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Trusting in riches is spiritually unsatisfactory and necessarily evanescent.
When Socrates drank hemlock in Athens and Caesar fell upon the Roman senate floor, their deaths remained final.
Yet his greatest difficulty arose from a faction calling themselves Christ's party—a group whose very name masked dangerous sectarianism.
Yet he 'obeyed at once,' unburdened by ignorance of his destination.
Similarly, when a musician strikes an out-of-tune instrument, he produces sound but the instrument's broken strings produce the jarring discord.
The Greeks and Romans witnessed friendships that shaped both statecraft and individual virtue—Scipio and Laelius, Cicero and Atticus, Achilles and Patroclus.
Temptation brings suffering to the regenerate soul in distinct ways.
These phases repeat with such regularity that he compares them to *the white and red lights and darkness reappearing in a revolving lighthouse lantern, or figures recurring in a circulating decimal fraction*.
Yet the psalmist's reply contains crushing power: "Our God is in heaven; all that he pleased he has done." Consider the contrast Martin Geier illuminated with surgical precision.
Surrounded by giant empires wielding brute force—Pharaoh and his kind—David had learned through both experience and divine inspiration that true monarchy operates on different principles entirely.
Maclaren observes that 'one coat of paint is not enough, it soon rubs off'—a homely image that captures how readily doctrinal knowledge slides from memory without constant reinforcement.
Where other evangelists might spare us the indignity, John insists on recording Christ's thirst upon the Cross and His weariness at Jacob's well.
While our Lord spoke of the Holy Spirit's aid and the blessing of angels' acknowledgment, this hearer's mind never left his father's inheritance dispute.
The prophet employs visceral imagery: nations flung into the press like ripe grapes, their life-blood spattering upon His garments as He stands knee-deep in the vat, fiercely trampling them to ruin.
By virtue of Christ's death and resurrection, Christians obtain the grace of a new life.
Exell's Victorian homily isolates four charges against this congregation, each applicable to contemporary faith communities.
In Remember the Titans, Coach Boone forces his racially divided football team to room together, eat together, learn each other's stories. Gary and Julius—white captain and Black leader—start as enemies and become brothers.
This is no mere sentiment, but the living testimony of regeneration itself.
Christ is King in Zion—the sole Sovereign of His Church by the Father's appointment and ordination.
Exell's Victorian exposition illuminates two critical spiritual failures.
First, the *phobos* (fear) of preparation for judgment itself.
First, the brotherhood of souls demands mutual burden-bearing.
So too the soul suffers from inherent liability to weakness, weariness, mistrust of God, and inability to rest upon His precious promises.
Exell observed in *The Biblical Illustrator* (1887), "All help is dangerous for any of us when there is absence of mutuality." Consider a household where one daughter bears all the work while others remain idle; such arrangement breeds neither health...