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222 illustrations
A paradox haunts this tetrarch: he reverenced God's faithful minister while remaining enslaved to his own appetites.
Exell's 1887 analysis reveals pride's devastating universality: it spares neither age nor circumstance, neither the healthy nor the diseased, neither public nor private life.
The *hierarchs* (ἱεράρχης, those holding highest spiritual rank), distinguished from secular magistrates as recorded in 1 Chronicles 24:6, faced humiliation beyond mere political defeat.
She is the chief of the four cardinal virtues and may rightly be termed the hinge that turns them all about: wisdom to direct, justice to correct, temperance to abstain, fortitude to sustain.
The Baptist rebuked Herod without provoking his anger, which reveals he spoke with gravity, temperance, sincerity, and genuine goodwill toward the king.
Solomon commands: "Be not thou envious against evil men, neither desire to be with them." The wise are least likely to covet such company, yet this counsel applies universally.
The imagery is deliberate: "Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well." Every person possesses independent spiritual resources.
The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom.—Piety a peculiar ornament to the aged. I. Who may properly be called old people? Old and young are relative terms admitting different significations. Children always think their parents are old. Those who...
Every person becomes his brother's keeper within this divine arrangement.
So too, a godly man will not gain—nor desire to gain—so much as a shoe-string through profaning the Sabbath with merchants, through fraud or deceit, through oppression or extortion, through usury (the devil's brokery), or through any unlawful or indirect...
This is no superficial cleanliness but a composition free from wrong admixture.
What does it mean to trust one's heart?
The essentials of a righteous man's character remain constant across all ages.
The Greek word *kapeleuo* (to peddle or retail for profit) originally described tavern keepers who adulterated wine—blending inferior stock, falsifying measures, deceiving customers for gain.
Delitzsch observed that holiness means separation from worldly corruption, superior in character.
Consider Nature itself: the earth was complete before Adonai created man in His own image.
The wise man offers five devastating consequences of adultery: it impoverishes men, threatens death, debauches the conscience with guilt, ruins reputation with perpetual infamy, and exposes the adulterer to the jealous husband's rage.
Man alone among creatures possesses articulate speech—the power to transmit thought from mind to mind.
First, we must preserve childlike simplicity of character—the freshness and moral innocence the gospel restores.
"It is not good to eat much honey," Solomon warns.
Joseph Parker, D.D., asks: Is there not stirring in the human heart the recognition that *I was meant to be a king*?
Strachey observed that the Medes cared not for gold, but for blood—even the blood of boys and infants.
A fear of Elohim for His own sake, and a fear of all things in reference to Him.
The Victorian scholar John Devotion, M.A., observed that genuine, unfeigned praise—bestowed for commendable conduct useful to the community—serves as a precise measure of moral and religious character.