The Unflattering Mirror Text: Proverbs 27:19
Introduction: The Impossibility of Self-Knowledge
We live in an age that is utterly obsessed with the self. We are told to find ourselves, to express ourselves, to be true to ourselves, to love ourselves. The modern project is a grand exercise in navel-gazing, a constant search for the authentic inner man, who is assumed to be a noble savage, a pristine victim, or a creative genius just waiting to be unleashed. The world tells you to look inside, and promises that you will find something beautiful, something worthy of applause.
The Bible, on the other hand, tells you to look inside and promises that you will find a viper's nest. Jeremiah tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9). Jesus tells us that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander (Matt. 15:19). The world's advice to "follow your heart" is, from a biblical perspective, the most catastrophically foolish advice you could ever give or receive. It is like telling a man with a faulty compass to trust it implicitly in the middle of a minefield.
So we have a problem. We are commanded throughout Scripture to examine ourselves, to know ourselves, and yet we are told that the very instrument of our self-perception, the heart, is a liar and a con artist. It is rigged. How then can a man ever truly know what he is? If the mirror is warped, how can he see a true reflection? This Proverb gives us the answer. It gives us a fundamental principle of spiritual physics. It tells us not only that we can be known, but that we are, in fact, always known. The heart, for all its trickery, cannot help but reveal the man.
The Text
As in water face reflects face,
So the heart of man reflects man.
(Proverbs 27:19 LSB)
The Natural Reflection (v. 19a)
The Proverb begins with a simple, observable fact of nature.
"As in water face reflects face..." (Proverbs 27:19a)
Before the invention of silvered-glass mirrors, the most common way to see one's own reflection was in the still surface of a pond or a basin of water. The image is immediate and undeniable. If you have a crooked nose, the water shows a crooked nose. If you have a smudge of dirt on your cheek, the water shows a smudge of dirt. The water does not flatter, it does not editorialize, it does not lie. It simply reflects what is there. It is an objective reality check.
This is the setup for the spiritual lesson. Solomon is establishing a baseline of how reality works. There is a direct, causal link between an object and its reflection. The reflection is not an independent entity; it is wholly dependent on the object it reflects. It is a true witness. The water doesn't have an agenda. It simply reports the facts. This is how God has wired the physical world to work, and He has done so in order to teach us how the spiritual world works.
The Spiritual Reality (v. 19b)
Having established the physical principle, Solomon now applies it to the inner man.
"So the heart of man reflects man." (Proverbs 27:19b)
Here is the punch. Just as water faithfully reflects the face, the heart faithfully reflects the man. Your heart is the truest mirror you have. What you are in your heart is what you are. Not what you say you are. Not what you wish you were. Not what your mother thinks you are. What you are down in the depths, in the command center of your being, that is the real you.
Now, this seems to contradict what we said earlier about the heart being deceitful. But the deceit of the heart is not that it fails to reflect the man. The deceit of the heart is that it tries to convince the man that the reflection is not accurate. The heart is a mirror that constantly tries to tell you that it is a portrait painting, and a flattering one at that. When you see greed in your heart, the heart says, "No, that's just prudent financial planning." When you see lust, the heart says, "That's just appreciating beauty." When you see bitterness, the heart says, "That's a righteous demand for justice." The reflection is true, but the heart provides a lying caption.
This is why Jesus taught that our outward actions are simply the overflow of the inward reality. "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil" (Matthew 12:34-35). Your words, your habits, your secret thoughts, your reactions when you are squeezed, these are the printout. The heart is the hard drive. You cannot have a corrupt hard drive and expect it to consistently produce righteous printouts. The man is what his heart is.
The Problem and the Solution
So, this Proverb presents us with a terrifying reality. If the heart reflects the man, and the heart is, as Jeremiah says, desperately sick, then the man is desperately sick. The reflection is accurate, and the reflection is ugly. What are we to do? If you look in a mirror and see that your face is covered in mud, you don't try to scrub the mirror. You wash your face. The problem is not with the reflection; the problem is with the object being reflected.
This is where the gospel crashes in. The Bible's diagnosis of the human condition is grim because it wants to drive us to the only cure. You cannot fix your own heart. You cannot scrub it clean. You need a heart transplant. And this is precisely what God promises in the new covenant: "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26).
This is the miracle of regeneration. God, by His sovereign grace, reaches in and performs spiritual open-heart surgery. He takes out the corrupt, deceitful, self-justifying heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh, a heart that is alive to Him and desires to please Him.
But even after this surgery, the work is not done. We are still in a battle. We must still deal with the remaining corruption. And how do we see it clearly? We need a better mirror than our own fickle self-assessment. This is what James talks about. He says the Word of God is like a mirror. "For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like" (James 1:23-24).
The law of God, the Scriptures, are the perfectly clear, un-warped mirror. When you read the Sermon on the Mount, you are looking into a perfect mirror. When it says, "whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment," you see the reflection of your own sinful anger. When it says, "everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart," you see the reflection of your own lust. The Word of God shows you the true state of your heart.
The unbeliever looks in that mirror, is horrified, and either smashes the mirror or runs away and pretends he never saw it. The believer looks in that mirror, is humbled, and says, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner." And then, having seen the filth, he turns to Christ for cleansing. He doesn't just walk away and forget. He looks intently into this perfect law of liberty, and he does what it says. He sees the reflection of what he is in his sin, but he also sees the reflection of what he is in Christ: forgiven, righteous, and being transformed from one degree of glory to another. He sees the ugly reality of his own heart, and it drives him to the beautiful reality of the heart of Christ, given for him.