“For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life” (Proverbs 6:23). We might think that commandments, the law, and reproofs of instruction are all pretty much one and the same. Indeed, they all work together for the same purpose of illuminating the path before us. But it could be helpful to look at their unique roles and the way they combine together to accomplish this mission. To God’s all-seeing eye, light, truth, the law, and the pure love of Christ are all different ways of describing the same thing. This light, this law, this truth, this love fills the immensity of space and permeates and infuses everything. Jesus explained that the whole law can basically be summed up in the two commandments to love God with all our might, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But God gave us other commandments because it can sometimes be a little tricky figuring out how to apply this love for God, ourselves, and our neighbors in specific scenarios that we encounter on a daily basis. These commandments are a lamp that can contain a small piece of the light of the Law, enough to cast a narrow beam on a particular dilemma that we face. Of course, even if we are trying our best to hold up the lamp of the commandment and obey with sincerity and faith in Christ such that our lamp is infused with the Spirit of God and the light of the Law, we still get it wrong sometimes. That is why reproofs of instruction are the way of life. Reproof is made up of the elements re-, which means again or anew or else back or backward, and -proof, which comes from the Latin word probare which meant to prove or test. Actually, if you dig a little deeper, probare itself comes from the roots pro- and -bus, which essentially means “to be good”. Reproofs of instruction are invitations for us to be good again. Reproofs of instruction are not personal attacks or indictments of our worthiness or mean-spirited attempts to make us feel small and pathetic and despicable. When we are chastened by the Lord, we may feel small because we recognize in the moment of our failure that there is still a seemingly impossible gulf between where we are at right now and our ultimate destiny of perfection. But this feeling of smallness should encourage rather than discourage us. If we are using the lamp of the commandments and the light of the law to chart our course and we end up down a blind alley, the appropriate response is to not throw our lamp away and slump down into the gutter and tell ourselves that we will never get the hang of this lamp and light and way thing so we might as well quit the whole enterprise. What we need to do is recognize that we ended up at a dead end, we guessed wrong, we either held the lamp wrong or let the light focus on the wrong thing or picked the wrong path, but as long as we keep our lamp of commandments and we keep shining the light of the law, and we keep giving heed to the reproofs of instruction that help guide us back to the one true way, we will slowly but surely make progress. God is testing us, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be active participants in this test. If we end up in a place we’re not supposed to be, we need to recognize that the test is not over and we are not inherently poor test takers. We are arriving at the right answer by process of elimination. Sometimes we will get to a fork in the road and one of the paths will already be filled with all kinds of dazzling lights. We might feel that we don’t need to hold onto our lamp of commandments for this part because it’s already fairly well lit. But a lot of those enticing paths cut the lights off after forty or fifty feet. We have to hold onto our lamp of commandments so that when all other lights go out, the light of the Law can still guide us back to the one true path. I know that there is one lamp and one light and one way of life and as we make the commandments and the law and the reproofs of instruction to help us return again and again to being good sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father and good disciples of Christ, we will be amazed at how much progress we make on the path to perfection.
