Episode Transcript
All right, we are in Proverbs chapter 14 and verse 10.
Proverbs 14 and verse 10.
Which says, The heart knoweth his own bitterness, and the stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.
And as we always do, tonight we want to look at the words in this verse and try to understand their meanings so we can understand the verse.
My daughter Sarah has been faithfully attending a church in the area where she lives, and she was sharing with me a verse on which her pastor preached last week.
And she said he taught them about the Hebrew words behind the English translation of the portion of that verse they were studying.
And I was so thankful to hear that her pastor studies the original language.
It's important to him.
What the original language says and means, and it's important to us tonight.
And let's first examine in our text the word heart.
The word heart is from a Hebrew word that means the inner man, so it's not necessarily talking about that organ that pumps blood The word also refers to the mind, will, and emotions.
And in the New Testament, we would see that uh broken down as the soul.
You have the body, soul, and spirit.
Spirit. in the in the New Testament and Paul talks about those.
Well they're also present in the Old Testament.
And interestingly, in the Old Testament, there is a word for spirit.
There is a word for soul.
And there is a word for body, and there are three different Hebrew words.
And the word for body is betan, and you may not have heard that before because it's Hebrew.
And I'm sure there's some Hebrew scholar out there shaking his head going, no, that's not how you say it.
And he's probably right.
But give it my best shot.
That word is not the only word for body, but it is one of them.
Our word heart in this text Seems to refer more to the mind, will, and emotions.
And so that explains what the inner man is as far as our text goes.
And that makes a lot of sense because the next two words we look at have everything to do with the mind.
The word knoweth and the word bitterness.
Now let's look at that word knoweth.
It says, the heart knoweth.
And that's from a very commonly used Hebrew word.
In fact, perhaps you've heard it and maybe it's been very annoying to you the way somebody has used it.
Have you ever told somebody something and they said yada yada yada?
Has anybody ever heard that?
It's annoying, isn't it?
Well, it means I know, I know, I know.
It's the same thing as If you're trying to tell your teenager who believes her brain is fully developed, you're trying to tell her something, and she says, I know, I know, I know.
And she may not know.
Well, that's the word yada.
I bet you remember that.
And the first time we see it. is in Genesis chapter 3 verse 5, where we see it twice.
And this is the serpent who is the devil.
Speaking to Eve about why she should eat of the forbidden fruit.
And here's what it says: For God doth know That in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And notice this very important distinction.
You've got God doth know, and then your eyes shall be open, and ye shall be as God's knowing, good and evil.
And we're going to see how this ties into our text in just a few moments.
First, that passage tells us, or that verse in Genesis tells us that God knows.
And what God knows, he's always known.
God has never learned anything.
When we take our prayer request to God, we're not telling him something he doesn't already know.
We're obeying Scripture to pray without ceasing And God's never learned anything.
He's always known it.
And the things that have not yet happened.
God knows them through what the Bible calls foreknowledge.
Foreknowledge.
And yet, even through foreknowledge, he knows those things as though they had already Happened.
I was looking at the weather channel forecast today, trying to see if we have a chance of a white Christmas.
And uh we're not gonna have anything like that.
It's gonna be 75 degrees and windy, but Uh even in the the mountains, the Rocky Mountains, and in the northeastern part of the United States where it's almost certainly gonna snow.
Nobody knows 100% for sure that it's going to snow.
But God does.
Now, also in the Genesis verse.
We learn that man does not know anything through his own foreknowledge.
God does, but man doesn't.
Man doesn't have foreknowledge.
And I think you'll understand that as we continue exploring this, that because that verse in Genesis told us, In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened.
The opening of the eyes, as the serpent put it, was a future event for Adam and Eve.
They had never known evil.
Only good.
Now God knew exactly what that would look like through his foreknowledge.
Evil didn't overtake him, surprise him.
But Adam and Eve did not know what evil was.
They only knew good.
And the good that they knew was from their experience with God, not their foreknowledge.
Before God created Adam and Eve, they did not exist.
God knew them, but they did not have foreknowledge about what life would be like whenever they were created.
They, in after they were created, they had not known the emotion of shame or fear.
However, God knew that they would have those emotions, even before he warned them not to eat of the tree in the midst of the garden.
A good way to sum this up is that God already knew what we did not know.
God already knew what we did not know, and God already knows what we do not know.
He already knew that we would want what we would one day know.
And as I said, we'll come back to this vital truth shortly.
But next, let's look at the word bitterness, which is an emotional.
Bitterness, as translated from the Hebrew word marah.
And it's used several times in the Old Testament, though sometimes other forms of that same word are translated as the word bitterness. in those places.
Now you may remember the place called Marah, where the children of Israel encountered the bitter waters.
And boy, they threw a hissy fit, didn't they?
They complained.
But those bitter waters were made sweet.
When Moses threw a tree into those waters.
But there's also a passage where this word for bitterness is used that will help us understand our text.
And the word bitterness there.
And it's found in the book of Ruth, chapter 1.
There was a woman named Naomi, and her husband died, and she had two sons, and they married two Moabite women, one of whom was named Ruth.
And Naomi's sons then died, which left her widowless and childless.
Now, I want you to listen to verses 19 through 21 and learn about the bitterness that is also the subject of our text, because you're going to see it means something a little different than what you might think of it as today.
This is Ruth chapter 1, verses 19 through 21, if you're taking notes.
So they too Now that is Naomi and Ruth.
They two went until they came to Bethlehem.
And it came to pass when they were come to Bethlehem. that all the city was moved about them.
And they said, Is this Naomi?
And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Marah.
For the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.
I went out full.
And the Lord hath brought me home again empty.
Why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me Now, what do we know now about the cause of Naomi's bitterness of heart?
It was caused by death.
It was caused by the profound grieving that followed the death of her husband and her sons.
And Ruth was especially compassionate to Naomi, willing to follow her until death.
But no man or woman, no matter how compassionate, could fully understand, fully know, that's our word, no.
Could fully know the bitterness of Naomi's heart, but Naomi, she's the only person who could.
When we try to comfort someone who is in this type of bitterness, I know somebody right now who is in this type of bitterness, and you probably do too.
We often try to imagine how they're feeling.
A widow is often the best person to comfort another widow.
But only the widow whose heart is bitter really knows her own bitterness.
And that's what the first part of our text says.
The heart knoweth his own bitterness.
So you see the Old Testament word, bitterness, and its offshoots have more to do with the despairing of life When one is swallowed up with grief and despair, and not so much with the resentment with which we currently equate the word bitter or bitterness.
And you will see that defined more that way in the New Testament.
Now this is why we study the original language.
And let's look now at the second part of our verse.
It says, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy Now, the New King James Version or translation renders it this way: the heart knows its own bitterness, and a stranger does not share its joy.
So the possessive pronoun his in the King James Translation can be translated its So it's talking about the heart rather than a particular person, although if it's talking about my heart, it's talking about me.
We dealt with the emotion of bitterness in the first part of the verse, and now we turn to the emotion of joy.
First, we read the word stranger here, which is one who turns aside or is decor declines something.
Four times in the study of the book of Proverbs, we've come across two words, strange woman.
Y'all remember studying about the strange woman.
That Hebrew word for strange woman is the same Hebrew word as for stranger in our text.
And we learn that a strange woman has no place in a man's house.
It doesn't mean a woman who's weird or odd.
It means one who is out of place, one who has declined to do that which is right.
And The two, the wise man and the strange woman, cannot rightfully be in a yoke together.
In fact, Proverbs 5, verse 8.
Proverbs 5:8 says this about that strange woman speaking to a wise man: remove thy way far from her.
And come not nigh or near the door of her house.
So in our text Tonight, in Proverbs 14, 10, a stranger is definitely an outsider.
And the text tells us, look back in your text, a stranger doth not intermeddle.
With his joy or with its joy.
That is the joy of the heart.
And now intermedal is another word you might defined a little differently today than you would have in the 1700s when this Bible was translated from the original languages into that English, that uh Middle English.
Probably medieval medieval English.
It's not old English, or you wouldn't be able to read it, and neither would I.
An intermedal The English word is normally translated as the word surety, S-U-R-E-T-Y, surety, which has the meaning of a braid.
Girls, how about that?
A braid happens when you intermix two strands or more of something together And in that braid, the components of that braid, the hairs or the strands of rope or fiber or whatever they may be, share that strand or share that braid with one another.
In fact, those strands are essentially pledging to one another to remain together and to strengthen the other.
The Bible says a threefold cord is not easily broken.
Now, a stranger cannot do this When it comes to the joy of a person's heart.
They're not in the braid.
There is no pledge there.
They can't share. in that joy.
And the verse we're reading here, as I told you a moment ago, that word his is the word its.
It can be translated as the word its.
But what we did notice, I think, and I hope you will now, is that the verse, this one verse, addresses neither the foolish nor the wise in particular.
It addresses both.
It doesn't specify the wise man or the foolish man.
It addresses both because both have hearts.
Both have bitterness.
Both experience joy.
And looking at the word joy here in the text, We learned that it means gladness.
And sometimes you'll hear it translated as the word mirth, M-I-R-T-H.
Now that always sounded like such a dark word to me to mean gladness.
But that was from my ignorance, not from any defect in the word.
So it's not at all different from what you think it means today.
But by the way, I don't notice many lost people talking about joy, saying the word joy.
I really don't.
They may say they're happy or excited or stoked or a number of words like that, but I rarely hear a lost person talking about their joy.
Seems to almost be a Christian word.
And true joy is.
Now taking what we've learned from the words, from this part of the verse, then we can make the conclusion that a stranger cannot braid himself with the joy of a man's heart.
Somebody who is a stranger to that man.
And just as it was with bitterness, we cannot truly know the joy of another person's heart.
When I hear someone tell me how excited he is to have a new grandchild, I can understand his joy.
I know what that feels like.
But I don't know exactly, precisely how joyful that man is.
Now let's make a spiritual application to this wonderful verse as we begin to wind down.
The word I want us to consider here again is the word stranger.
Whether it be bitterness or joy, it is clear from our text that a stranger cannot truly share in either With you, with me.
And if that were the case, and that alone were our hope, for having our joy or our bitterness shared by another.
That would mean we have to rejoice alone.
That would mean we have to suffer alone.
And if that's the case, then we can never be truly understood in our joy and in our suffering.
But that applies only to the case of a stranger.
In speaking to the Jews about his sheep, John Jesus said in John chapter 10, verse 5, and a stranger they will not follow, but will flee from him, for they know not the voice of strangers.
Jesus' sheep flee from strangers.
Just as the wise man in the Proverbs removes his way from the path of the strange woman.
There is no fellowship.
There's no braiding, no pledge, no intermeddling, as our word is, intermeddle, between the sheep and a stranger.
A stranger cannot intermeddle with our joy or know the bitterness of our hearts.
But in John chapter 10, verse 27, John 10, 27, Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
Jesus knows us like no stranger can.
Not only does he know us, he foreknew us.
He foreknew then and he knows now everything about us, including the bitterness of our hearts and the joy of our hearts.
First Peter chapter four verses twelve through thirteen.
First Peter chapter four verses twelve through thirteen.
Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you.
Now I'm going to stop right there.
I want you to imagine, as a Christian, you're going through a fiery trial, a test of your faith, and you try to share that with a lost person.
Can you really share that with them?
Oh, you can tell them about it.
Do they understand?
No way.
They can't even imagine to understand.
He said, but rejoice inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings That when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.
So when the stranger Does not and cannot know the bitterness of your heart.
Just know that Jesus does.
He's in the braid We are partakers with his sufferings.
And when the stranger cannot intermeddle with your joy, when he cannot braid himself together with your joy, just know that Jesus can.
And when we understand that because we're partakers with Jesus and his sufferings, that we'll be partakers of his joy Then we understand he is no stranger to his sheep.
He knows the bitterness of our hearts And he can and he does intermeddle with our joy.
And I'm so thankful for that.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you for your word.
Thank you for tonight how encouraging your word is.
That when nobody else understands our joy and our bitterness that Jesus does, because he is no stranger to his sheep.
And it's in his name we pray, amen
