Wisdom

Proverbs 3:5-6 gets used as a technique. Trust hard enough, and the right door opens.

Read it again. It does not promise information. It asks for trust, and it asks you to acknowledge God on the road you are actually walking.

“He will make straight your paths” is not a guarantee that the path will be short, or obvious, or the one you would have chosen. In Proverbs, a straight path is one that gets somewhere. The turns were never the problem.

Most decisions get made without certainty. Deciding without certainty is the ordinary condition of a creature who cannot see around corners.

You will decide without knowing. That is what deciding is.

Elijah has just watched fire fall on a mountain. Not long after, he is sitting under a desert shrub asking God to let him die.

He is sent to Horeb. A wind tears the rocks apart. Then an earthquake. Then fire. The text stops after each one to say that God was not in it.

Then comes a phrase translators have argued over for centuries: qol demamah daqqah. A still small voice. A sound of thin silence. A low whisper. No two versions render it the same way, which is itself worth noticing.

At that, Elijah covers his face and goes to the mouth of the cave.

Not every word from God arrives with weather. Some of it waits until the noise has finished.

Quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Notice the order, and notice that only the first one is meant to be fast. Most people who quote this verse are quoting it at somebody else, which is a small demonstration of the problem. Arguments are rarely lost for want of a good answer. They are lost because the answer was finished before the other person was. Holding a sentence takes more strength than letting it go. James writes to scattered congregations under real pressure, and he treats their anger as genuine. He asks them to be slow with it anyway.

“My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning.”

Then the psalm says “watchmen for the morning” again, immediately, back to back.

Hebrew repeats for emphasis. Read it aloud, though, and it sounds less like emphasis than like a man saying a thing twice because the night is long and he has run out of other words.

The image is deliberately unimpressive. A man on a wall. Standing there, watching a horizon that has looked the same for hours.

He is also certain. Morning will come. That much is settled.

Which makes his problem a narrow one. He knows how the night ends. He only has to get through the part before it.

Most of what we call waiting on God is closer to that than to suspense.

The psalm says it twice. Once for the watchman, and once for whoever is reading it at three in the morning.

It is not “money is the root of all evil.”

Paul wrote that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. The Greek has no article on “root”, so it is a root among others. And the subject is love, not money.

The misquote is convenient, because it lets two different people off the hook at once. It lets the person with little feel righteous by default, and it lets the person with much decide the verse is aimed at somebody else.

Paul is writing about appetite. Appetite does not check your balance before it starts.

The question is not what you have. It is what you would do to keep it.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”

Proverbs is describing a test, not recommending harshness.

Flattery costs nothing, which is why there is always so much of it in circulation. It is the cheapest thing one person can hand another.

The friend who tells you what you did not want to hear has spent something to do it. They put the friendship at risk on your behalf, knowing you might not thank them for it.

When did someone last tell you a hard thing to your face?

If you cannot remember, the problem may not be the people around you.

Naomi comes back to Bethlehem after ten years and a great deal of loss. The women of the town recognize her and say her name out loud.

She refuses it. “Do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.”

Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She means it literally. The name is a report.

Scripture does not correct her back. Nobody in the chapter tells her she is being ungrateful, or that she should think about what she still has, which is Ruth, standing right there beside her.

The book will end well. It does not get there by asking Naomi to pretend she is somewhere she has not arrived yet.

Luke tells you the target before the parable starts. Jesus told this one to people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on everyone else.

The Pharisee’s prayer is not a lie. He probably does fast twice a week. He probably does tithe on everything. Every claim he makes about himself may well be true.

That is what makes it uncomfortable. Dishonesty is not his problem. He has made himself the measure, and the measure only works when somebody is standing below him.

The other man will not raise his eyes. He asks for mercy and nothing else.

One of them goes home right with God, and it is not the one with the better record.