The House of Wisdom

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Wisdom has built her house; she has carved its seven columns.  She has prepared a great banquet, mixed the wines, and set the table.  She has sent her servants to invite everyone to come.  She calls out from the heights overlooking the city.  “Come in with me,” she urges the simple.  To those who lack good judgment, she says, “Come, eat my food, and drink the wine I have mixed.  Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live; learn to use good judgment.”  Proverbs 9:1-6

The Proverb-writer has purposefully described the open-handedness of God in a universal invitation to gain wisdom.  There’s a great banquet of wisdom, and an army of messengers to spread the open offer to come close to the source.  It’s a house of life-giving good judgment; it’s a place to grow strong, leaving the simplicity of childish ways, for the strength of providing for others. 

The “front door” of wisdom’s house arrived early-on in the introduction Solomon gave the Proverbs…where to begin if you wish to live a life of disciplined success, knowing how to do what is right, just, and fair.

Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.  Proverbs 1:7

The foundation of wisdom’s house is fearing God…being reverent, respectful, and obedient to our Creator.  It is a small, but exceedingly-meaningful and important step to begin any journey.  If that step is in the wrong direction, the end of the journey will not be what one hoped.  That first step (surrendering every aspect of your life to reverencing God all through the journey) cannot be over-valued.

John was a retired Naval officer I met many years ago.  He attempted to side-step that first step.  He had seen much of the world and experienced many different cultures, but neglected Solomon’s advice about wisdom’s front door.  He had his own agenda, and that was his god.  Now, I do not say that with prejudice, or lightly; it’s simply an observable fact.  Whatever you do reveals that to which you give your allegiance.  If I go fishing 12 hours a day, it’s a reasonable assumption my behavior means I’m devoted to fishing. 

A living, breathing, passionate thirst for God’s Kingdom indicates you have (at least) begun the journey towards wisdom.  The retired Navy man craved experiences that pleased him.  When we met he was ready to “experience” faith.  He went through the motions, profession of faith, baptism, and church membership.  But, for John, it was like a field trip, another experience.  Soon, that brush with religious activities became boring, and then turned hostile.  In the end he became a sad footnote on the evening news, committing suicide in a stand-off with police in front of the local K-Mart store. 

I cried privately over John for months.  He had made the choice of a foolish and anguished moment, after trying to live life on his own.  In the end, experiences and the pleasure he thought they ought to bring him, just weren’t enough. 

For You Today 

It’s not enough to proclaim faith, get wet in a baptismal ceremony, have your name recorded on a church membership roster, and attend church regularly for the rest of your life.  Solomon did all of that, and also experienced every pleasure possible, and came to understood that real wisdom meant reverencing Almighty God.  Scripture tells us how we should respond to God, our maker:

“Be still, and know that I am God!  I will be honored by every nation.  I will be honored throughout the world.”  Psalm 46:10

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:   Standing in the Sweet Spot  and  Learning to Use Good Judgment   

Title Image:  via Pixabay.com   Images without citation are in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

When Power Makes You Nervous

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild.  But whoever obeys the law is joyful.  Proverbs 29:18

I must admit that I have never understood the obsession underlying power.  Personally, it has always made me quite nervous to be in the company of those who wield the kind of strength of presidents, governors, and other influential positions.  Those who lead bear a considerable weight of responsibility for the well-being of others.  It is an inherently-unselfish calling.  The fly in the ointment of the democratic system of choosing leaders who are perceived as strong-enough to do well, is that politics is a magnet for the best and worst of motives.

In an article[1] reflecting on the state of world affairs, published earlier this year by Princeton University professor, Jonathan Gold, calling for (at a minimum) mandatory psychological testing of candidates for public office, Gold trotted out the elephant in the rebel room, concerning the two most powerful leaders who should never have been elected by sane people:

At the extreme end of the scale are the symptoms associated with anti-social personality disorder (ASPD), which ought to be out of bounds for an elected official but read to the untrained like a character description of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.

This devotional blog is not a blatant political tool, rather a purveyor of Godly advice from the Scriptures.  What Solomon said about God’s guidance as the life-giving need for any nation, is precisely what leaders Putin and Trump ignore, in favor of ascribing all knowledge and power to their own imaginations.  It is often quoted that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  And if that is true, it removes (by definition) any hope of governance without corruption; the lone exemption is the one, true, living God. 

For You Today  

If your children and grandchildren are the hope of the next generation of leaders for this world, better teach them by example to be humble and honor God.  Otherwise those who live in those generations and beyond are going to be bound to the same human foolishness of the current times, thinking we have all the answers, yet having no vision at all.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

   Stubborn to the Bitter End and Without Vision Nations Crumble

Images:  Title Article - Don't Hand Power to Dangerous People   Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] Don’t hand power to dangerous people (even when they really want it) — a modest Buddhist proposal

God's Different Way

 

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him.  He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.  But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.  They are reborn—not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God.  So the Word became human and made his home among us.  He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.  And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.  John testified about him when he shouted to the crowds, “This is the one I was talking about when I said, ‘Someone is coming after me who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before me.’”  From his abundance we have all received one gracious blessing after another.  For the law was given through Moses, but God’s unfailing love and faithfulness came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God.  But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart.   He has revealed God to us.  John 1:10-18

Elsewhere in Scripture God tells us His ways are different than anything we can imagine: 

For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.  Isaiah 55:9 

John the Baptist understood that about God, at least to the point that even though Jesus was chronologically born after John, his cousin existed long before John.  That is a kind of “math” that defies our human explanation.  And that is precisely why God had to appear in flesh-and-blood in a manger.  Even then, God’s own creation didn’t get it; God revealed God, and we rejected Him.

In hindsight, we humans can do things one of two ways with the stuff that confuses us…especially those things about God’s different way of doing the math.

1.    We can distort truth and reconcile it to our way of thinking, or

2.    We can live more honestly, see more clearly, accept our limitations, and bow before Heaven’s throne.

Those are our choices.  However, humanity’s “normal” way of dealing with God-truth is so abnormal to the way humankind were created, it is absurd to imagine.  It is as if Nimrod, builder of Babel’s tower ^{(see Genesis 11)} completed his work, like a mouse having ascended his mountain, (sitting on an elephant’s head), assumes he rules all he can see.  

  

Such is limited human thinking, merely scraping the bottom of Creation’s barrel.  What is so amazing about God is, despite our mouse-on-an-elephant’s-head caricature of mankind’s foolishness, that of denying our Godly heritage – a descent into delusion – God still chose gracious condescension to lift-up the very species which rejected His gift.

For You Today

Delusional mouse or child of a gracious king…what a choice!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

For other posts on this text see Catch and The Fullness of Time

 

Foolishness

 

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Timothy, guard what God has entrusted to you. Avoid godless, foolish discussions with those who oppose you with their so-called knowledge.  Some people have wandered from the faith by following such foolishness.  1 Timothy 6:20-21

It’s an amazement that tops most of the surprises I’ve had in my life – those times when I’ve been unable to resist responding to the bait.  It happens this way: 

·       Somebody poses an absurd thought in a group, or social media forum

·       Russell responds

And that’s all it takes for the foolishness to begin. 

The sense in avoiding nonsense is just about self-evident.  Paul told Timothy to avoid it; run like the wind from such nonsense.  Paul probably got a first-hand picture of the height of foolish debaters in a Sanhedrin meeting as one Pharisee tried to convince a Sadducee that there is life after death.  Or when Paul’s teacher, Gamaliel (a wise man by reputation) tried to break-up the argument of two students fighting over how many angels could actually fit on the head of a pin…proof of the proverb:

Fools have no interest in understanding; they only want to air their own opinions.  Proverbs 18:2

The crux of the issue, however, isn’t THAT we should run, but HOW to keep the motor ready TO RUN at the first sign of someone just wanting to drag you into the bottomless pit of argument.  I have my share of blind-side issues.  I tend to focus deeply on what I’m doing.  When preaching, I focus so much on the moment and delivering God’s Word that I often miss what’s going on around me.  I’ve been told a toddler could bite me on the ankles when I’m in sermon-mode, and I’d never even notice the blood or pain.

So what do you do when your nonsense-detector isn’t exactly up to speed?  How do you avoid being dragged into the foolishness of empty chatter?  There is only one way I’ve found, and that is what I’m doing right now…meditating on what God’s Word says about it, bathing my spirit in the things of God, so that anything other than Godliness sets up an odor like a landfill.

For You Today

Making progress in your journey through this life as a child of God will never be served by trying to teach those who enjoy foolishness.  You’d have more success trying to teach a rock how to dance.

After enough foolish arguments, avoiding that trap becomes a lifestyle!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©    

Of Yokes, and Staying in Your Lane

 

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Jeremiah 28:10-17

Then Hananiah the prophet took the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and broke it in pieces.  And Hananiah said again to the crowd that had gathered, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Just as this yoke has been broken, within two years I will break the yoke of oppression from all the nations now subject to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.’”  With that, Jeremiah left the Temple area.  Soon after this confrontation with Hananiah, the Lord gave this message to Jeremiah:  “Go and tell Hananiah, ‘This is what the Lord says:  You have broken a wooden yoke, but you have replaced it with a yoke of iron.  The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: I have put a yoke of iron on the necks of all these nations, forcing them into slavery under King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.  I have put everything, even the wild animals, under his control.’”  Then Jeremiah the prophet said to Hananiah, “Listen, Hananiah!  The Lord has not sent you, but the people believe your lies.  Therefore, this is what the Lord says:  ‘You must die.  Your life will end this very year because you have rebelled against the Lord.’”  Two months later the prophet Hananiah died.

I was sharing a conversation with a friend of mine, who is an internist, about another friend, who is experiencing the multiple-doctor-mixed-diagnoses-syndrome.  One “specialist” doc prescribed a certain medication; the other doc, not in that specialty, said, no, you don’t have to take that.  I asked my internist friend, what’s a patient to do?  He said, I believe that other doc oughta stay in his lane.

Jeremiah had worn a common oxen yoke to show how Israel had gotten themselves into a serious rock and hard place situation with disobeying God.  Hananiah, a man who had a reputation as prophet, took the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and broke it to pieces.  That was a metaphorical slap at Jeremiah’s prophecy, telling all who would hear about it, that everything was going to be just fine in Jerusalem.  Israel was going to be great again, and the Babylonian invasion was just a minor blip on the screen of their national pride…not to worry. 

But, it didn’t turn out that way.  King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, burned the city, destroyed the Temple and carried

off all the treasures, and drove the captives into his land as slaves for the next 60 years.  Jerusalem wasn’t great again, and Hananiah found out the hard way, when it comes to prophecy, you’d better stay in your own lane!

America hasn’t had to deal with that (so far) in its storied 244 years since our Independence.  We have been the richest, most powerful nation on earth for a long time.  I am certainly not Jeremiah, nor am I going to be a meddling Hananiah, but the parallels between Israel’s disobedience, and what we see destroying even a thin resemblance of godliness in this country, should give warning enough that we are headed for the same hand of judgment Israel experienced…and, perhaps worse.

Now, that’s as far as I go in prophesying, following Jesus’ admonition to see the signs of the times, the fields being white unto harvest.  But it still causes me to shudder for the sake of my children, and theirs; what in the world are we thinking in this day to do just what Israel did 2,600 years ago? 

·       They were arrogant about being God’s chosen (as we claim with our motto, One Nation Under God); they were, but that just meant, if they were disobedient children, their Father was going to meet them at the woodshed, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

·       They assumed (as we do) their wealth, powerful history, and determination would protect them from any other nation.

·       They sacrificed their children (as we do).

At the risk of being pronounced unpatriotic, I am saying you don’t have to be a prophet to make this connection – America is not great; we are sinful.  Only God is great, and we have no hope of being great unless we bow in His presence by changing our ways. 

Let’s Pray Together:

Father, help us to not lay the blame for our sins on anyone else.  Help us to acknowledge that, like sheep, we have ALL gone astray[1], and must not only plead for forgiveness, but receive that forgiveness by repenting of sinfulness.  Help us to put aside the notion of being great and turn towards becoming Godly.

For You Today

Which is more important to you, patriotism, or godliness?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO                                                                                                                  

Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on God’s Judgment see When God Measures and No More Tambourines

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[1] Isaiah 53:6

Passover's New Day

Thursday of Holy Week, April 9, 2020

While the Israelites were still in the land of Egypt, the Lord gave the following instructions to Moses and Aaron: 2 “From now on, this month will be the first month of the year for you. 3 Announce to the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each family must choose a lamb or a young goat for a sacrifice, one animal for each household. 4 If a family is too small to eat a whole animal, let them share with another family in the neighborhood. Divide the animal according to the size of each family and how much they can eat.  Exodus 12:1-4

11 “These are your instructions for eating this meal: Be fully dressed,[a] wear your sandals, and carry your walking stick in your hand. Eat the meal with urgency, for this is the Lord’s Passover. 12 On that night I will pass through the land of Egypt and strike down every firstborn son and firstborn male animal in the land of Egypt. I will execute judgment against all the gods of Egypt, for I am the Lord! 13 But the blood on your doorposts will serve as a sign, marking the houses where you are staying. When I see the blood, I will pass over you. This plague of death will not touch you when I strike the land of Egypt.  14 “This is a day to remember. Each year, from generation to generation, you must celebrate it as a special festival to the Lord. This is a law for all time.  Exodus 12:11-14

Passover, the marking of the first day of freedom for the Israelites leaving Egypt, began last night, and ends with sundown this evening.  Jewish families will gather at the table and recite Scripture, explain their epic history of being God’s chosen people, joyful, worshipping people, disobedient, sinful people, and, like us, forgiven people; they will eat the meal of haste and remember.

As part of the remembering process they will think on the new order of things as God instructed them to consider this date as their New Year.  After 400 years of slavery they were getting a do-over, released from bondage to liberty.  This was their Fourth of July…a new, released-and-back-on-mission family of God.

I can’t help connecting this New Day feel to what we’re experiencing right now.  Of course our “bondage” to Coronavirus is only a few months old; hardly a four-century saga of suffering.  But I cannot help shaking the thought that we are on the cusp of a new normal that is game-changing.  And, if you’re asking exactly what that means, I have to demur speculation in favor of fuzzy.  I only have an impression something looms large for the human race. 

I will tell you what I hope, and that for which I pray: 

He who is the faithful witness to all these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon!”  Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!  Revelation 22:20

But, absent of that final prayer and promise of Scripture, the other possibility in my mind and heart is a regeneration of respect. 

·      Respect for our tongues and ears – where there is a kinder, gentler, more positive tone in daily speak in conversations, media, and any interaction between humans.

·      Respect for our stewardship of God’s resources

·      Respect for being what God created, not what our darkness imagined

·      Respect for God, Himself…a regeneration of refreshing revival

Our world has had enough of terrorism, plagues, and living in fear.  It’s time to get along and live the love of Passover’s New Day.

For You Today

The role of the church is not exhausted just because we’ve been locked out of our buildings.  Somehow, it seems, the church is reborn every time the pressure cooker of life starts to blow off steam.  This day is our new chance to get it right.

Go to VIDEO

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Exodus 12 and the Passover see Ready to Travel and Seder; Meal of Haste and This Holy Week – Part 4