I Know What I Feel
by David Gibson
One day, while grading finals in a Bible course, I inadvertently placed the key on the right side of a student’s exam, instead of the left. Before I realized it, I graded the answer key by his paper and marked a red X beside six correct answers!
That’s somewhat like judging God’s word by our own ideas of how things should be. It’s all backward. Our think-so, feel-so, want-so must be subject to God's word, not the other way around (II Timothy 4:1-4).
“Just follow your heart”?
- “He who trusts in his own heart is a fool…” (Proverbs 28:26 NASB; see Deuteronomy 12:8; Proverbs 12:15; 21:2).
- “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
- “I know, O Lord, that a man’s way is not in himself, nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23).
- “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
The problem with subjectivity
Some years ago, while driving in Southeastern Oklahoma, I ran over a branch. It knocked out the speedometer. I couldn't trust my own “feel” for how fast I was going. A patrolman with an objective device called radar (presumably accurate) could pull me over, even if I sincerely thought I was going 65, but his radar said 75.
In his book Flying the Hump: Memories of an Air War, Otha C. Spencer wrote, “Flying by instruments in bad weather means that a pilot puts his complete trust in his instruments and ignores his senses. All pilots, when on instruments, experience vertigo from time to time. This is when their mind, their sensations, and every cell in their body tells them the aircraft is in a crazy turn, climbing, or in a dive. The instruments say ‘no.’ Pilots trust their instruments, or they die.”
“There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12).
We can’t say we haven’t been warned.
