If there is any time in life when we most want wisdom, it is during those times when we have to make plans for our future or we are facing a future for which it seems difficult to plan. To which school should you go?  Do you go to school or back to school?  What type of job should you pursue?  Should you change jobs? Who should you marry? Where should you live?  Thinking about the future can be maddening. For the past couple of months we have been considering what it is to be wise, that is to live in a way that is consistent with our confession that God is our Lord.  So what does wisdom look like as we try to plan for the future?  In the face of the future we often tend toward two types of behavior, there are no doubt others.  On the one hand, some of us are inclined to take a laissez-faire, hands-off attitude toward the future.  Something’s going happen and I will just deal with it when it comes.  On the other hand some of us are obsessive-compulsive planners.  We have prepared for every contingency and live in fear of the situations we cannot predict.  Most of us live in the continuum between these extremes, but each of us probably has a tendency one way or another. (More)

Why does God allow us at times to feel deeply the effects of our sin and at other times to feel deeply His abundant blessing? To discipline & disciple? To rebuke & encourage? Yes. And yet, God's reasons are inscrutable, beyond searching out.

Where does that leave us? We must trust Him. We must believe-despite present appearances-that God will bring about justice on the last day. And we must trust Him that He loves us and knows what is good right now. In that sense, as His people, we are always under His blessing, no matter what.

He loves you. He's doing what's best for your and all who belong to Him. Do you believe that?

(Prov 3:11-12; Ecc 3:11; 8:16-17; Rom 8:28-39; 11:33; Heb 12:1-17)

I have been reading some of John Owen's Communion with the Triune God (ed. Kapic and Taylor) and was struck by some of Owen's statements about what ought to define a Christian's thoughts about God the Father.

"Let us look on [the Father] by faith, as one that has had thoughts of kindness towards us from everlasting.  It is misapprehension of God that makes any [to] run from him...Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, [then] it could not bear an hour's absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.  Let, then, this be the saints' first notion of the Father--as one full of eternal, free love toward them: let their hearts and thoughts be filled with breaking through all discouragements that lie in the way."

There’s a Woody Allen film, “Crimes & Misdemeanors,” where the main character, Judah, struggles with whether there is a moral order to the world or not.  He starts out the movie saying that the eyes of God are on us always.  But by the end of the movie, the Rabbi has gone blind, and Judah has gotten away with adultery, lying, and murder.  He’s rationalized away his guilt.  He hasn’t been punished.  Guilty feelings fade.  Now he realizes he can go on living a “normal” life.  Judah  (More)

If you like Seinfeld at all you might remember an episode where Elaine dates a bad “breaker-uper” and eventually when she ends up breaking up with him he tells her that she has a big head.  Elaine of course completely blows off this sophomoric insult, but we all know what is going to happen next.  Elaine becomes insanely self-conscious about the size of her head, so self-conscious in fact that at the end of the episode she stabs the guy in the head with a fork.  And like so much of comedy, the reason the episode is so funny is because it is true.  A comment about our appearance, values, clothes, and intelligence can have an impact on our lives for days, weeks, months, or even years.  The point is that words have power.  And the things that I have just mentioned are not even the most serious things we can do with words.  A lie in the right context can get someone killed and good rhetoric, true or not, can get you elected president.  It is not surprising given the importance of what we say that Proverbs has something to say about wisdom and folly in speech.

Proverbs 1-9 can be summarized (albeit over simplistically) as follows:  You need wisdom.  It will give you life.  Go get it.

So, what is this wisdom that will give us life?  Well, let me take a shot at it.  Wisdom:  the mastery of living in the world that comes from 1.) knowing intimately & experientially the God who made the world and 2.) fearing that God, that is, having a desire to obey Him.  Knowing and fearing the God who made the world and living in light of that.  “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (9:10).  Living wisely is living in relationship with Yahweh; living in covenant faithfulness.  To seek wisdom is to seek to understand the world that God made as God’s world and then to seek to live as God’s covenant people.  Wisdom: it’s about living life in God’s world.  (More)

At the end of Proverbs 4 the father instructs his son not to swerve to the right or to the left, but to turn his foot away from evil.  In chapters 5-7 the father tells his son about some possible ways one can swerve to the right or left and so leave the path of wisdom for the path of foolishness. The foolish path that dominates the father's discussion in chapters 5-7 is the path of adultery.  The father is at pains to show his son the danger of participating in an adulterous relationship.  He does this by (1) pointing to its negative economic consequences (5:7-14), (2) pointing to the superiority of sex as experienced in the context of marriage (5:15-23), and (3) the inevitability of God's and the cuckold's retribution (5:21ff.; 6:33-35).  The father's greatest reason for avoiding the path of adultery is that its destination is death (5:1-6;7:21-27), and not death in a clinical sense, but death understood as being cut off from covenant fellowship with God. (More)

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