Seven Times Down

for a righteous man falls seven times, and rises up again; but the wicked are overthrown by calamity. (Proverbs 24:16, WEB)

Most men counting their falls stop counting somewhere around the point where they decide they are hopeless. They keep a private ledger, and the numbers only ever move one direction, and after a while the arithmetic itself feels like a verdict. The proverb has a different way of adding things up. It says that though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, and that the wicked stumble in calamity. Notice what makes a man righteous here. It is not that he never goes down. It is that he keeps getting back up, and the getting up is treated as the mark of the righteous rather than an exception to it.

That should slow you down if you have been reading your relapses as evidence that you were never serious about God to begin with. The verse assumes a righteous man will hit the floor, and more than once, and it still calls him righteous while he is down there. The falling was never the thing that disqualified you, and the number seven is not a limit you are in danger of exceeding. It is a way of saying the falls will be many and the rising will still be there each time.

What God is watching for is whether you will rise, and he is not standing over you tapping his foot while you do it. He is the one who reaches down. The hand that lifts you is not impatient with how often it has had to reach. If you are on the ground this morning, you are not outside the category of men God calls his own. You are exactly the man this proverb was written to keep from quitting, the one who has lost count and started to believe the count is who he is. Get up slowly if you have to. Let the getting up be its own small act of faith, a way of agreeing with God about who you are before you feel it. Just get up.

Father, I have lost count of my falls. Teach me to count the times you have lifted me instead, and give me the strength to rise once more.