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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Proverbs 18:17
Comments
Somebody says to you, ‘This person has done something terrible and has wronged me and put me at a disadvantage. This is what they did.’ Don’t react by going, ‘O, that’s awful, terrible. He must be an utter rogue.’ We always hear both sides. We always hear what the other has to say. ‘He that is first in his own cause seemeth just.’ Maybe what has happened is that there has been some disturbance with his neighbour, and his neighbour has done something and he is complaining about it, but what he is not telling you is that he pulled down the neighbour’s hedge and moved the boundary of the property a few metres onto his neighbour’s. So of course there was going to be some response or some reaction, but he did not tell you that bit. ‘But his neighbour cometh and searcheth him’, that is to say, he makes his statement and it is a very searching statement and it exposes what the first person actually did to provoke the reaction. So always we hear both sides.
Application
We have known of problems even among Christian people where somebody has made bitter complaints about a Christian worker in another place, and this has gone round and been believed, and it has been taken seriously, and people have got very hot under the collar and indignant, and said, ‘That Christian worker should not be supported’. I have known four of five cases like this across the years. But when you heard what that Christian worker had to say about it, the case was quite different. There was another story to tell, and in Christian relationships we always must be fair and remember there are two sides and hear them.
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