him and therefore do not.

And then there is the rest of it: the things he turns to at night that have no opinion at all, that give him what he goes to them for and never once ask him a question back.

He is not lonely in the way that word is usually meant. There are people around. He is unopposed, which is a different condition, and it has taken him a long time to understand that it is the more dangerous one.

There is a proverb about this and the arithmetic in it is uncomfortable.

The proverb, and the arithmetic

Here it is, in the King James Version:

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. (Proverbs 27:6)

Faithful are the wounds of a friend.

Wounds is the word and the proverb does not soften it. Something a friend does actually hurts, and the verse calls that hurting faithful, which is the word for reliable and true.

But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

And there is the other half, and it is the half that describes a man's evenings. The kisses are pleasant. That is what makes them work. Nothing in the sentence says the kisses feel bad.

So the proverb sets up a test that cannot be run on how something feels, because the true thing hurts and the false thing is pleasant, and a man sorting his life by comfort will get it exactly backward every single time.

You are not weak for having preferred the comfortable and you were never sorting on the wrong instinct on purpose. Proverbs 27:6 makes the wounding the faithful thing and the kissing the deceitful one, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a stronger stomach who reverses what a man goes toward.

The two verses on either side

The same chapter puts two other pictures near it and both are about the same mechanism.

Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel. (Proverbs 27:9)

Hearty counsel. That is a friend saying what he actually thinks, and the chapter calls it sweetness and compares it to ointment, which is not the language anybody uses about being disagreed with.

And the famous one:

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. (Proverbs 27:17)

Iron sharpeneth iron.

Two hard things. Contact. Friction. And an edge is the result, and the process removes material from both of them.

The reason that image is chosen is that nothing soft sharpens anything. A cloth does not sharpen a blade. A thing that yields to you cannot put an edge on you, and a man surrounded by things that yield goes blunt, slowly, without any event marking it.

You have a sharpening available that only comes from something hard and you were never going to get it from anything that yields. Proverbs 27:17 says iron sharpens iron, and it is His Spirit who makes contact with something that does not yield a mercy rather than an injury.

And if what is under this has gone somewhere heavier than loneliness, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is asked to carry that by himself.

What He says about His own no

And then the sentence that puts God on the same side of this, in the middle of a letter to a church.

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. (Revelation 3:19)

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.

That is a causal sentence, not a concessive one. It does not say: I love you even though I rebuke you. It says the loving is why.

Which puts the no in the category of evidence rather than in the category of cost.

And Hebrews says the same thing and then says what its absence means:

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. (Hebrews 12:6)

And a psalm where a man asks for it:

Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil. (Psalm 141:5)

It shall be a kindness. He is asking for it in advance, in writing, in a song.

That is the thing a man in this position has to sit with. The arrangement he has built has removed from his life the specific thing that Scripture names as the evidence of love.

You have a God whose no is the evidence and you were never being loved by anything that could not give you one. Revelation 3:19 makes the rebuke follow from the loving, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes being told no by God something a man can receive as care.

What a thing that cannot refuse you cannot do

And the sentence this whole category rests on, said plainly.

A thing that cannot refuse you cannot choose you.

That is not a Bible verse and it is not being presented as one. It is the arithmetic underneath Proverbs 27:6, and it holds for anything: a person who agrees with everything, a screen, an arrangement, a life quietly assembled out of things that yield.

Whatever comes back from those is not a choice, because a choice requires the possibility of the other answer, and every declaration of regard a man receives from something that could not have withheld it is a declaration he supplied the conditions for.

And the reason that hurts to write down is that a man who has been living on it has been receiving something and calling it love, and it was never nothing. It was just not that.

You were made to be chosen by somebody who could have refused and you were never going to get that from anything else. Proverbs 27:6 calls the wounds faithful because they come from somebody with a will of their own, and it is His Spirit who makes being genuinely chosen a thing a man can begin to want again.