Loading...
658 illustrations
The wisest person must contemplate two humbling truths: his knowledge against what remains unknown, and his knowledge against what he ought to have learned.
With the remaining timber, he carves a god and falls before it in worship.
The godly person cannot ethically pursue only individual welfare while the church of God languishes.
Under Tiberius, as in the Victorian era, three religious postures competed.
This Hebrew rebuke strikes at a weakness of human nature: we minimize the commonplace and exalt the distant.
Consider Nature itself: the earth was complete before Adonai created man in His own image.
This poetical vision describes not mere longevity, but a transformation of human capacity itself.
The wise *thirsty ground* drinks in rain; likewise, the wise in heart long for and live upon God's Word.
This rule is no external constraint imposed upon the believer; rather, it emerges from the new creature itself, the regenerate inner man transformed by the Spirit (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Elohim ordained that man should labour—not as punishment, but as partnership with the Divine Husbandman in cultivating the field of life.
First, *philostorgos* (kindly affection)—genuine concern born from love of God, not mere worldly sympathy.
Yet this humble labouring man, armed only with an ox-goad, slew them all.
The word carries an evil connotation—recalling the serpent's cunning in Genesis 3—yet here Solomon redeems it to mean discernment rather than deception.
The wealthy preserved winter ice and snow in cisterns to cool summer beverages.
Melancthon mourned in his day the divisions among Protestants, and sought to bring them together by the parable of wolves and dogs.
Peter's response cuts to the heart of a peculiar modern delusion: "Thy money perish with thee." Simon believed, as many in our commercial age believe, that wealth can purchase anything—even the gifts of Elohim.
In the autumn of 1937, a thirty-one-year-old German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat at his desk in Finkenwalde, a small town in Pomerania, putting the...
Thomson, D.D., witnessed in nineteenth-century Sidon diggers consumed by frenzy at the discovery of a single coin.
The wicked person is utterly corrupted: speech corrupt, habits corrupt, heart corrupt, influence corrupt.
Every congregation of Christ possesses an organic life distinct both from other churches and from the lives of individual members.
The *defilement* (*tum'ah*) he feared was twofold: the flesh had been offered to idols in Babylon's pagan temples, and the wine mingled with heathen libations.
Selfish in nature, he wears the costume of benevolence; false in speech, he uses the language of sincerity and truth.
When a ruler is surrounded by wise counsellors, both he and his people are safe.
Maclaren observes that these two apostles, 'principal members of the quartet which stood first among the Apostles,' needed each other precisely because they were unlike.