A quarterly magazine for truth, faith, and logic.
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A quarterly magazine for truth, faith, and logic. |
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Vol. 3, Issue 1 | Winter 2009 |
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The Gospel According to the ProverbsA Selectionby Paul Lytle Over the last several months, Primum Mobile editor Paul Lytle has been blogging through the book of Proverbs, one verse at a time. Please feel free to stop by to say hello. He is currently in chapter 2, but he has made all the blogs from chapter 1 available in a handy PDF file, which you can download here. Below we have picked out four of the forty entries to republish here. We hope you will enjoy them. Proverbs 1:7: The first step"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction." I was trying to fix my computer recently, and I found some very helpful websites that explained what to do in exactly my situation. They told me to go the command prompt, to type this, to look at that, and to change this. There was only one problem: I didn't know how to get to the command prompt. I'm quite sure the websites were right in what they were telling me, but I had no way to find out, since I was lost on step one. I had to go elsewhere to figure out how to do that one step, and only then could I go back and try again. Sometimes I think the church is like this. I've heard so many sermons about how we need to stop sinning, and cut out that behavior, and we need to act like that. And I think so many people in the pews are thinking (though they may not admit it aloud), "I agree, but how?" Where do we start? Are we to grit our teeth and stop sinning by sheer will power? Are we to suddenly turn away from the life we have always known and suddenly be perfect by setting out minds on it? Are we to suddenly know everything perfectly and be able to walk in the paths of righteousness? How does this happen? Solomon gives us the first step in his first proverb of the book. Fear the Lord, and then we begin to understand. What is this word fear? Are we supposed to cower away from God? Fear comes from a Hebrew word that is more of a respectful awe. In sort of the same way a child might fear his parents. The child probably doesn't cower away (we would hope not!) unless he does something wrong, and he understands that his parents have great power, and you should not forget it. His parents care for him, love him, provide for him, but can also punish if not obeyed. This is sort of the same concept here. When we fear the Lord, we are obedient to Him. We respect Him for His goodness and power. At times we should truly fear Him, for He has authority over us far more than anyone in this world. Jesus summarizes it nicely: "I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" So we are talking about all these things combined when we speak of how we should approach God. Yet we usually do not do these things. We will fear all sorts of things in this life, but we will not give God the respect He deserves. No wonder our world seems to come crashing down when we get dumped or fired or our electricity goes out! No wonder! We fear the wrong things, and as a result, we lack understanding, so we react badly to things that ultimately don't matter very much. Jesus came to earth guide us back to that right relationship with God. And you know what? We hate instruction and wisdom so much that we killed Him. But God is so great and so awful (I use the word in its proper meaning to be "full of awe," which is exactly what God is), that He used this terrible crime against His Son and turned it into a saving act for us all. By the Blood of Jesus we can return to God, properly this time, upon our knees, surrendering all, repenting of all, and be restored to Him. It all begins with the fear of the Lord. Repent of your old foolishness and come to Him, and this will be the beginning of understanding. Proverbs 1:18: The Gospel according to Looney Tunes"but these men [sinners] lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives." I was always a big fan of the Road Runner cartoons. I mean, all of the old Looney Tunes cartoons followed a similar theme: one character was always chasing another and usually ended up being hit in the head five or six hundred times. But the Road Runner ones were special to me. They were unique from the others in two ways: 1) they were all about the bad guy, Wile E. Coyote, rather than the good guy, like the others, and 2) they were more patient in delivering the laughs. You remember. Wile E. Coyote would spend an inordinate amount of time building some crazy contraption, and then the Road Runner would zoom by, and Wile E. Coyote would hit the button, only to fall off a cliff, smack himself in the head, or rocket himself into a huge rock. It was this long set up for a half-moment worth of punch line. But what a punch line! It was worth it every time. We're looking a few verses here that talk about the futility of sin. The sinners in these verses are compared first to people who set a trap for a bird while the bird is watching (thus gaining nothing). Now we are told that they are actually setting the traps, much as Wile E. Coyote does, only to fall into the traps themselves. This is very true in this life, but it is even more true in the next. But consider, how many of your problems in life are not ultimately of your own making? There are times when this is not true, but most of the time it is. You try to take advantage of a situation, maybe in a relationship, maybe at work, maybe elsewhere, and it comes back to bite you. It is rare that we ever experience a problem that could not have been avoided by a better decision in the beginning. It happens, certainly, but it's rare. In the next life, no one will have an excuse. All sins will be paid for. I find it somewhat funny that some people say that they will get to heaven because they are "good people." That is nothing but pride talking, and pride got Lucifer kicked out of heaven. I tell you the truth, if all your anger, your lust, your greed, and your pride were laid before you, you would know that you deserve nothing better than death. Sin is a trap of our own making, constructed to gain some advantage for ourselves, and yet will bring about our own destruction. Like Wile E. Coyote, we think we have everything under control, and we end up making a man-shaped hold in the side of a cliff. There is only one way out of this. It's not being a better person, because we've already gone too far for that. It's not balancing your sins with good works, because even the smallest sin is too much to ever be repaid. It's Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life and died undeservedly. But in that death He took on our sins and paid for them with His blood. If we repent of our sins and follow Him, then His Blood will take the place of our own in death. Or we can keep chasing the Road Runner. Th-th-th-th-th-that's all folks! Proverbs 1:23: Nine times nine[Wisdom says:] "If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you." I am surrounded, more and more, by a world that does not know the multiplication tables. Especially now, with the state of American schools, fewer people are even considering this information, fewer people will admit it worthwhile, and fewer people can really multiply nine and nine and get eighty-one without a calculator. If you're wondering, I did not use a calculator for that one, but maybe I should. . . . Yep, I was right the first time. If you go around to the people you know, chances are that many of them will have no clue when it comes to mathematics. Many of them will just have a blank look on their faces when you start talking about the multiplication tables. Doesn't mean they aren't true. Anyone can grab a handful of rocks and work out these tables for their own, making nine little piles of nine rocks each and then counting eighty-one rocks. Any fool can do this. And yet it is so telling that I've heard some mathematicians are now questioning the meaning of one. There are absolute truths in this universe of a higher order than one. There is wisdom beyond that which a normal man on the street will admit to. There are those who will tell you there is no truth, that nothing is good or evil, that there is no God. But then there are people who do not understand nine times nine, but that doesn't change the answer away from eighty-one. In one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard is tortured for an extended period. One of the things the Cardassians do to him is to shine four lights in his eyes and tell him there are five lights. They promise him freedom, food, whatever, if he will just admit there are five lights. But there were four lights. In just the same way, the evidence of God is all about us, from the way we are fearfully and wonderfully made to the precise balance of the universe to the moral law inscribed within us to love, to love, to love. Wisdom cries out in the street, and she cries out the name of Christ Jesus, the evidence of a love beyond any other we could ever know. While we were sinning, while we were in rebellion, God sent His Son to save us. Jesus died for us, paying the price for our sin upon the Cross. It is true, more true than nine times nine being eighty-one. If you repent of your old ways and fall at His feet for mercy, you will find it. Ask Him for His forgiveness and walk in His ways, and you will find love and wisdom as you have never before known. Proverbs 1:32: Where? Behind the rabbit?[Wisdom says:] "For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them;" I love the rabbit scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you haven't seen it, an enchanter named Tim is leading Arthur and his knights to where the Grail is hidden, but there is a terrible monster blocking the path. Tim takes great pains to warn Arthur of the danger, and he really gets the knights riled up with his description of the peril. But when they get to the cave, there is nothing there but a white rabbit. The knights are incensed. They can't believe that Tim had them so worried. "Look at the bones!" Tim cries out, hoping they will listen. They don't, and Bors goes to take care of the rabbit. And the rabbit leaps up and rips Bors' head off. The knights cower in fear, and all Tim can say is, "I warned you!" (It's very funny; trust me.) There are three reactions a person can have when hearing the truth about God. They can turn away, saying, "I don't believe that." Like Bors rising up to kill the rabbit, they scoff at God. They turn away, in the words of this verse. Other people just assume they're okay. "Oh, I'm a good person. I have nothing to worry about," they might say. They are complacent. And both of these reactions will earn you death. The reason is simple. We are imperfect beings, and God is perfect and Holy. We have earned death in our pride, greed, lust, and hatred. God's mercy is the only way we can have life. But if we turn away from Him actively, or passively assume we're good enough, then we have foolishly accepted the death sentence we deserve. But the other way to react is by accepting the call of Jesus and repenting. Only He did not deserve to die, and yet He died anyway. He died in our place. Turn away, stay, or bow. Those are our only choices. The first two are simple and foolish, and they get us nowhere. But trusting in Jesus will get us eternal life. Ask for His forgiveness and follow Him. |
