Thinking in Christ — Issue 25: One Judge for Every Option

Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

The age has a counsel for the man who must decide, and it sounds like wisdom. Define your criteria. Gather the information. Analyze each option: its strengths, its weaknesses, its short-term and long-term consequences. Seek diverse perspectives. Apply critical thinking: expose the biases, catch the fallacies, close the gaps. Quantify where you can, so the comparison is objective. Anticipate the risks and build contingencies. Consider the context: the constraints, the resources, the time, the legal and social standards. Then decide, communicate the decision clearly, and afterwards reflect on the outcome and learn. On this telling, the well-evaluated decision is the wise decision, and the man who weighs most carefully chooses best.

Therefore this issue must press one question before any of that counsel can be trusted. Who weighs the weigher? For a set of criteria is not wisdom, and a longer evaluation is not wiser. Ten options assessed by a deceitful heart are ten ways to depart from God with documentation, and the most thoroughly evaluated among them may be the most dangerous, because it disguises the departure as diligence. The method cannot supply what the man lacks, because the man who defines the criteria is the same man who will apply them, and he will apply them by the desires that defined them.

Consider first the anchor. Trust in Yahweh with all your heart. The command does not forbid thinking. It forbids leaning. There is a difference, and the difference decides the decision. A man may gather information, count costs, and weigh consequences, and still lean on his own understanding the whole time. To lean on one’s own understanding is not to think too much. It is to trust the thinking. It is to treat the evaluation as the foundation, so that whatever survives the evaluation stands, and whatever fails it falls. But the anchor sets the foundation elsewhere: trust in Yahweh. The understanding is a servant, useful in its place; the moment it becomes the ground of the decision, it has become a god.

Because of this, the heart must be named before the criteria are defined. The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9) A deceitful heart does not define neutral criteria. It defines criteria that spare itself. It will call its fear prudence, so that the risky obedience scores low on feasibility. It will call its ambition vision, so that the disobedient expansion scores high on effectiveness. It will call its appetite compassion, so that the forbidden compromise scores high on kindness. It will call its impatience decisiveness, so that waiting on God scores low on efficiency. The criteria will look objective, written down and quantified in a table. And the table will lie, because the hand that drew it wanted a particular outcome before the first option was listed.

Yet this does not abolish the weighing of options. It relocates the judgment. No mind is neutral (Romans 12:2). A mind conformed to the world will weigh its options by the world’s measures: what works, what costs least, what offends no one, what can be defended afterwards. A mind renewed by the Word will weigh its options by God’s measures: what He commands, what He forbids, what accords with righteousness, what fears Him rather than man. Every thought must be taken captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), including the thought that the evaluation is now complete. The gathering of perspectives is not evil, but no multitude of voices can make an option true. Voices can corroborate what God has said. They cannot found what the believer believes, for God’s testimony about His Son stands first (1 John 5:9-10). An option confirmed by every voice in the room and contradicted by the Word is still false, and an option contradicted by every voice in the room and commanded by the Word is still true.

For this reason, the gathering of information finds its true direction under the Word rather than above it. The age counsels the man to gather all relevant information, as though more information were the same as more wisdom. Scripture names a different first gathering. But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. (James 1:5) The man who lacks wisdom does not first lack data. He lacks wisdom, and wisdom is given, not assembled. A spreadsheet of consequences cannot tell the man whether the consequence he fears is a cost of obedience or a warning against disobedience. That question is answered by the Word that lights the path (Psalm 119:105). The Word does not compete with information. It judges it, the way a lamp judges the darkness.

At the same time, the weighing of risks is not forbidden. It is relocated. The age weighs risks by likelihood and impact. The Word weighs one risk above all of them: departing from God. A feasible disobedience is still disobedience. An effective departure is still departure. A sustainable rebellion is still rebellion. Short-term and long-term consequences must both be considered, but the longest term is set by God, not by the planning horizon. The man who counts only what he can measure will always undercount, because he cannot measure what his decision does to his soul.

Consider, then, what happens to the decision itself when it is placed under this rule rather than above it. A man’s heart plans his course, but Yahweh directs his steps. (Proverbs 16:9) The verse does not abolish planning. It dethrones it: the man plans, and Yahweh directs, and the directing is the deciding. The decision is therefore not an act of self-authorship, in which the man creates his future by choosing well. It is an act of submission, in which the man acknowledges God in all his ways and receives the straight path from Him (Proverbs 3:5-6). This is where the command to choose life finds its true force. Life and death are set before the man, and he is commanded to choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). The command is not a neutral offer laid before an independent chooser. It is God telling the man what He wants him to do, and what happens if he does not. The choice is real, and the responsibility is real, and the command is the master of the choice, not its servant. Apart from Christ, the understanding is darkened and the life of God is alien to the chooser (Ephesians 4:18). In Christ, the mind is renewed and the path is straight. The contrast is never between two kinds of rooms. It is between the man in Christ and the man apart from Christ.

This is where the testimony reaches its center. The wisdom by which every option must be weighed is not a method the man masters. It is a person the man receives. Christ is made wisdom to those who are in Him, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption with it (1 Corinthians 1:30). No evaluation framework would have produced Him as the answer, because the framework measures what man can manage, and Christ is not managed. He is trusted. And because He is trusted, the believer’s decision is not secured by the thoroughness of the evaluation. It is secured by the One who directs the steps. The evaluation may be careful or hasty, and carefulness is better than haste, but carefulness is not the ground. The ground is God, who gives wisdom liberally, who directs steps, who makes paths straight. God gives the increase, and the man who forgets that will turn his decision-making into a work of his own hands, even while he calls it wisdom.

So let the final word reverse the age’s counsel. Do not define your criteria, gather your information, weigh your options, and then ask God to bless the best of them. Acknowledge Him in all your ways first, and let His Word define the criteria, judge the options, and name the risk that matters. Let the Word challenge the criterion you have not challenged. Let the fear of Yahweh narrow the list before feasibility widens it. Count the costs, weigh the consequences, hear the voices, and then hold them all under the one Judge who cannot be weighed in return.

Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6) The straight path is not the one the man chose best. It is the one God made straight, and it is found not in the most thorough evaluation, but in the Son who is Himself the wisdom by which every option is weighed.