Manhood is a Mindset. J. Colin Trisler
the best way to get to know God is through his word. Through disciplined and thorough Bible study, you will gain deeper insight into the character of God and you will develop a more intimate knowledge of him as your Heavenly Father. The more you study, the more you will grow in wisdom. And as you mature in your faith, you will come to know what it means to truly fear the Lord—and the more certain you will be of his unique involvement in your life.
vvv
Sinful fear stifles a man.
It freezes his mind and numbs his senses and renders him an ineffectual coward. Rational fear, however, is a righteous motivation that lights a spark within the wise man’s spirit. That spark kindles action, not cowardice. The man who lives with a rational fear of the Lord is the man who gives real-life proof of his respect for God at all times. He honors his Heavenly Father by thinking and acting within the well-lit borders of all that is righteous and good.
Son, you can likewise honor the image of God when you live in accord with the commandments of his word. He has put his statutes in place to protect his relationship with you. He is a good Father who values his relationship with you as his child. And his commands are proof of his love.
You can in turn prove your love for him by obeying those commands and respecting his authority.
But the call to obedience doesn’t stop with God. As Solomon and I will explain in the next letter, God expects you to take that same spirit of respect you have for him and extend it toward me, toward your mother, and toward the rules we’ve set in place to govern our home.
Love,
Dad
8. Lewis, On Stories, 39.
9. Although Solomon doesn’t explicitly identify his son as his intended audience in these opening verses, he goes on to single him out as his primary reader in v. 8 (letter 3).
10. The word equity as it is used here denotes personal integrity and is not to be confused with equality (particularly some impossible collectivized notion of equal distribution of outcomes). The Hebrew word ūmêšārîm (from meshar, translated here as equity) derives its meaning from the root word yāŝār which, according to Mounce, “usually denotes appropriate human conduct with respect to ethical norms and religious values. . . . This word also describes the straight, level pathway that believers are to walk, in contrast to the crooked and uneven pathway that the wicked follow” (Complete Expository Dictionary, 760–61). In their commentary on the book of Proverbs, scholars Carl F. Keil and Franz Delitzsch translate meshar as integrity to emphasize the word’s moral connotation, which involves “a way of thought and of conduct that is straight, i.e., according to what is right, true, i.e., without concealment, honest, i.e., true to duty and faithful to one’s word.” (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, 39). Also see https://biblehub.com/hebrew/4339.htm.
11. We’ll discuss in more specific detail how to accomplish this in your day-to-day relationships in letter 7.
12. As I will touch on in letter 6, the fear of God is rational, but the fear of men is irrational. The persecution of this world is shallow and fleeting, so never submit to the threats of bullies. Jesus called on his disciples to stand strong on the rock of their convictions, even in times of intense persecution. He warned them to fear not “those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28).
13. Mounce, Complete Expository Dictionary, 244.
14. This analogy is appropriate, as the biblical image for hell comes from a deep narrow gorge southeast of Jerusalem called the Valley of Ben Hinnom, which was used as a garbage dump. The Valley of Ben Hinnom “became known as a garbage dump, the place of destruction by fire in Jewish tradition. The Greek word gehenna, ‘hell,’ commonly used in the NT for the place of final punishment, is derived from the Hebrew name for this valley.” Ryken et al., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, 376.
15. Calvin, Institutes, 50.
16. God is immutable—that is, unchanging—by nature: “For I, the LORD, do not change” (Mal 3:6). Regarding God’s relationship to his nature, the philosopher Anselm pointed out that God does not possess his nature. Rather, he is his nature (Monologion and Proslogion, 30).
17. Job said God is “Wise in heart and mighty in strength,” that he possesses “wisdom and might,” and “to Him belong counsel and understanding” (Job 9:4; 12:13). The prophet Jeremiah said of God: “It is He who made the earth by His power, who established the world by His wisdom; and by His understanding He has stretched out the heavens” (Jer 10:12). Paul called God “the only wise God” (Rom 16:27), and David marveled at God’s intellect, proclaiming God’s thoughts to be intimate, timeless, and precious; and he glorified God’s knowledge as beyond definition (Ps 139:1–6).
18. Brunton, “The Wisdom of the World.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.