Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 3:11-12

My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord,
Nor detest His correction;
For whom the Lord loves He corrects,
Just as a father the son in whom he delights.

Proverbs 3:11-12 (NKJV).

Love in the modern world carries largely an emotional connotation. Love is a feeling, an experience, something that you can find or lose just as easily. Love always carries a sexual undertone as well, and there is no real platonic dimension to it.

This can be quickly seen in how sexual orientations which are contrary to biological norms are rationalized because "they love each other". The platonic dimension doesn't exist.

Even within families, siblings, people say "love" but they can quickly grow uncomfortable using the term because of how frequently it is used in the sexual sense and not platonic.

What we call "love" today was previously called "lust", and that is an emotional experience, connected to sexual arousal, but lacking any of the higher concepts and ideals that were attached to "love".

"I love my kids/siblings" gets connected to incest.
"I love my buddies" gets connected with closet homosexuality.
"I love my mom" gets Oedipal.

Instead people default to "I love my family" in order to try and detach individual association and instead connect to an ideal, in effort to allude to the platonic dimension.

And sure, in certain social circles these are understood in the platonic sense, but those social circles are not what is on advertisements, lauded in movies and television shows, or written about in novels. Those social circles are not the popular ones, the ones which hold a place in the current media narratives.

If you do not understand that "love", as defined in the Bible and subsequently by God, is entirely platonic, and is devoid of sexual connotation, then passages like this one will be hard to understand. If you grew up in a family where "love" held the platonic understanding of commitment, of concern for welfare, of sacrificial intent to the betterment of another, then you won't have this struggle, but it's necessary to understand the culture you're witnessing to when you seek to spread the Gospel.

You don't change what "love" is or try to find some new term, but you're probably going to have to explain what I've just explained to someone who does not grasp the platonic understanding and instead defaults to the sensual.

Now, when you understand the platonic definition of love, that makes the remainder of the verse much easier to understand, and this one isn't all that complicated either. When God loves, he cares about our future, what we're growing into, and in seeking to guide and shape what we are becoming, God offers correction, discipline, direction to us that may be different than what we were already pursuing.

This is difficult to do for humans because we're so wrapped up in our own desires and ideals on what we should be doing that God's correction often feels counter-productive. God puts limits on us, restricts our freedom, and seeks to prune growth that we've had in our life that we were trying to nurture.

Our problem is that God already knows what is best for us, and does not always explain why something is to be done in a certain manner, or how it will benefit us in the long run. While helpful, explanations do not change or improve the direction that God provides, it only softens our hearts and makes obedience easier. Sometimes that ease becomes a crutch, where lacking an explanation, we feel justified in defying God's correction in our life.

Solomon is instructing us to not resist the correction and guidance of God, similar to how he had already extolled the discipline of one's father and the law of one's mother. The parents who care for their child will be concerned for the child's future, and will be seeking to prepare them for leaving the home and bearing the burdens of life on their own.

The parent who is invested in the life of their child will see areas of growth that are not beneficial, like a cancer on their child's life, and will seek to eliminate that before it destroys their child.

"You can't wear..."
"You can't watch or listen to..."
"You can't hang out with..."
"You can't marry..."

All of these are the parent's attempts to guide the life of their child towards greater success, and God does that for us on everything, not just becoming an adult, but being a complete human.

For this reason, when God puts a restriction on us, changes our direction, corrects our thoughts or actions, we should be thankful, not resentful, that we are so loved that God would care for our futures and try to guide us instead of just abandoning us, leaving us to stumble and fall alone our own wicked paths, convinced in our ignorance that we know what's best for ourselves.