The Law of the Wise: A Fountain Delivering from Death

What is law? Richard Hooker, the great theologian, wrote that law's "seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world." All creation—material and spiritual—moves according to divine law. Yet the law governing the good is supremely specific: love to the supremely good, which is Adonai Himself.

Proverbs 13:14 declares this law "a fountain of life," delivering us from "the snares of death." Here death means not mere bodily separation, but the soul's separation from God—the awfullest death imaginable. Supreme love to Elohim guarantees deliverance from this separation.

Moreover, this law secures abundance of life. A fountain suggests activity, plenitude, and perpetual flow. The happiness of the righteous soul is not deferred to some distant eschaton [end time]; it dwells within the law that controls him now. John Howard, England's illustrious philanthropist, understood this profoundly. Writing from Riga amid privations and dangers in 1787, he testified: "I hope I have sources of enjoyment that depend not on the particular spot I inhabit. A rightly cultivated mind, under the power of religion, and the exercise of beneficent dispositions, affords a ground of satisfaction little affected by 'heres' and 'theres.'"

This is the paradox: obedience to God's law produces not constraint but liberation, not deprivation but joy.