A quarterly magazine for the proclamation and defense of the Gospel
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A quarterly magazine for the proclamation and defense of the Gospel |
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Vol. 4, Issue 1 | Spring 2010 |
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Primum Mobile is a quarterly web magazine. This issue and all its contents are © Copyright 2004-2010 by the editors. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
by Paul Lytle
Over the last year, 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. We have made all the blogs from chapter 4 available in a handy PDF file, which you can download here. To get previous chapters, please click below:
Below we have picked out five of the chapter 4 entries to republish here. We hope you will enjoy them.
Get laid; get high. Get a cool car with racing stripes. Get a hot girlfriend. Get a wicked sound system. Get a great job and make tons of money. Get ahead; get up the corporate ladder. Get respect; get a gun. Get power; get out the vote. Get a shrink; get some help.
Get married; get divorced. Get some action on the side. Get a bigger TV. Get a drink. Get a new wardrobe; get some new décor; get a face lift. Get a new job with more money. Get stock options. Get a new haircut; get a new life. Get some new friends. Get out more.
Get involved. Get productive. Get some love. Get real.
The world is full of advice of what to get. Sometimes, there are so many voices in a day, you get turned around. You get lost in the crowd. You don’t know where to turn.
This verse is a call to remember something much greater. It is a call to seek out the ways of God, to understand His ways and to make them our ways. To look out for those things that will not fade away and turn to dust. This verse is a call to push away that other stuff and make sure you are focused on what is important.
Do not forget. Do not forget the wisdom found in the Bible. No matter what else you are seeking in this world, it is fleeting. No matter if it is the most noble thing out there, it will only last a little time, and it will be gone. All other pursuits will perish, except this one. Except this one.
The reason this one will not perish is because this is the way to life. Do not forget, because everything that happens to you after the grave is going to depend on this one. On this one right here.
We are not worthy of life. You may think you are, but you’re not, just like I’m not. We have spent too much time pursuing our own goals, our own lusts, our own pride, our own ambition, our own selfishness, our own anger, and our own hatred. Nothing we can do will make up for that. We are desperately fallen, and we are not good enough for eternal life.
But Jesus came to earth to die on the Cross to take the punishment for our sins. He took the price we could not pay upon Himself and died. And then He rose again to prepare a place for us. If we repent and believe in Him, we will have life eternal. Repent, and believe.
Do not forget. Seek this one out. Get wisdom; get insight. Read the Bible, and keep reading it. Start praying and keep praying. I don’t care what else is going on, what else you need to “get,” because this is the issue that will outlive all others.
In my line of work (insurance), I occasionally come across people who are trying to defraud my company of how ever much money we are willing to give them. Strangely, they don’t seem like total jerks at all (well, most of them don’t), but when the chance for some quick cash arises, it has an odd effect on them.
Some of these are really obvious. Others are not. For some, it just seems like they are acting a little more hurt than they really are. A groan here or there will do it, they think.
I came across two interpretations of this verse, the second of which we’ll take a look at next time. In the first, the bread and wine mentioned are gained through unjust causes. Honestly, I was going to skip this interpretation completely. I immediately thought, “This isn’t about me. I work an honest job, and I worked it honestly.” And I doubt many of my readers are thieves either, though I could be wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t be quick to make assumptions on that one. Still, I really wanted to just pass to the second interpretation. But after a little soul-searching, I realized that I shouldn’t skip it at all.
It’s true that I do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. But that’s not where I slip. I slip, like some of those hurt people I deal with, when an unexpected opportunity for gain or loss comes by. Do I exaggerate the truth when it fits my purposes? Do I hold back when I think it may get me into trouble? I remember several times when I withheld a bit of information when returning an item to a store or calling customer service about my bill. Can I really say I was that honest when it came to getting that money?
For some of us, our jobs may not be that honest. It’s probably legal, and it probably doesn’t involved violence, but that doesn’t mean it’s honest. Does our daily bread come from taking advantage of people? Does it come from misleading them at all? Does it come from clever sales pitches and pressure sales? Does it come from overly inflating prices?
I can think of a few times even recently where my daily bread didn’t come out of hard work and love. It came from something else.
These little lies, these little misrepresentations, they come from a lack of faith. See, God told us He would provide our daily bread. It is He that gives us our jobs and income, and it is also He who knows where our next meal is coming from. So it’s only when we doubt this provision that we resort to dishonesty to get more money. If we really believed that God would keep His promise, we would continue to work in honesty and uprightness.
That bread and that wine are temporary. Tomorrow you will need more. And so we have to begin all over again in dishonesty and, Heaven forbid, violence.
Jesus provides the water of life, which is eternal. He offered His own body and blood up as a sacrifice for us, which, remember, He first offered to His followers as bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper. Even when we, in our lack of faith, turn from God and to our own devices, Jesus died on our behalf so we could live. To the woman at the well He said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
God not only is our provision in this life, but for eternity. We have sinned, each one of us, and none of us deserve life, but Jesus took the punishment for our sins upon Himself on the Cross. By His Grace we can have the life we did not deserve.
It is His death we remember every time we take Communion. Such righteousness does Jesus possess, and like His body and blood, it is righteousness He gives to us.
I get excited when I look back on my life as a Christian. Frankly, for the first year after becoming a Christian, I wasn’t terribly active in the church or growing spiritually very quickly. I got involved in a small group because I had some friends there, and that helped a lot. It forced me to at least think about Jesus during the week.
There was one girl who was going to that group because of her boyfriend, but she wasn’t a Christian at first. But one day we learned that she had converted, and suddenly she had a lot of questions. That rather forced the rest of us to get more involved just so we could find answers for her. All of a sudden, we were all researching during the week — not for our own sakes, but for hers!
Soon after that, a great trial in my life drove me to God even more. I had nowhere else to go. I thank God constantly for that time, because I became more at peace in Him than ever before.
There have been other events since, forcing me to study one aspect of Christ or another, or forcing me to pray more. But now it’s the study itself that drives me. Once I reached a certain point, studying the Bible simply became a joy.
That’s what makes me excited about it. When I look back, I see the long path that got me here. As this verse says, the path of righteousness begins like the dawn, but the light grows. The Hebrew here tells us that the light is both clear and bright. It is pure.
It’s not yet midday for me, I am happy to say. There is so much more left to learn, to see, to do. I am still so fallen and so flawed. I sin so much, but this road is working it out of me gradually. That day will only come in the resurrection, and it will just get brighter until then.
But here’s the thing — this road of righteousness, it’s not mine. I did not do this in my life. I am not able to make myself a good person. I cannot work my way close to God.
The path belongs to Jesus. In His perfect life, He forged this trail, and in His death, He lets us walk it. If left to myself, I would be lost in darkness. My mind and heart are filled with evil lust, greed, selfishness, pride, and hatred. I do not deserve life with God.
But Jesus died in my place, taking my sins upon Himself and paying the price I owed. That’s why I can keep walking this path, no matter how often I slip. His mercy picks me up, and His Grace leads me farther into the light of day.
It is that Grace I want to proclaim, not my own accomplishment. The message of the Bible is not that we can earn our way to Heaven. The message of the Bible is that we absolutely cannot earn it. Our very natures have been taken over in sin, the thoughts of our hearts always on evil. The road we forge can only go to darkness.
Repent of that road and believe in the One who made a better way. By His Blood we can be forgiven. By His Grace we can have everlasting life, though we do not deserve it.
There have been so many times lately when I’ve heard someone talk about the Gospel message (the Good News) as a set of behaviors or a way of life or something of the like. And that makes sense, right? This is the way the world works — it tells us that if your message has meaning, it will change something. If your business has value, then you’ll start getting more money. If your philosophy has value, then people will find purpose and meaning in what you say. If your marriage has worth, people will see it in the way you and your spouse are together. All these things give you a better life, and that’s how we know they’re important. So the world says.
And so our sermons seem to follow after this formula. On the far right, preachers are preaching about obeying all of these moral laws. On the far left, they are preaching love to everyone. And they’re right, to an extent. We should be loving people. We should be morally pure.
But that’s not the Gospel message. The Gospel message is not about actions at all.
The world doesn’t understand this, which is why everyone is looking really closely at the lives of the people delivering this Gospel to make sure they are living right. And if a pastor is caught in adultery, and so many begin to question the message.
So I love it when Solomon starts talking about how his words “are life to those who find them.” His words. See, Solomon was one of those guys who could have destroyed the faiths of thousands by his actions. He married hundreds of women who tempted him to false gods. And this is a guy who helped write the Bible?
But it’s not the actions of Solomon that leads us to life. It’s the words.
And don’t get me wrong. These specific words do not have some sort of magical properties we can use as an incantation or pagan mantra. That’s not it at all — it’s the words that direct us to Christ.
By our actions, we’re not going to get anywhere. We are so tainted by lust, pride, anger, selfishness, and hatred that we are spiritually dead, unworthy of life. We can’t “try harder” and make it to heaven. In our sin, we have offended a just and perfect God, and His justice demands payment for those sins. By our actions, we are lost.
But the actions of Jesus can save us. He was without sin, perfect in every way, and yet He died, though he did not deserve it. He died upon that Cross to pay for our sins and provide for us His righteousness so we may be saved. It is through His righteousness that we can finally act as we should. His Spirit will guide us to love God and others as we should. But these things do not save us — only His Blood can.
You can probably find out plenty of information to discredit me by my actions. But my actions won’t save anyone. The value of the message doesn’t depend on the messenger who delivered it; it depends on what the message is. Listen to my words: Repent and believe in Jesus. That is the way to life.
This verse took me a little by surprise. I mean, as many times as our Christian life has been described as a walk or a journey, I don’t know that I’ve ever had a pastor tell me to “ponder the path.”
Isn’t it usually the other way around? People will tell you it’s not about the destination, but about the journey. Or they will tell you to be passive in this walk, just moving by the Spirit. Or they will tell you to not be so single-minded about the path at all, but embrace other paths that people may travel.
Not so here. Solomon tells us to concentrate on where we’re walking.
Now, I’m a doctrine geek, but people look at me funny when I start talking theology. It’s not in the vocabulary of many Christians. Their theology goes only as deep as knowing John 3:16 and some of the Ten Commandments. A few will have graduated to knowing some praise and worship songs.
You mention a word like propitiation (a word that is in the Bible), and you’ll get blank stares.
But this path matters. The way we walk matters. Doctrine is not a bad word (check out Hebrews 6:1) — it simply means what we believe about God. We all have a doctrine. The question is only this — where do you get that doctrine? Do you get it from pop culture, a new book, a praise song? Or do you get it from the Bible with the interpretive help of the Spirit?
Some will tell you that what you do is more important than what you believe. That sounds good, but it doesn’t work that way. We should do good works, yes, and that is a form of worship, but our worship must be formed out of a proper view of God. John 15 talks about the fruit we bear when in Christ, but it is in Christ where we bear real fruit. God has given us that glimmer of Himself in His Word. He has taught us these creeds so that He may be honored in our worship and faith.
And before we think this creedal path is some sort of legalistic formula we must follow, we should be reminded that Jesus Himself is our way, truth, and life. Our path is forged by His righteousness, by His Blood. We should concentrate on our path, if for no other reason than to concentrate on Jesus. Any other thought, any other focus, any other step is one away from God, no matter how good and nice it may seem.
It is not a path you can walk alone, but only in Christ may we stand. We have no righteousness in us, but in His death He can impute His righteousness to us. By His Spirit He can lead us. And in the end, when we stand before the Lord on the Day of Judgment, we can stand by His sacrifice on the Cross.
Here is the true danger of not paying attention to doctrine — we will not know whether we are standing by the good idea of another man, or by Jesus. No matter how wonderful it seems, the former is the wrong path. And no matter how hard it gets, the latter leads to life.
What to seek, what to avoid
“Get wisdom; get insight; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth.”
-Proverbs 4:5
Where did lunch come from?
“For they [the wicked] eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.”
-Proverbs 4:17
The light of full day
“But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.”
-Proverbs 4:18
It’s not about what you do
“For they [my words] are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh.”
-Proverbs 4:22
What’s your doctrine like?
“Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure.”
-Proverbs 4:26
