Loading...
287 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
Thomas Carlyle observed with prescience: "There is a great necessity indeed of getting a little more silent than we are.
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Proverbs.
First, the wicked man takes deliberate pains to devise evil, much as a miner searches for treasure in concealed depths.
Exell (1887) identifies flattery's essential character: it assumes all forms and colors, a universal countenance indifferent to truth.
There is more hope of a fool than of him." The Scriptures overflow with denunciations against human self-sufficiency, and Solomon's writings particularly stigmatize the absurdity and guilt of a self-willed, self-sufficient spirit.
Beneath apparent severity lies the spirit of true kindness.
The proverb's geography matters—the north wind's effect depends on terrain, just as righteous anger's effect depends on its proper object.
While all persons possess some sense of duty rooted deeply in the human heart, the constant strife between inclination and principle generates contradiction in conduct.
Mystery envelops human existence—commonest objects raise unanswerable questions—yet from this unknowable realm emerge four irreversible certainties.
First, to take partial views of His glorious gospel.
In Solomon's day, famines were frequent and trade communications uncertain between nations.
One such truth concerns a child's early accountability.
In his helplessness, he cast himself upon the Lord's hands, beseeching Adonai to deliver him from this destructive passion that marred his Christian witness.
God's method of punishment is not arbitrary cruelty but divine permission—He lets us punish ourselves.
Proverbs 4:7 declares wisdom the principal thing—not merely intellectual attainment, but the *summum bonum* (*chief good*) that elevates the human soul. Joseph S. Exell's 1887 exposition reveals wisdom's four-fold excellence. First, wisdom addresses man's spiritual state before Elohim. True happiness...
Under the Levitical dispensation, tithes, firstfruits, and firstlings were consecrated to the Lord.
Like the mythological Twins of Love, *eros* and *anteros*, Truth and Mercy weep together, smile together, sicken together, and recover jointly.
Proverbs 26:4 contrasts two forms of encounter: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." The ancient cynic Diogenes carried a lighted lantern through Athens at midday, searching for "a man"—a true friend....
The Hebrew rendering cuts deeper than arbitrary punishment: "He that despiseth the Word shall bring ruin on himself." This reveals a foundational law of Biblical revelation—that destruction is not merely God's external penalty imposed from above, but rather self-ruin, a...
Exell's Victorian homiletic analysis illuminates two essential truths about spiritual sustenance.
Most possess considerable advantages: the pure teaching of Scripture, the living voices of parents and ministers, and the Spirit of Elohim unfolding truth to conscience.
The previous verse (Proverbs 16:14) describes a king's anger as *messengers of death* — swift, certain, and irreversible.
The Victorian homiletics of Joseph Exell (1887) pressed a crucial distinction: godliness genuinely lengthens life, not through magic, but through obedience to Yahweh's wholesome laws.
The contempt of God's Sabbaths and disregard of ministerial instruction mark our age as spiritually perilous.
Boundaries were marked by corner-stones placed at the edges of fields.