The Sin of Looking Away Text: Proverbs 24:11-12
Introduction: A World Full of Staggering
We live in a world that has perfected the art of looking away. We have trained ourselves to walk past the beggar, to scroll past the atrocity, to change the channel when the images become too disturbing. We have cultivated a fine sense of what is and is not our business, and we have generally concluded that most of the world's staggering and slaughter is not our business. We have made a peace treaty with the unpleasant, a non-aggression pact with injustice, on the condition that it does not knock on our front door at dinnertime.
But the book of Proverbs is not interested in our comfortable arrangements. It is a book of applied wisdom, of street-level righteousness. It does not deal in airy abstractions but in concrete duties. And here, in the twenty-fourth chapter, the Holy Spirit confronts our carefully constructed plausible deniability. He grabs us by the lapels, turns our heads, and forces us to look at those who are stumbling toward the slaughter. And He tells us, in no uncertain terms, to do something about it.
This passage is a direct assault on the sin of omission. We are far more comfortable thinking of sin in terms of commission, the bad things we do. We lie, we steal, we covet. But the Bible is equally concerned with the good things we fail to do. James tells us plainly, "Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin" (James 4:17). This is not some minor infraction. It is a fundamental failure of love for God and neighbor. And in our text today, the stakes are as high as they get: life and death.
And we must not spiritualize this away into some vague notion of rescuing people from "spiritual" death while we let their bodies be dismembered. The immediate context is physical peril, unjust slaughter. And there is no greater or more obvious application of this text in our generation than the silent holocaust of abortion. Every day in this nation, thousands of our tiniest neighbors are being led away to death. They are staggering, helpless, toward a saline-scalded or suction-ripped slaughter. And the church, by and large, has said, "Behold, we did not know this." Or worse, we knew, but we did not think it was our place to intervene. This text comes to us today as a divine indictment and a divine command. God commands us to act, and He warns us that He will not be fooled by our excuses.
The Text
Deliver those who are being taken away to death,
And those who are stumbling to the slaughter, Oh hold them back.
If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,"
Does not He who weighs the hearts understand?
And does not He who guards your soul know?
And will not He render to man according to his work?
(Proverbs 24:11-12 LSB)
The Unmistakable Command (v. 11)
The first verse is a pair of commands, clear and direct. There is no ambiguity here.
"Deliver those who are being taken away to death, And those who are stumbling to the slaughter, Oh hold them back." (Proverbs 24:11)
The language is active, urgent, and personal. "Deliver" and "hold them back." These are verbs of intervention. This is not a suggestion to form a committee or to "raise awareness." It is a command to rescue. The picture is of someone being unjustly condemned, dragged through the streets to the place of execution. They are stumbling, weak, and unable to save themselves. This is not a call to interfere with just punishment; the law of God establishes the role of the magistrate in executing justice. This is about intervening when the innocent are condemned, when the helpless are being destroyed.
Who is more helpless than an unborn child? Who is more innocent? Who is more literally being "taken away to death"? The mother walks into the clinic, and the child is dragged along, silent and unseen, to a state-sanctioned slaughter. They are stumbling, not because of their own weakness, but because they are entirely dependent on the one who is carrying them to their death. We are commanded to hold them back.
This command establishes a positive moral duty. Our default setting is non-interference. We think that as long as we are not the ones doing the killing, our hands are clean. But God says otherwise. To forbear, to hold back from helping, is to be complicit. In God's moral calculus, passivity in the face of slaughter is a sin. It is the sin of the priest and the Levite who saw the man beaten on the side of the road and passed by on the other side. They didn't beat him, but they left him for dead. And for that, they were condemned in the Lord's parable.
This duty is not optional. It is not for a special class of "activist" Christians. It is for every believer who has knowledge of the injustice. If you know that your neighbors are being led to the slaughter, you have a divine obligation to do what you can to hold them back. This may mean speaking, writing, voting, protesting, sidewalk counseling, supporting crisis pregnancy centers, or adopting children. The form of the deliverance may vary, but the duty to deliver does not.
The Useless Excuse (v. 12a)
Solomon, under the inspiration of the Spirit, anticipates our first and most common excuse. He knows the human heart.
"If you say, 'Behold, we did not know this...'" (Proverbs 24:12a)
This is the great refuge of the comfortable. "I was not aware." "I did not know the details." "It's a complex issue." In our day, this excuse is particularly pathetic. We live in the information age. With a few clicks on a device, we can see in graphic detail what an abortion procedure does to a tiny human body. We know that over sixty million children have been legally killed in this country since 1973. We know that there is a clinic in our city or the next town over where this happens every week. To say, "Behold, we did not know this," is not a statement of ignorance; it is a statement of willful blindness. It is a moral lie.
We are not talking about genuine, invincible ignorance. We are talking about the cultivated ignorance that allows us to maintain our peace of mind while our neighbors perish. It is the choice to look away, to not think about it, to keep the reality of the slaughter at arm's length so that we do not feel implicated. We don't want to know because if we knew, we would be responsible. And so we construct a little bubble of plausible deniability around ourselves.
But God is not impressed with our bubbles. He is in the business of popping them. And He does so with a series of devastating, rhetorical questions.
The Omniscient Judge (v. 12b)
God's response to our flimsy excuse is to appeal to His own perfect knowledge. He knows what we know, and He knows why we pretend not to know.
"Does not He who weighs the hearts understand? And does not He who guards your soul know? And will not He render to man according to his work?" (Genesis 24:12b)
First, "Does not He who weighs the hearts understand?" God is the great cardiologist. He does not merely see our actions; He weighs our motives. He puts our intentions on His divine scale. He knows the difference between true ignorance and the self-serving, convenient ignorance we use to excuse our apathy. He sees the heart that says, "I don't want to know because I don't want to act." He understands the internal calculus perfectly. Your excuse is transparent to Him.
Second, "And does not He who guards your soul know?" This is a beautiful and terrifying phrase. The one who is the keeper of your very life, the one who watches over you day and night, He knows. You cannot hide from Him. He is intimately acquainted with all your ways, including your ways of avoidance. This phrase also carries a subtle warning. The God who guards your soul is the same God who can cease to guard it. The one who gives life is the one who requires an account for how we have defended the lives of others.
Third, "And will not He render to man according to his work?" Here is the final demolition of our excuses. There is a day of reckoning. God is a just judge, and on that day, He will repay every man according to his deeds, not according to his excuses. This includes the deeds we failed to do. Our works do not save us, let us be clear. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone. But our works are the necessary evidence of that saving faith. A faith that can see the innocent staggering to the slaughter and do nothing is a dead faith, a useless faith, a faith that cannot save (James 2:14-17).
On that final day, the Lord will not be judging us on a curve. He will not ask if we were better than the abortionist. He will ask if we obeyed His command to "deliver" and "hold back." Our inaction is a "work." Our silence is a "work." Our looking away is a "work." And God will render to us according to it. This should put the fear of God in us. This should shatter our complacency.
The Gospel for Apathetic Sinners
If we are honest, this text leaves all of us condemned. Who among us has done all that we could? Who has loved these little neighbors perfectly? Who has not, at some point, chosen comfort over confrontation, silence over speaking? We are all guilty of the sin of looking away. Our hands may be clean of blood in the active sense, but they are filthy with the sin of omission.
And so, what is our hope? Our hope is not in resolving to do better tomorrow. Our hope is in the one who did not look away. The Lord Jesus Christ, when He saw us stumbling to the slaughter of eternal death, did not say, "Behold, I did not know this." He knew. He saw us in our helpless, hopeless, and guilty state.
And He did not hold back. He delivered us. He rescued us. He did not simply stand on the sidelines and shout encouragement. He entered the fray. He put Himself between us and the slaughter we deserved. On the cross, He took the full force of the divine judgment against our sins of both commission and omission. He was "taken away to death" so that we might be delivered. He staggered to the slaughter under the weight of our guilt so that we might be held back from eternal ruin.
Therefore, our response to this text must begin with repentance. We must confess our apathy, our fear, our self-serving ignorance. We must confess our failure to love our unborn neighbors as ourselves. And we must flee to Christ for pardon. His blood is sufficient to cleanse us from this sin as well.
But true repentance does not end with a prayer of confession. It leads to a change of life. The grace that pardons us also empowers us. The God who weighs the heart can also change the heart. He can replace our heart of stone with a heart of flesh, a heart that beats with compassion for the helpless, a heart that is moved to action. The gospel does not nullify the command of Proverbs 24:11; it enables us to begin to obey it, however imperfectly. We are saved not by our rescue efforts, but for them. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). And what better work than to deliver those being taken away to death?