Daily Meditation

Starting at the Beginning

Ligonier Ministries

The word philosophy derives from a combination of two Greek words: phileo (“to love”) and sophia (“wisdom”). Literally, philosophy means “love of wisdom.” The ancient Greeks, who are usually credited with developing the science of philosophy, were also concerned with abstract metaphysics and epistemology. However, the question of ethics was of paramount importance to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates sought to reduce virtue or ethics to “right knowledge.” Plato sought the ultimate standard of the good.

The Jewish thinkers of the Old Testament did little in the area of metaphysical speculation. The Scriptures begin with the affirmation of God, known not via intellectual speculation but by His own revelatory self-disclosure.

The overarching concern of Jewish philosophy was indeed a love of wisdom. The wisdom in view, however, was not speculative but practical. Hebrew wisdom was concerned with life, with living a life pleasing to God. The Jewish thinker asked: “What does obedience involve? How is God glorified in my behavior?” Because of this focus, the Old Testament declared that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10).

Coram Deo

Reflect on these questions: What does obedience involve? How is God glorified in your behavior?

Passages for Further Study

Psalm 51:6
Psalm 90:12
Proverbs 8:12

Refusing to Bow To Every "Whim and Fancy"

Sage Advice

The following piece of advice and direction to a teenager has been making the rounds on the Net.  The precise provenance is not established.  Nevertheless, its direction and advice is pretty timely.  There are few parents of teenagers who would not be found nodding affirmatively.  Unless, of course, one happened to be a metro-sexual parent who had long ago departed from the realms of received wisdom and common sense.

Open Letter to Teen-ager

Always we hear the plaintive cry of the teen-ager. What can we do?…Where can we go?

The answer is GO HOME!

Hang the storm windows, paint the woodwork. Rake the leaves, mow the lawn, shovel the walk. Wash the car, learn to cook, scrub some floors. Repair the sink, build a boat, get a job.

Help the minister, priest, or rabbi, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army. Visit the sick, assist the poor, study your lessons. And then when you are through – and not too tired – read a book.

Your parents do not owe you entertainment. Your city or village does not owe you recreational facilities.  The world does not owe you a living…You owe the world something.  You owe it your time and your energy and your talents so that no one will be at war or in poverty or sick or lonely again.

Grow up; quit being a crybaby. Get out of your dream world and develop a backbone, not a wishbone, and start acting like a man or a lady.  You’re supposed to be mature enough to accept some of the responsibility your parents have carried for years.

They have nursed, protected, helped, appealed, begged, excused, tolerated and denied themselves needed comforts so that you could have every benefit. This they have done gladly, for you are their dearest treasure.

But now, you have no right to expect them to bow to every whim and fancy just because selfish ego instead of common sense dominates your personality, thinking and request.

In Heaven’s name, grow up and go home!

– South Bend Tribune, Sunday, Dec. 6, 1959.

Glory and Beauty That Continues to Astound

Balaam's Ass and the Coming Glories

One of our favourite novels is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  The central character is an old, declining minister, John Ames.  Having married later in life, he is using his final days to write a long letter to his seven year old son.  He is attempting to put on paper what he would have liked to convey to his son as he grew up into manhood.

There are some beautiful and lyrical passages in the book.  Here is one of them:

This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success.  I don't know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven.  I could never have imagined this world if I hadn't spent almost eight decades walking around in it.  People talk about how wonderful the world seem to children, and that's true enough.  But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.  That's clearer to me every day. 

Every morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes--old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable.  What of me will I still have?  Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion.  Like Balaam's ass, it's seen the angel I haven't seen yet, and it's lying down in the path.   [Gilead, (New York: Picador, 2004),  p.66f.]

We find ourselves smiling at Ames's description of physical decline compared to Balaam's ass seeing the angel and lying down in the path.   We find ourselves challenged not to become a jaded eye, but to maintain that sense of wonder, joy, and delight in the glory of this world--which, though fallen--still astounds with its glory, and beauty, and complexity. 

For the Christian, growing old should never be an occasion for any loss of wonder and delight in God and His creation.  It should make us anticipate with great excitement the joy of seeing this glorious creation re-established, re-made--even better than Eden in its original and initial splendour.  And if we understand these things correctly, and embrace the glory of Christ's total re-creation of the universe, we will continue to be be delighted at the glories and wonders of this world as our bodies, like Balaam's ass, gradually lie down in the path. 

This, too, is part of the significance of Advent.

Euthanasia and the Love of Death

The Netherlands Recommissions the Ovens of Belsen

In Proverbs 8, Divine Wisdom is personified and calls out to human societies everywhere.

Does not wisdom call?
    Does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights beside the way,
    at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
    at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:
“To you, O men, I call,
    and my cry is to the children of man.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
    O fools, learn sense.
Hear, for I will speak noble things,
    and from my lips will come what is right,
for my mouth will utter truth;
    wickedness is an abomination to my lips. [Proverbs 8: 1-7]

Wisdom, divine wisdom, is crying out every day to humanity.  But men are weak, stubborn, and foolish.  Men, in vast arrogance, think they can ignore the Living God and forge their own path and make up their own wisdom.  But the cry of Wisdom ends on a final, determinative climax:

For whoever finds me finds life
    and obtains favour from the Lord,
but he who fails to find me injures himself;
    all who hate me love death.

Those who shut their ears to God experience self-inflicted injury; those who hate God's wisdom love death.   At first glance some may advance the idea that "loving death" is a mere figure of speech, possibly an example of hyperbole.  But as humanism gains strength throughout the post-Christian West it is becoming literally true.  There is a growing love of death, as opposed to living and life.

Emma Elliott Freire writes:

Our Disease of Discontent

The Good Life

Where can wisdom, joy, and peace be found in the monotony of daily life?  The Book of Ecclesiastes has much to teach us about what is, in effect, the daily experience of  most of our lives: the dull drudgery of existence.  But it is teaching not understood by many in the West.  It represents our particular curse.

 For most Western cultures, drudgery is a calling to be pursued by machines, not souls.  Therefore, there is a subterranean discontent, a roiling of soul, because we cannot escape the tedium of life, its repetitiveness, nor its dullness.  For so many in the West, life is one long boring monotony interspersed by seasons of desperate excitement originating from the occasional spectacle of entertainment.  The Western soul is deeply discontented.

Here is the biblical perspective on dull monotonies:

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. [Ecclesiastes 3:9-13]

What is God's gift to man?  It is that he should accept his limitations, as Clint Eastwood so sagely remarked in one of his movies,  and learn to live joyfully all his days, taking pleasure in his eating, his drinking and his toil.  All of these, our entire existence, is God's gift to man.  Seeing this, learning it, accepting it is the path of life--as we learn to worship God and His gifts in the (otherwise) mundane monotony.  When we do this, the mundane life becomes a glorious uplifting symphony of praise and worship to our Lord.

In his book, Recovering Eden, Zack Erswine takes up these themes. Speaking of our "lot" in life, he remarks:

Daily Devotional

When Reason Serves Rebellion

The sluggard says, “There is a lion outside! I shall be slain in the streets!” (Proverbs 22:13)

John Piper

This is not what I expected the proverb to say. I would have expected it to say “The coward says, ‘There is a lion outside! I shall be slain in the streets!’” But it says, “sluggard,” not “coward.” So the controlling emotion here is laziness, not fear.

But what does laziness have to do with the danger of a lion in the street? We don't say, “This man is too lazy to go do his work because there is a lion outside.”  The point is that the sluggard creates imaginary circumstances to justify not doing his work, and thus shifts the focus from the vice of his laziness to the danger of lions. No one will approve his staying in the house all day just because he is lazy.

One profound biblical insight we need to know is that our heart exploits our mind to justify what the heart wants. That is, our deepest desires precede the rational functioning of our minds and incline the mind to perceive and think in a way that will make the desires look right.  This is what the sluggard is doing. He deeply desires to stay at home and not work. There is no good reason to stay at home. So what does he do? Does he overcome his bad desire? No, he uses his mind to create unreal circumstances to justify his desire.

Doing the evil we love makes us hostile to the light of truth. In this condition the mind becomes a factory of half-truths, equivocations, sophistries, evasions and lies — anything to protect the evil desires of the heart from exposure and destruction.

Consider and be wise.

Modern Words

Downward Progress

We were intrigued the other day to read what was intended to be a damning criticism of a US politician.

The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.

 "More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said.  “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."

Imagine we attended Harvard Law School as a tyro, but with a deep conviction that the world was over 70 percent ocean.  Now, years later, replete with a Harvard Law degree, years of life experience, and presumably wiser, we still hold the same view: that the earth's surface is predominately water.  Critics could doubtless allege that we were closed minded, of "calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world." 

Whilst the slur would be expectorated full of sound and fury, it would signify precisely nothing.  Well, actually, it would signify something about the person doing the slurring.  Let's deconstruct.

Cooking and Counting 

Goo-Mongers - Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 13 July 2012

One of the charges that is laid at my feet with some regularity is that I am an autodidact, unaccountable to no one, and that this unfortunate fact makes me pop off from time to time, and to do so in ways that are clean contrary to what is taught by the certified experts and gatekeepers.

There is a lot going on here, not the least of which is the confusion of certification with education. But that part of it is another topic for another day. For the present, I would like to present a brief explanation and defense for what I would describe as the biblical approach to being contrarian.

"I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts" (Ps. 119:99-100).

This approach eliminates the cocksure sophomore as well as the argumentative crank.

A Sad Passing

Four Step-Brothers Have Inherited

From an obituary printed in the London Times . . .

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair; and,
- Maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense went into serious decline when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. His health declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense also suffered a severe beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

Arrogance of the "Educated" Class

Labouring Under a Regimen of Fools

The Scriptures make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. To know something is not the same as being wise with respect to it. For example, one may be highly educated in the intricacies of how a hunting rifle is constructed, its technical specifications, the peculiarities and functional applications of its calibre, the specifications of varieties of loads and what is superior for what conditions, its design provenance, the laws of physics operating when it is fired, and where that particular rifle fitted into the panoply of hunting rifles, past and present.

Knowing about all this does not ensure that the rifle will be used properly, safely, and effectively, without harm or damage to oneself or others. The Scripture warns of the dangers of knowledge when it says, "knowledge makes arrogant, but love builds up." (I Corinthians 8:1). In the Bible wisdom has to do not only with accurate and correct information, but the proper use and application of that knowledge to life. Wisdom is the happy condition of acting in a manner condign with the Creator as His sub-creator in His created world.

For many in the modern world, knowledge is the equivalence of wisdom. The our rationalistic age a wise person is the one who knows more, who is educated.
Thus, it has become increasingly common in political and social discourse in the United States (somewhat less so in New Zealand) to speak of the "educated classes" and the "uneducated classes": the former are superior, smarter, wiser, and better fitted to rule than the latter. Probably the most offensive thing about Sarah Palin to the liberal left in that country is that she is deemed uneducated, not part of the educated elite. She is therefore ignorant or stupid or both. She is consequently deemed completely unfit to be a political leader in the Republic.

In Biblical terms, however, it is possible that Palin may be deemed wise, and her political opponents, although Ivy League educated, fools. In Scriptural parlance, having read more books does not make one wise; it may merely mean one is a more loquacious polysyllabic fool. (In this vein, it is salutary to remember that when Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the Presidency, his political opponents and the media constantly portrayed him as simplistic and semi-idiotic. Without putting too fine a point on it, the narrative about Reagan was that he was dumb. He was not part of the educated class. Yet there are few now who would question that he was a highly effective President. In a similar vein, George Bush Jr was constantly caricatured as ignorant and stupid, a bumbling fool. Now with him there was a slight hiccup in the framing because he was a scion of the Ivy League: but he mangled his sentences (due to dyslexia) and that proved he was ignorant. Because he could not use words properly, he was obviously a fool, and was lampooned accordingly.)

In New Zealand, Anne Tolley, Minister of Education has regularly been smeared and attacked by her left wing political opponents, and by teacher unions as being ignorant, stupid, obtuse, and dumb. It is the same syndrome. Generally those on the left see themselves as being fundamentally smart because they are clever enough to promote statist solutions to every perceived problem. Their opponents are believed to be ignorant because either they don't see the problem in the first place, or if they do, they don't understand the only fundamental solution, which is always a state run, central government one.

Using the Bible's authoritative frame of reference we may acknowledge that a particular political leader may be highly educated, clever, smart, and intellectually sophisticated. But that does not make him or her wise: it may only serve to make them more dangerous. If, in their self-referencing cleverness, they pursue and enact laws and policies which are not condign with the Creator and His world, great damage will be done. Fools they will have proved to be.

Humility always attends the truly wise, for they recognize that they have no calling, authority, or right to attempt to remake the world in their own image. The truly wise consider themselves to be stewards, responsible to God, appointed and restricted to sub-creation, not original creation. The wise know they must work within God's frame; fools attempt to make a new world after their own image.

In our day, unfortunately, education often is inseparable from foolishness. To be under the aegis of the educated classes is not a pleasant prospect. For in our day, the "educated" are taught to be self-referential. They have been instructed that to be educated means that you have the knowledge, skills, insight and wisdom to be able to make a new world as it seems good to you. Because one is so endowed one deserves the people's respect and trust. One supposedly is therefore fit to lead and govern.

The Proverb says that one of the most difficult things for the earth to bear is when a slave becomes king. We can add to that. It is very difficult for a people to bear leaders who equate education with wisdom, who think that their education justifies their self-referential stupidity and foolishness.