Pondering Proverbs 10:3

“Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger, but He will reject the craving of the wicked.” Proverbs 10:3

Our economy is based on craving and would collapse without it. We are conditioned to crave. We condition our children to crave. Many of our churches are conditioned to crave. We want more, then more, then more. We think that if we have just a little more that we’ll be satisfied, but of course that is a mirage.

The more our souls consume of the things and values of this world the more they crave – we are obese with poison. God rejects these cravings. Yes, He will “give us up” to them, He will allow us to consume what we crave and to be turned into those very cravings – we will become what we crave and worship. That is a hideous picture, but it is beautiful to those who crave it – yet a Day will come when that beauty will turn to dust, when the hideousness of our idols will be revealed for all to see.

The word we see the most in the Bible for these cravings is “lust” – and lust is styled as idolatry. We may not have idols in the sense that the ancient world had them, ours are more sophisticated – our images tend to be those which have been marketed to us. We open our wallets and pay homage to the idols. We open our minds and hearts and invite the idols to live within us. We raise our children as offerings to the idols.

And as for our children, like fools we then boast about what good jobs we have done in raising them in the image of the idols…conforming our children to the values and desires of the idols of wealth, prosperity, influence, fame, materialism, and pleasure.

The cravings of the wicked are never satisfied. We were not created to desire these cravings. We were not created to be conformed to them. We were not created to be their dwelling places. We consume them and they consume us.

Yet the soul of the righteous will not hunger. Now here is a healthy tension. While it will not hunger it will hunger, for our Lord Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” So we hunger but we don’t hunger. Those who have tasted that Christ is good want more of Him, and the more we have of Him the more we want.

Yet again, in the Incarnate Son of God we see that His food is to do His Father’s will (John 4:31 – 34). And who is the Righteous but our Lord Jesus Christ?

Jesus Christ says, “My soul has become troubled…” (John 12:27). “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38).

When we are one with Jesus Christ we are one with the Righteous One and we participate in the Incarnation. Christ lives in us and we live in Christ; He lives out His pilgrimage in us and we live out our pilgrimage in Him.

The Father will not allow the soul of the Righteous One to hunger. We hunger for our Lord Jesus and in Him we find rest and food, the Bread of Life and Living Water. We hunger for more, we hunger to see Him more clearly. We hunger to taste the Bread of Life more deeply, for our palates to become more sensitive to Him, to enjoy and discern the taste of our Lord Jesus, the true Manna from heaven.

The fact that our souls hunger speaks to us of Someone greater than we are. The fact that we have desires to fulfill speaks to us of the transcendent, of that which is greater than ourselves. Our bodies hunger because they need food. Our souls hunger because they need their own food. The question for us is which table we choose to eat at – if we eat at the table of the Wicked we will never be satisfied.

If we eat at the Table which our Good Shepherd has prepared for us, if we partake of His body and His blood – of His life – we will know the joy of tasting that the Lord is good, we will know the satisfaction of living in the deep love and grace and mercy of the True and Living God.

No matter what our circumstance, our kind and gracious heavenly Father desires to feed our souls; He gives us His Son Jesus Christ and in Christ we will never hunger without being fed.