Daily Bible Study - Proverbs 10:17

He who keeps instruction is in the way of life,
But he who refuses correction goes astray.

Proverbs 10:17 (NKJV).

If you listen to instruction, you'll do well in life, but if you reject correction, you will lose yourself. This seems simple, right?

The problem is that the source of the correction, the instruction, often taints our ability to hear and understand what wisdom is being shared, and sometimes what we are to take away from an interaction isn't in the surface-level details.

For example, if a friend provides instruction and something goes wrong, their reaction to the correction by reality itself will be informational, if you learn from it. Reject the truth that your friend provides bad advice and you'll keep taking their bad advice at face value and making poor choices.

While there are no shortage of people trying to provide guidance and direction, it becomes much easier to sort between the signal and the noise when you actually listen, consider what is being shared, and then put it up against your existing experiences to see what does or does not align.

In studying counterfeit money, you can try to keep up on all the newest ways that a counterfeiter is creating counterfeits, or you can study the original such that when you come across a suspected specimen, you already know what to look for, and even if you do not understand the nature of how a bill or coin was faked, you can still be certain you do not have the genuine article in your posession.

The wisdom Solomon describes here is challenged by the phrase "how do you know that?" It's not so much a question about whether what is being said is true or not, but a means of trying to disqualify or discredit as a means of circumventing the actual details and trying to lay blame for a discrepancy on simple ignorance. If it's easy to show why a claim is false, why spend time trying to undermine why it could be true?

When we reject correction, we should not need to be discriminatory when collecting information. That's not the stage when we down-select, that's when we should be exploring the possibilities so that we have a full breadth of understanding to pull from.

Then we start the refinement process, the comparison to what we already understood to see if some new understanding really would change our conclusions, or if the conclusion remains unchanged but we find our problem to be even more trivial in that and we're just stubborn and refusing to abide by even what we understand truth to be.

We can't do that if we're constantly rejecting help, rejecting advice, rejecting a different perspective, even if we claim to be confident in our assertions, revealing a cowardice in us, a fear that we may have to admit something uncomfortable or change something we'd really rather not.

Instead, take the instruction and advice and ruminate on it, validate it, and then start figuring out which of it is truly useful to you and which of it is clearly coming from those who are already astray and just wanting to be less lonely while wandering through this life aimlessly.