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513 illustrations
The Jews, having exhausted rational debate with Jesus, abandoned discourse for violence.
What we ought to do, we owe to do; what we ought to be, we owe to be.
Solomon observes from wide experience that extremes in appearance and reality create spiritual peril—we must strive to *be* what we *seem*.
Yet Exell's Victorian commentary redirects this judgment toward the Church's calling, extracting three marks of the Christian standard-bearer.
Yet beneath such plausible disguises lie spiritual impostures that demand our careful discernment.
The Preacher warns against an obsession with others' opinions that fragments the soul.
Moses and Pharaoh understood this as warfare between supernatural powers.
First, it demands a *specific pursuit* (*zēteō* – to seek diligently).
This command demands reading with utmost attention, diligence, and devotion—weeping as John did until the sealed book was opened, digging deep in the mine of Scripture for the mind of God, and holding it fast lest it slip away.
They possessed no human sympathy for the sufferer whom hope deferred had made sick and hopeless.
The Word visited men before the Incarnation through nature and conscience, came fully at the Incarnation, and still comes through the Spirit who interprets His name (John 14:25; 16:13).
First, the physical: Yahweh fashioned our sensory organs, yet some men deny His authorship, attributing ear and eye to gradual evolutionary development.
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.
Like the mythological Twins of Love, *eros* and *anteros*, Truth and Mercy weep together, smile together, sicken together, and recover jointly.
When Elohim displays His supremacy through knowledge—by announcing events before they occur—He addresses our judgment directly, without the bewilderment that miracles may produce.
This contrast illuminates how Elohim accommodates His truth to each person's capacity to receive it.
This declaration from Psalm 10:7 captures a foundational truth: *dikaiosyne* (righteousness) is not merely a divine attribute among many, but the quality binding all of Elohim's perfections into perfect unity.
No kingdom—evil or good—consciously engineers its own destruction.
Joseph Parker, D.D., observes that instruction often begins with negatives—teaching children what they must not do.
Yet Nathan the prophet was constrained to deliver a startling word from Yahweh: the request would be denied.
Exell, in *The Biblical Illustrator* (1887), distinguishes three dimensions of this sacred duty.
The outward event communicates spiritual and religious truth through what he calls the 'semi-transparent' visible fact.
The Victorians, with Bible in hand, understood that Yahweh—who is "wise in counsel, benevolent in purpose, and almighty in power"—employs even the most destructive forces of nature as ministers of His will.
Since He is full of mercy Himself, He delights when we exercise the same toward our fellow creatures.