Psalm 42

Posted on March 21, 2015 by ehurst

Here we begin Book 2 in the Psalms. The theme of this series, ending with Psalm 72, seems contentious among Western scholars. A common remark raises the issue that Book 1 used God’s personal name Yahweh more often, while Book 2 emphasizes the title Elohim. Perhaps it’s best to let the reader decide. We note in passing scholars do seem to agree that this and the next psalm were written as one, but separated at some point later for reasons unknown. However, it does seem to change the subject a bit, so it makes a kind of sense.

David is in exile. He mentions the vicinity of Mount Hermon, meaning that he would be at the northern reaches of his kingdom, around the City of Dan. We know of no particular event from the biblical record that placed him there. The flight from Absalom’s revolt seems to have halted at Mahanaim, a city on the Jabbok River only one-third as far from Jerusalem as Mount Hermon would be. It may have been a bit of Hebrew hyperbole or simply a poetic image. The point is that David is about as far as possible from where he prefers to worship.

More modern songs are taken from this psalm. Picture a deer in the high desert, panting for water. This is how David feels about missing the worship in Jerusalem at the Tent of Meeting over the Ark of Covenant. Whatever else is going wrong in his life to drive him way out here on the edge of his kingdom, it all pales in comparison to his longing for proper worship. He recalls the grand parade that brought the Ark into the city.

He tells himself to pull it together, because this time of trouble will pass. While he is forced to remain way up here in the north, he can still call on God. Nonetheless, it’s rather like one wave of depression after another washing over him. It’s as if they are calling to each other where to find him. But the difference between sorrow and deep penitence is just a small step in his soul, as David remarks that God grants him His Law of Love in daytime and songs in the night.

Still, his call to God does not hide his misery at the embarrassment of his enemies mocking him. “Where is your God?” Thus, it’s more an insult to Jehovah than to David, but he still feels it. Once more, he tells himself to get over it. God will do things on His own schedule and it always turned out well for David in the past. There is always hope for the future.

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BLDJ: Chapter 8

Posted on March 21, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

8. What Now?

Now you understand all of David’s blather in Psalms about loving God’s Law; His Law is love itself. The single greatest reward for this kind of lawful living is more of that love coursing through your soul. It becomes its own reward.

For this reason, the laundry list of blessings attached to lawful living seem mere icing on the cake. We don’t obey to earn our pay, but because we would rather obey than be captured by material rewards. On the one hand, God’s glory comes in part when people see how God blesses those who embrace His character. On the other hand, we have a chance to speak the truth when people notice we miss out on some material blessings because we aren’t willing to play along in the worship of Mammon. We really don’t want for much when we view this life through the lens of our hearts. All we really want and need are opportunities to bless His name.

Thus, we recognize that all Creation exists as a mere tool for His glory. We embrace that and internalize it as our sole reason for living. You don’t need any other justification for taking up space; no other human has any valid claim on you as a resource outside of the pursuit of God’s glory. The same goes for the rest of Creation — nothing and no one has to justify their existence. In every encounter with things and people, the only question is what God requires of you for His glory, in part by our seeking to redeem the context as much as we are able. When all else fails, we are quite eager to go Home to be with Christ.

We have been warned that the world will only get worse as we drift toward the End of Time. A critical part of that warning is that we not somehow imagine that this broken world will actually see redemption. To the degree redemption happens, it is within our souls. We our the battlefield, not the world around us. It becomes necessary to understand the ancient concept of dominion: the portion of your world God has delivered into your stewardship. Most Westerners assume that, because there is some mythology of “consent of the governed” that God wants us to change the political situation. Often the excuse if “for our children.” This is pure worldliness.

While we may well fight for our children against an evil secular world, the greatest gift we can give them is an active sensory heart. Short of that, the best gift is to let them see our otherworldly focus. Exercise divine justice over the limits of what God has granted you. He most certainly did not grant us a democratic political philosophy. Again, that is a wholly pagan ideal based on rejecting God’s revelation. A proper divine justice takes place only within the limits of where your faith operates. That is, your faith and your heart ruling over your mind after you have purged the damned nonsense about political activism.

We have no intention of fixing this broken world, only using it for His glory. The human political situation is just as much entirely His domain as is the natural. Nothing within human power can bring His mercy and grace to bear on things. Rather, we operate within the context He gives to exploit every opportunity to bring Him glory. We should never be surprised that His promises seem shaved a bit by circumstances. The Laws of God living in you will change things, and nature will respond, as will human nature itself, but there remains a truculent grip on the mythology that blinds the world to the truth. People will often respond to the truth in spite of themselves, but only God can grant a living heart.

Jesus told His disciples:

“I give you a new commandment — to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples — if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

Naturally, the only way those early disciples could do this was by first sacrificially loving God. Rather, Jesus emphasized here His Second Commandment, adding the context of His sacrificial love, with the Cross looming before Him. It was the same as commanding them to love as God loves. And while John does not record it, we know that numerous references to that Last Supper elsewhere in the New Testament describe Jesus establishing a New Covenant based on that sacrifice. We celebrate that in our highly abbreviated version of the Passover Meal with our communion ritual.

But it’s all just words and rituals unless your heart comes to life and rules over your head. You can just about obey the Law of Noah without it, and perhaps reap some measure of shalom in worldly terms. However, you cannot truly obey His Law of Love in Christ unless something much better than your brain takes over.

The End

(Did I leave anything out?)

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BLDJ: Chapter 7

Posted on March 20, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

7. Hostile World

We live in a world that is hostile to divine justice. We are not surprised that Paul warns the Roman Christians of his day that all Creation cries out for relief (Romans 8:18-25). Most of humanity has no heart, so they are unable to hear it.

Your first step is to awaken your heart as a sensory organ. There are no nifty exercises or training anyone can put into clinical terms. You simply have to be aware that it is possible and pray for God to reveal it. The biggest threat is substituting emotion in place of it or somehow imagining that random crazy ideas come from your heart. That’s not how the Spirit works. While it is likely emotions will be stirred at least part of the time, it has to work when there is no emotion at all. It also contains no rational content, but is expressed always as a drive without words. It comes upon your soul as an imperative that demands you work out in your mind how to obey it.

A primary symptom that it is working is that you’ll hear that anguished cry of Creation for divine justice. It won’t be in your ears, but you’ll feel a pull on your heart. It doesn’t work the same for everyone, but if elements in our natural world do not seem vividly alive and rejoicing in the love of the Father, it’s probably not working. This is far more than merely enjoying the wonder and beauty of nature. Rather, you sense a drawing and kinship, a burden of responsibility, as if nature were very much alive and calling your name. Be aware that it works best with native natural flora and fauna, not something exotic or highly domesticated. There can easily be far more to it than that, but this is rather the minimum.

What is really exciting about this is when you encounter other people who share this gift. On the one hand, this is how the Lord made us all, and it is potentially available to every human alive on the planet. On the other hand, Western Civilization has been implacably hostile to this faculty from the beginning. Hostile to the notion of a sensory heart is hostile to God and to divine justice.

Nor should we expect to recover every aspect of divine justice. It will likely be a major struggle to train your own children to live this way against a Western society with so many diversions. ANE feudalism is the divine model, but we were warned it would be increasingly difficult to call people into God’s divine justice. Rather, this is chiefly for our own awareness. Instead, we should hope that we can nudge things here and there, incrementally instituting His moral character where possible. Whenever the context allows you some freedom, do not follow the path of our deeply fallen age. Always choose divine truth as the path of life itself, regardless how inexplicable it may be to others.

Then again, it never hurts to explain when possible. You’ll have to find your own way of telling the truth in any given context, though it begins with simply living by the wisdom of your own heart. The New Testament emphasizes the readiness to answer the inevitable questions. However, that doesn’t mean sometimes you really can’t tell them anything useful. Sometimes you simply have to allow them to label you as crazy or alien because your head is most assuredly in an alternate universe. If your calling is to be somewhat prophetic about it, then you’ll have to spend a lot of time learning how God wants you to present His truth. For most of us, it’s a major victory just recognizing that truth.

And it’s not as if your heart needs no training. Scripture often uses the language of searching your own heart before God, a figure of speech for striving to reshape your commitments to match every new discovery you make along the way. Unlike Jesus, we are not born fully morally developed. Even our hearts are cluttered with misunderstanding and false values. When you are striving for God’s favor, there is no shame in making adjustments every day. Indeed, we should find it disturbing if so much as two weeks pass without being somewhat a different person than before. A critical element in bringing Him glory is that we change, and how we go about it. We are alive and growing morally.

Catch the vision: You represent a tiny minority of humanity that has awakened all the faculties God granted us at Creation. We are natively in tune with reality itself. There are flaws in our discernment, but God is more concerned with the fundamental desire to please Him than with any success. As noted in Romans 13, it is that sacrificial love and communion with our world that fulfills the Laws of God. All Creation longs for us to grow and become stronger in our obedience and seeking His glory.

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Proverbs 4

Posted on March 19, 2015 by ehurst

While we know that Solomon received his unprecedented wisdom as a gift from God at his first wedding (1 Kings 3), Solomon insists a part of his inclination for it came from his father, David. Thus, he reaffirms the critical importance of inter-generational teaching by his own personal example. Sadly enough, his own heir Rehoboam didn’t take this advice and lost half his kingdom. However, this serves to reinforce the lesson of at least giving consideration to wisdom from your elders.

Then Solomon asserts in the strongest terms that moral wisdom is the single most important pursuit of humanity. Nothing else in life matters nearly as much as having moral discernment. This kind of wisdom can make you the pinnacle of humanity. Solomon compares it to a smoothly paved highway for your feet. Then he warns against the twisted path of wanton violence. Notice that he does not say all violence in wrong — Solomon was quite the warrior himself, as was his father — but uses Hebrew idioms for abusive violence. It is like the difference between walking in the light of mid-day versus stumbling around in the darkest night.

He then subtly reemphasizes the importance of learning from his mistakes. We know that Solomon compromised with moral purity because of his numerous marriages and got way off track. So he warns the generation following him that they don’t need to experiment with such folly to see where it leads. We get just a taste of his own bitter regrets here about letting your heart be misled. Watch your mouth and don’t be distracted from the straight and narrow.

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BLDJ: Chapter 6

Posted on March 19, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

6. Far Away

Let’s have just a moment of historical review here. So far as anybody can tell, among the current populations of Europe, the oldest occupants were Celts, Jutes, Frisians, Gauls and the like. Some few centuries after the time of Christ a horde of Germanic tribes invaded from farther east. Those tribes went by names like Franks, Burgundians, Vandals, Goths and so forth. They brought with them a mythology and culture that overwhelmed everything. They crashed head-on into the last vestiges of the old Greco-Roman Civilization and eventually absorbed what was left. That includes compromises with the existing church hierarchy that had long since paganized, more Greco-Roman than biblical. The result is that “European” means essentially Germanic with their ancient mythology and morals. But they were pagan morals, utterly contrary to those in the Bible.

Here in the US, our social mythology and morals are essentially Anglo-Saxon. Our religious mythology is somehow more like Norse, in the sense that we tend to view the God of the Bible like some grouchy Norse deity. How we got in this mess is a long story in another book (see my A Course in Biblical Mysticism for details). But it leaves us holding the system sacred, with the polar tendencies to either slavishly obey authorities under the system or use that reverence as an excuse to revolt and kill them all because we imagine the authorities violated it. Of course they have, but we aren’t supposed to notice.

We cynically reject the whole thing, but by no means would a follower of Christ with an active sensory heart prepare to resist our unjust Western governments. We’ve already covered the basic principle that God is no longer involved directly in politics. He uses human political entities for His inscrutable purposes, but our mission of walking in the truth has nothing to do with that. For the most part, we attempt to ignore human politics as much as possible.

So what do we make of Romans 13? It would help if folks read the whole chapter. Paul enunciates the basic guideline that you avoid provoking government officials. Do what they say — though no one in their right mind imagines Paul suggests slavish obedience to unconscionable demands. Instead, Paul eventually tells his readers in that same chapter (starting in verse 8) that the twin principles of divine sacrificial love for God and neighbor fulfills your obligations as far as God is concerned. Thus, we are right back where we started: Let your sensory heart rule, not your head. A conscience led by the heart trumps all human law.

If you pretend to evaluate government demands on the grounds of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, you cannot please God. If you make the effort to shift over to biblical justice, you begin to understand how flexible you must be within the context. There are precious few rules, but a massive load of personal accountability to a very Personal God.

Thus, any talk of objective human rights does not come from the Bible. It becomes blasphemous to suggest that there are rights granted by God; it wasn’t the God of the Bible. Rather, it’s yet another scheme dreamed up by pagan philosophers along with silly notions of popular consent for government. Political power does not arise justly from the popular will. In Scripture, government arises from the family relationship and the necessity for someone to stand before God accountable for His justice. Since no government anywhere in the world does it God’s way, it’s simple enough to note with holy cynicism that all power is from violence and deception. The language of human rights is simply another tool of deception and an excuse for oppression.

There is no such thing as fairness in the Bible. No two of us are alike and no two of us have the same need or capability in glorifying Him. He alone decides what each living soul must return to Him. The notion that any of this can be objectified with blanket rules or precepts is blasphemous, an open rejection of the God who made us. It requires denying that God can make a sensory heart by which we each find our own path to His favor. It requires denying the substance of His revelation.

Whatever it is we do in our daily lives under various modern secular states, we dare not embrace the language and concepts of those who flatly rejected the revelation of God.

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Great Car

Posted on March 18, 2015 by ehurst

… once I fix everything.

Again, this is not a fund-raiser, just letting my prayer partners know what’s happening. We got all the motor mounts replaced and it did solve some problems. In the process, we discovered that the wheel bearing on the right-front is loose. We can afford that, but not right now. However, today the starter died. Neither of these are surprising on a car with 180k miles. We are still thrilled with it, but you have to expect to fix stuff on used cars that were poorly maintained. So far as we can tell, the major components are still in great shape, many miles to go before it dies. Indeed, with all the repairs so far we are still way ahead compared to the market value.

We did get it towed home and that’s covered by our insurance company‘s roadside assistance plan. We love these people; they’ve been very good to us.

We have transportation arrangements for everything until the next payday. It’s just that this was an unpleasant surprise.

Update: Looks like it might be the starter relay, because ours tested bad. That’s a whole lot cheaper, but still not available locally.

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BLDJ: Chapter 5

Posted on March 18, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

5. Property

Unlike Western feudalism, where land was the primary object of ownership and the serfs simply belonged to the land same as animals, ANE feudalism is very personal and holds people as the primary treasure. Material wealth could be recovered easily enough, but people were the source of wealth, not land. It was a burden on the chiefs and other rulers to maintain justice so that Creation would actively support reasonable prosperity. The leaders’ moral stature was a major issue and could never be presumed simply by virtue of position or role. It was a heavy burden and men were rightly somewhat reluctant to accept the mission of shepherding more than their own immediate household. The head of household was responsible for bearing a very indulgent affection for everyone, and God required his blood for theirs if he failed.

While it would always be obvious that the nature and use of some physical objects prevented more than one person claiming it, most property was familial. In more primitive pastoral societies, it would be said that the chief owned all the flocks, but it meant that he was responsible for feeding, clothing and housing everyone in his extended household with those animals. Disowning a family member was serious business. It was quite rare because most problems resulted in either stern discipline within the household, or in such extreme measures as execution. Otherwise, it was share and share alike. When it’s all blood kin sharing, we don’t call it “communism.”

Furthermore, one could become family by covenant. A woman married into her husband’s family most of the time, and was thereby an equal member of the household. There were other forms of covenants with varying degrees of application, but in general, covenants were more binding than — took precedence over — blood kinship. It was a broadly recognized custom that a natural heir could be disinherited, but a covenant heir could not.

There was no such thing as contracts, which in theory bind property only. All business was personal in ANE feudalism. You weren’t permitted to invest without a blood kinship or covenant tie with the titular owner (and family) of a business or property. If you weren’t there to work it with your own hands, you had to send a family representative. This guaranteed a full bond of responsibility for all parties in both directions. There could be no such thing as property owned indirectly. Even rental was full personal ownership for a limited term. If you weren’t personally involved in occupying the property in some way, you didn’t own it and had no claim. Our modern property laws are pure perversion up against divine justice.

In similar fashion, various forms of liability were all personal. Our civil, tort and criminal justice systems are an ugly insult to Creation itself, and rather like poking God in the eye. We whine about slavery but our prison system is actually far worse than ANE slavery. We grant conflicting ownership claims and use conflicts as an excuse to enrich the powerful. Perhaps the greatest abomination of all is the notion that the state has any claim on the individual against the family. In a broad sense, God Himself permits violent resistance of government agents who interfere with domestic affairs. That doesn’t mean it will necessarily be effective, but that was never the point. It still requires you are sensitive to the context with your heart and understand the nature of divine justice. This crime of breeching the sanctity of the family structure alone justifies God destroying any nation.

In divine justice, there is no such thing as The State. If it isn’t the people directly involved, it cannot be a valid government in His eyes. Abstracting roles as if they were legitimate third parties is dehumanizing, a moral holocaust. In essence, no one has any legitimate say in your daily life unless they are kin by blood or covenant. If your government is not your family first and foremost, it is illegitimate by God’s revelation. You will never be property of the state in God’s eyes.

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Proverbs 3

Posted on March 17, 2015 by ehurst

What good does it do? What comes from committing your heart to God?

First, Solomon describes what it means to genuinely enter into the Covenant with God. We can be amused at the vast popularity of verses 5 and 6 for Bible memorization programs, but how they contradict the assumptions of the people most likely to memorize them. That is, Solomon describes a familial commitment under Eastern feudalism, with an approach to wisdom that denies propositional truth. He refers to the heart as a faculty above the intellect, and truth is beyond proposition. It makes no particular sense on a human level to offer God a tithe of your agricultural produce, yet it guarantees that nature will give you a bigger harvest when you do. Living from the heart is actually healthier, enriching your existence in ways that cannot be counted in your larder.

Solomon mentions how this feudal Father will discipline you as His own child. How could you rebel against someone who so clearly loves you? If there were no measures of discipline, it would only prove you were not standing in His favor.

Solomon again waxes lyrical about Wisdom the Good Woman, your sweetest and most faithful companion. More than all material wealth, make her precious to you. She was there at the moment of Creation, woven into the very fabric of all that exists. This is more of the parable pointing to God’s moral character — His Law — as the fundamental nature of reality itself. You dare not lose track of this.

Then we are treated to some examples of how wisdom makes us act in building a stable society. We are quick to share our resources with others in need because they are family. We aren’t looking for an excuse to make trouble for anyone; they’ll find enough on their own. Don’t covet what an evil man gains by his rejection of wisdom. Don’t let mere material wealth become a barrier between you and God. We are designed to know His will by instinct, but we have to work to keep that instinct in power over our lives. You cannot measure God’s favor with mere material prosperity.

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BLDJ: Chapter 4

Posted on March 17, 2015 by ehurst

In essence, the Law of Noah is hard-wired into human nature. That is, the Law of Noah reflects what God revealed as the best way to live after the Fall. It would prevent the necessity of another global destruction of the human race until the End of Time. It answers to the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden (Genesis 3:24), the revelation of God that is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). It is as much as we can know about the fundamental nature of reality as God created it.

Of course, man has done his best to obscure that instinctive knowledge. Placing human reason on the throne of the soul and silencing the heart has produced a plethora of cultural diversions from God’s truth. We struggle to peel away all the man-made trash to recover what Noah and his kin took for granted.

The first and most shocking necessity for Westerners to grasp is that we are hard-wired for Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. The Genesis narratives all assume this as the standard form of human government that was the one best answer to God’s demand in the Covenant of Noah. Someone has to bear the sword and execute those who forget that blood is sacred in God’s eyes. In the broader biblical context, it requires something horrific in the human soul to treat any bloodshed with casual indifference.

On the one hand, God mentioned to Noah in passing that, when gathering animals into the Ark, some were clean (“kosher”) but the rest were not. So Noah was to collect seven each of the clean animals, but only a breeding pair of all others. These were acceptable offerings and safe to eat. On the other hand, God also told Noah that he could hunt down any animal as necessary. Animals are not on par with humans. While the blood of animals is sacred enough to require they be drained before eating, human blood is even more sacred in the eyes of God. It was more than simply a dead heart that did not treat blood as sacred; it was a demonic threat to God’s Laws that anyone should refuse to respect life.

Here we note echoes of shalom that arose later under Moses. The whole point of having a government is to protect human life, but more, to safeguard social stability. The Hebrew word shalom is more than mere peace, but all the things necessary for a peaceful life. It’s another way of describing social stability. The whole point of government is to promote a stable life that lends itself to the same predictability that God promised Noah. If Noah would institute a stable social life under ANE feudal government, then God would provide a stable cycle of seasons. All the other forms of government man has dreamed up since then are inferior in God’s eyes, because every part of His revelation assumes the ANE feudal government and the ANE tribal social structure to go with it.

Thus, we note that ANE feudalism is not about land and physical possessions, but regards people as the greatest treasure. In the ancient world outside of Eden, where most of humanity now have to learn how to reawaken the sensory heart, and learn the moral purity necessary to get nature to cooperate in sustaining life and health, any community would need all the bodies they can get. More people living together in a single community means greater safety and comfort, and a better chance at the material prosperity necessary to live.

At the same time, they hardly objectified the value of human life as Western society does. We say “life is precious” but then use that phrase as an excuse to make vast stretches of humanity utterly miserable. This is an example of human reason perverting God’s revealed truth. If all you have is your reason, then you cannot help but get everything wrong. ANE feudalism is not slavish about keeping every human heart beating, but rather clings to the moral value of reducing human suffering to a minimum. Some human suffering is simply part of the Fall; there is a legitimate level of misery built into our existence. Along with that is a legitimate level of mortality. Westerners have a rabid hatred for death; it was simply a part of life in the ANE. There is no fear of death in a sensory heart, but there is a distaste for unnecessary human sorrow.

Thus, with the proper moral priority on minimizing the natural human sorrow, we find that whatever flaws there might be in ANE feudal government, nothing else man has dreamed up can come close to answering God’s demands. The only hope for satisfying the Law of Noah is that ANE feudal government and a tribal social structure. That is, you generally expect to live among your kinfolks in extended family households. In each household there is a dominant male head, with a supporting female head, and everyone knows your personal business. We have a very poor grasp of just how much freedom was still offered in that setting. It was messy and inefficient with lots of time wasted on trying to convince folks to go along on a vast wealth of details in daily life. But it was safe and supportive, and thus quite stable.

Meanwhile, by various means some families rose to a higher influence than others within a clan, and some men rose to greater prominence. It was organic, with customs simply minimizing the risk of past sorrows. At some point, there was always a male chief who took responsibility for recognizing that one of their clan was a threat to social stability. Whatever their conduct, if the malefactor could not be restrained and the damage contained, they were executed to prevent them destroying shalom for everyone else. It was always personal, and there was no passing the buck to some outsider. Each family cleaned up their own messes. The same basic idea was extended to when one of your kin threatened the shalom of some neighboring clan or tribe, as well. Depending on the nature of the offense, you would either execute them yourself or turn them over to their victims.

Again, the stark reality: No other system of government and family life will satisfy the Covenant of Noah. This was not some random happenstance. God designed and created the ANE feudal society as the one best way to meet human need, to meet the fundamental nature of our wiring, and to meet the nature of reality itself.

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Proverbs 2

Posted on March 16, 2015 by ehurst

To the untrained eye, this chapter seems almost pedantic. Solomon piles up the overlapping phrases again, trying to convince his readers that God is the source of all wisdom. Our problem in Western society is that we are so utterly convinced that spiritual wisdom is one thing, and morality almost another thing, but that we can get along through life just fine with our human wisdom regarding science and technology. What difference does it make to God how someone engineers next year’s car model? So long as there is nothing in the car company’s actions that warrant a boycott, what does that have to do with God?

Therein lies the issue. Even in Solomon’s day, there was a major problem with folks convinced they could use their human reason and wisdom to work out all kinds of things and not have to worry about divine wisdom all the time. So Solomon uses his position as the wisest man in history, at least up to that point in that part of the world, to counteract that false notion.

If you are going to deal with reality, it’s always best to start by asking the Person who made it that reality. Failing to start with God’s revealed moral truth means it won’t matter what you engineer, He won’t bless it. That may not have a noticeable effect, or at least not so much on a human time frame, but it makes a difference. So perhaps we should not have started that car company, never mind how the next model is engineered. Or maybe the whole concept of automobiles is really terribly wrong, and will eventually bring God’s wrath. You won’t know until you make it a point to ask God.

Start with the moral fabric of Creation, the moral character of God Himself, and everything else you do will make sense. Otherwise, nothing you do will make sense in this reality, despite how it may appear to human reason. Solomon hammers on it over and over in this chapter. He uses some rather obvious images that would tear at the fabric of a covenant society, like an adulteress. Everybody knows better, but some men just don’t know how to tell that head between their legs, “No.” And by this time in Israel’s history, there were plenty of well known examples of how that never quite worked out. Would you have liked to ask Solomon’s mother, Bathsheeba about her first-born?

The adulteress is named Folly. Get to know her from a distance.

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