In the Multitude of Counselors, and Not One of Them Is God

In my family a decision gets made by a process that has never been written down and that everybody follows exactly.

You mention it at a meal. You do not announce it, you mention it, and then you let people react. Then you have four separate conversations in the following week, one of which is in a car, one of which is on the phone with somebody who was not at the meal, and one of which happens standing up in a doorway and is the important one.

By the end of that, you know what the family thinks, and you generally do that.

I want to say clearly that I love this and I would not want to have grown up any other way. Those people are wise, they know me, several of them have been through worse than whatever I am deciding, and Scripture says out loud that this is a good way to live.

And I was thirty-six years old before I noticed that in this entire process there is a person nobody speaks to first.

The proverb is real and it is not the whole book

Let me put the verse up first, because I am not going to undercut it and nothing here is an argument against asking people.

Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. (Proverbs 11:14, King James Version)

Safety. That is the word, and it is a strong one. A person who decides alone is described as falling, and Proverbs says the same thing in three or four other places.

So a family that talks a decision through is doing something Scripture praises, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling a lonelier religion than the Bible teaches.

But the same book, two chapters earlier, says something about where the leaning goes.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5)

Lean not unto thine own understanding. And here is the thing I did not see for thirty-six years: a family's understanding is still an understanding. Six people's opinion is not a different category from one person's opinion. It is a better version of the same category.

You have somewhere to lean that is not more of the same thing, and the difference is a difference of kind rather than of quantity, and Proverbs 3 sets the leaning on the LORD rather than on a wiser opinion. That work is the Spirit's, and He leads a person somewhere counsel by itself has never been able to.

What the count of opinions actually does

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being honest about because it is comfortable.

A count of opinions relieves pressure. If five people said yes, then a decision that goes badly is not entirely mine, and something in a person knows that and reaches for it. That is not cynicism. It is the same instinct that makes a person want a second signature on a form.

And there is a second thing. Counsel gives a person a lot to do. There are conversations to have, people to catch, a whole week of activity that feels exactly like diligence, and at the end of it a person can be genuinely tired and still not have said one sentence to God about the matter.

You are not being accused of avoiding Him, and a person can be doing something wise and something avoidant at the same instant without any dishonesty in it (Proverbs 11:14), and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a thing like that without shaming anybody for the years it took to see it.

Jeremiah says the sharp version, and it is worth hearing without flinching.

Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. (Jeremiah 17:5)

Notice what that verse actually names. Not asking people. Making flesh the arm. It is about where the weight rests, and the weight can rest wrongly on people who gave excellent advice.

The order, not the ingredients

I am not asking anybody to stop asking their family. I would not do it myself and I do not intend to start.

The whole of what is on the table here is an order. Say it to God first. Then have every conversation that was going to happen anyway.

You have been doing the right things in a sequence nobody chose, and Scripture never once forbids the counsel it only sets what comes first (Proverbs 11:14). The same Spirit is the one who makes an order into something more than a rearrangement.

There is a small scene in Samuel that shows the order in about eleven words. David has come back to a burned town, everything is gone, his own men are talking about stoning him. And before he does anything else, he asks.

And David enquired at the LORD, saying, Shall I pursue after this troop? shall I overtake them? (1 Samuel 30:8)

He had six hundred men with him. He had experienced fighters. He asked first.

And afterward he still used the men, still took counsel, still ran the operation like a commander. The asking did not replace any of it. It came before it.

You are able to put one sentence in front of a whole week of conversations, and the order costs nothing and changes what the week is (1 Samuel 30:8), and it is the Spirit who is present in the conversations afterward differently when the first word went to Him.