Solomon and Christ

Oxen wagon train in South Africa.

Anyone who has had to muck out a barn knows what a nasty chore it is. When you maintain farm animals, you can expect to clean up manure, shovel feed, and other undesirable tasks. In the old days, when people needed animals to plow and to grind, there was no choice. The effort was amply repaid, however. The labor of the oxen and horses greatly multiplied productivity. The point of this proverb is that to get results we often have to put up with inconveniences.

The story of our salvation is a story of Christ putting up with inconveniences. There was the inconvenience of leaving his throne in heaven. There were the inconveniences of poverty, cold, hunger, overwork, tiredness, misunderstanding, vilification, and crucifixion. He endured all these things to demonstrate what it means to have absolute obedience to God the Father. His inconvenience resulted in our salvation and much multiplication of fruit.

Beasts savage Christians in the arena.

During the Roman persecutions in North Africa, many Christians so feared the danger and torments with which they were threatened, that they paid for false certificates, saying they had sacrificed to the emperor, when in fact they had not. Others refused this dodge as unworthy of their faith, and accepted whatever indignities their cruel captors inflicted.

In this they were like Christ. Although he shrank from the cross, as any man might have, yet he set his face to it and endured the nails, the jeers, the thirst and hours of gasping agony for our sakes. He showed a strength of purpose which Solomon could not have imagined when he wrote this. Christ’s fortitude in adversity has inspired every generation since.