You Don't Know the Whole Story
Do not slander a servant to his master, lest he curse you, and you be held guilty. -Proverbs 30:10
Working for a busy brokerage firm, your day is non-stop action. Your computer screen is constantly changing, the phone is always ringing, everything is high energy. Every second counts. You leave each day exhausted. Which is partially why you hate Jamaal.
Jamaal doesn’t work for your company. He is one of those “outside guys”. “What does this lazy bum, even do?” you think to yourself. He moves like a sloth and his computer screen barely even changes throughout the day. If he was paid by the number of times he clicks his mouse, he’d likely go home with only a picture of Andrew Jackson in his pocket. Why your company is spending money on a guy that needs two hours to process a single screen is beyond you.
As papers pile up on your desk and you are flooded with even more work, your frustration towards Jamaal increases. You start asking him to get you coffee, or maybe lift one of his idle hands to do the devil work of organizing your overflowing client files. He refuses to help, informing you that he is “working”. Your anger spills over and now you’re telling others about should-be jobless Jamaal. You even tell your bosses that Jamaal isn’t doing his job and that his work is entirely unnecessary. It gets to the point where you give them an ultimatum. If they are going to pay someone like Jamaal to waste company time, without helping important brokers like yourself, and all this while you’re drowning in work….”well, then it’s either him or me,” you say.
Jamaal is fired. The next day all of the company computers crash. It’s down for so long that the firm loses thousands of dollars. Jamaal was in IT. Sitting at his computer doing important work of monitoring systems. Far from being lazy, he was working hard at keeping an eye upon complicated systems.
The point here is that we do well in life, and in work, to stay in our lane and mind our own business. We feel 100% of our own weight and little to none of the weight of those around us. That is why Proverbs 30:10 says not to slander a servant to his master. You do not know the whole story and so your accusations will be slanderous and you’ll end up found guilty when the servant places a curse upon you.
In their social context, and sadly at times in our own, the vulnerable only had one recourse for justice. They could cast a curse—in the hopes that the Almighty would come to their defense. They are slandered but have no means to defend themselves. Except for taking it to the highest authority—God Himself. This is why it’s so dumb to slander a servant, because God Himself will come to their defense.
Stay in your lane is one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve heard. You worry about yourself and don’t fix your attention on those around you. It’s absolutely vital for this kind of attitude to permeate our churches. It’s what Paul says in Romans 14. The church was splitting over issues of food. One guy was eating this thing and ticking off another guy. And so that made the guy who wants to eat his BBQ pork sandwich all mad at the other guy. It seemed like it was about food but it really wasn’t. It was that neither person knew how to entrust the other to Jesus.
We prefer uniformity. We assume that if someone’s relationship with Christ doesn’t look exactly like ours, then they must be “off” in some way. And then we begin to judge the servant of Christ for doing the very things which Christ would have them to do. We slander His servant. Bonhoeffer says it well:
Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them. As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes.
In today’s bonus content I will interact with this quote a little more. For now, it’s enough to say that we do not own other people. When we start to think that we do we’ll develop slanderous hearts. You slander when you think you are able to stand over another. The heart of slander is pride. It’s an assumption that we know the whole story and that we’re in a position to judge the servant of another; namely, the servant of Christ.
We don’t know the whole story. We should stop pretending like we do.