Verse of the day · September 16
Does Proverbs 16:9 mean a man should not make plans?
God sometimes directs a man's steps to the very thing he least intended.
Read one of these every day in the THNK GOD app →
A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.
Proverbs 16:9
A man designs an end, and projects the ways and the means that lead to it. The creatures below him cannot do that, being governed by sense and natural instinct. Contriving for himself is the faculty he has in place of theirs, and the proverb opens by granting it to him — his heart deviseth his way. Then it hands the steps to the LORD.
Matthew Henry takes the devising as a dignity and not a fault. Man is represented in his note as a reasonable creature, and the shame he names is not the devising but what it gets aimed at: the more shame for him, he writes, if he do not devise the way how to please God, and provide for his everlasting state. The same note has him as a depending creature too, subject to the direction and dominion of his Maker.
Charles Spurgeon, in an evening reading on a proverb eleven verses further down this chapter, has the man without wisdom as the wild ass's colt, running hither and thither, wasting strength which might be profitably employed. The pilgrim in that same reading will sorely wound his feet among the briers of the wood of life if he does not pick his steps with the utmost caution. Both pictures have a man on his own feet, and the wisdom he lacks is trust in the Lord.
In the Geneva Notes the whole proverb exposes one folly, and the folly is not in the planning. It sits in a man who thinks that his ways are in his own hand, and yet is not able to move one foot unless God gives force. The folly there is about possession, and the note puts a single foot against it.
John Gill decides whose heart this is before he says anything about the steps. It is not the wicked man's, in his reading: in that heart is frowardness, and it devises mischief and evil imaginations continually, and such men are an abomination to the Lord, whose goings he does not direct and whose ways he does not prosper. The heart in the proverb belongs to a good man, or a righteous man — one who thinks about the way in which he should go, and desires to walk in a right way.
Even that good devising, in his account, is something the man was given. He is influenced by the Spirit and grace of God to think and act in that manner. Otherwise, the way of man is not in himself. It is only such a man, a good man, whose steps are ordered by the Lord.
Henry reads the second clause as conditional: if men devise their way so as to make God's glory their end and his will their rule, they may expect that he will direct their steps by his Spirit and grace, so that they shall not miss their way nor come short of their end. JFB put one word on the verb — directeth is establisheth — and set the third verse of the same chapter beside it. Gill spells the same verb out as a journey: to go right on, and not turn to the right hand or to the left, and to walk safely and surely, through a variety of troubles and difficulties, to his kingdom and glory.
That directing does not always agree with the plan it directs. Let men lay out their worldly affairs with ever so great a probability of success, Henry writes, and God has the ordering of the event, and sometimes directs their steps to that which they least intended. It is one verb both times — the steps that arrive where the man aimed them, and the steps that arrive where he never did.
What the proverb is finally for is to teach a man a sentence to say over his own plans: if the Lord will, we shall live and do this or that. The end is designed, the means are laid out, the thing he means to do is named out loud — and in front of all of it there is now a clause that was always true. The eye that sentence asks for goes to God not only at the great turns of a life, but at every step of it, which is as often as a foot has to be lifted.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Geneva Bible notes, Charles Spurgeon and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary. How these teachings are made