“Whoever loves transgression loves strife.” -Proverbs 17:19 (ESV)
The tendency to want to argue, strive and debate with people about things is symptomatic of a direct linkage to the love of transgression. All throughout the scriptures, the word transgression is linked to the idea of sin, but it is more specific. Transgression is to purposefully rebel. In other words, when we know something to be the right thing to do, but instead we rebel against that and do the opposite, we are transgressing.
So when Solomon says that those who love transgression, in turn love strife, what can we then say about our strife? I love how the bible does not bandy about with words, or make excuses. Instead it just simply says that if you love to strive and argue and wrangle with people, you love transgression. Is there anything simpler to understand?
Love of Argument = Love of Transgression
It amazes me how people, Christians especially, can find all sorts of justification for arguing their pet doctrines in such a manner that they are only manifesting this exact problem. It is no wonder John the Apostle spent so much time telling us to love one another.
I guarantee you, if God has not done a true changing of your heart through the power of his Spirit, and you are not changed from the inside out, you will find every justification you can possibly find in the bible to be a total jerk. Jude admonishes us in his Plutonium-charged weapons-grade epistle that the false prophets are the kind of people who, “Speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.” (Jude 10) We know a tree by its fruit, and we are to discern that. I am finding more and more that debating and wrangling over petty doctrinal issues it is a huge distraction. The fundamental issue’s are a persons character, and the way they think they are representing Christ, far more than the specificity to which they adhere to every jot and tittle of correct doctrine.
If you have the love of Christ in you, by all means, correct, exhort, preach and certainly call a spade a spade. But if you are false in your character, so also will your words be false. Even a true word becomes wormwood in the mouth that is rotten . . . I have finally understood a false teacher for what a false teacher is. He/She is simply a person who in themselves is false. And you do not have to be a pulpiteer to be false in your representation of the true Messiah. Look at Ananias and Sapphira, they never uttered a false doctrine that is recorded, but they were slashed from this life through their wicked falsehood.
One of the reasons that people will not inherit the Kingdom of God will be because they love “Emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, and heresies…” (Galatians 5:19-21) and I think the order there is important. Oh we love to talk about how adultery is bad, how fornication is bad…but how many hate it when Christians strive and be seditious and cause division over things that are unimportant?
