Gulag prisoners at work, courtesy of wikipedia.

This is owing to Christ. Such is his power in relationships that the contrast between a marriage of convenience and a marriage of true Christians can be enormous. Christianity elevated the status of women. For instance, by likening marriage to the relationship between Christ and the church, Christianity gave women a higher status than was normal in ancient societies. Anyone who studies anthropology and archaeology with honesty cannot help but notice the different status of women in non-Christian societies and in Christian.

Jan Amos Comenius, innovative educator.

In one of her poems, Emily Dickenson wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” I always interpreted this to mean to tell the truth but through simile, metaphor or other artistic devices that make knowledge more memorable and palatable—sweet lips that increase learning.

Centuries before Dickenson, the notable Christian educator Jan Amos Comenius had adopted a similar principle. He developed the first graded textbooks. These included pictures to make their content more memorable, a tactic followed by educators ever since.

Jesus also used the “slant” technique. He spoke in pithy parables and word illustrations, sarcasm, hyperbole, parallelism and other literary devices aimed to help his learners retain his word, including similes and metaphors. The results are some of the most memorable statements in all of literature, showing great wisdom and vividly illustrating the truths he wished to impart. He was the master exemplar of this proverb.

John F. Kennedy

When John F. Kennedy was president, he had Ambassador Stevenson present fake photos to “prove” the Bay of Pigs was not a CIA action but the work of disaffected Cubans. The photos were quickly exposed as forgeries. Adlai Stevenson, who had been misinformed by the White House, was publicly humiliated and the United States embarrassed.

Politicians are notorious for their lies, but are by no means the only liars. Every adulterer who tries to keep his affairs secret from his wife is in the same category and so are newsmen and newswomen who fake their stories, ignore crucial details, or spin events to make them mean the opposite of what they really mean. Businesses which promise quality that is lacking in their products are liars. Moviemakers who ignore the consequences of sin also practice deception. All such falsehood is an abomination to God. It suppresses the truth.

When God showed the world through Jesus Christ how He would behave as a man, one of his chief characteristics was truth. Thus Jesus went so far as to declare, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and asserted to Pilate, “For this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” Little wonder that God called from heaven, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.

Anne H. Judson, prudent wife.

When Adoniram Judson became a Christian, his father, a minister, immediately had visions of him becoming a notable pastor in the United States. Adoniram grievously disappointed him. He told his father he was leaving it all to go to India.

Shortly before sailing in 1812, Adoniram married Anne Hasseltine, a young woman who had been a socialite before her conversion. They wound up in Burma, where Adoniram was imprisoned and tortured. Although a new mother, Anne exhausted herself to preserve his life and succor him. She died soon after his release.

Adoniram could have taken the course his father wanted. Instead he took a harder path, on which he was accompanied by a wife from the Lord. The pair became household names in America.

Everything of the Father belongs to Christ. He also is preparing himself a bride without spot or wrinkle, a prudent wife.

Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, happy couple.

In the house of the righteous is much treasure, but in the revenues of the wicked is trouble. Proverbs 15:6.

When worldly church-goers hear the word “treasure,” they immediately assume the gold and silver kind are meant; but the person who knows Christ understands that something else is intended—treasures of love, joy, justice, wisdom, and peace. Christian homes, armies, societies and nations are distinguished by such treasures. Often physical treasures follow, too, because people who live well-regulated and honest lives tend to husband natural resources wisely and increase them.

For an example of a home filled with spiritual treasure, one can look to Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. The beauty of their affections and their godly oversight of their children were recorded by contemporaries. Evangelist George Whitefield was so impressed with the love he saw between the pair that he promptly determined to marry himself. His ill-advised union was not so happy.

One of the chief treasures of the Christian is contentment. The revenues that the wicked extract (often by unjust methods) do not bring them much happiness, not least because they constantly crave more and are never satisfied.

Christians enjoy spiritual treasures others can only crave. This is possible because of Jesus, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3) and who “became poor so that we might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9).” The deposit he has left us is the Holy Spirit, who resides in us, whom Paul likens to those clay pots in which the people of the Middle East stored documents and gems they wished to preserve.

The glory is departing.

Although it is doubtful more than 5 or 10% of Americans have ever been heart-Christians, there have been times when the Judeo-Christian ethic exerted considerable control over the United States. Other nations admired and looked up to us then and sought to imitate our ways.

This is much less true today, for we have become a people that chases every kind of sin, excess and folly. Where once we strove for political and spiritual freedom, today the urge of the masses is for sexual pleasure, degenerate music, vampirism and the occult. We pile excess upon excess and spend money we do not have as though there will never be a reckoning. The Muslims call us the Great Satan and much of the world holds us in contempt.

We have rejected Christ as king, and have lost all restraint. Jesus still calls us to take up our cross daily, warning that anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but those who lose it for his sake save it. A wicked nation plugs its ears and pursues another round of self-indulgence. How can these once noble states escape reproach when such is the face we turn to the world?

Stephen Hawking in a NASA photo.

I hope I never forget the thrill of insight I experienced as I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time. Hawking was one of the great physicists of our age. In Brief History he showed that just a tiny bit of matter less and our universe would have blown apart at creation. A tiny bit more, and it would have collapsed on itself. The amount is so tiny that Christian astronomer Hugh Ross holds up a dime to demonstrate how much we are talking about. Imagine—one dime’s worth of matter is all that stands between a habitable and inhabitable universe. My thrill was because I recognized God at work.

Likewise, science is showing us that many, many things must be just right for the earth to support human life. It has to be the right size, with the right orbit around the right kind of star, in the right region of the right kind of galaxy, with exactly right proportions of carbon and water, metals and gases. Two hundred or more factors are now known which have to be right for a planet to support carbon-based life (the only possible kind in our universe). The discovery of over three hundred planets around other stars in the last decade has shown us just how difficult it is to find those “just right” conditions together in one place at one time. Truly we see God’s wisdom at work in fashioning our world.

This is Jesus’ doing. Scripture is unequivocal that everything we see was made through Christ and for him. Indeed, it is he who is speaking as wisdom personified in Proverbs 8:22-36. The lesson of this is that if anyone of us is not living for him, we are out of synch with the purpose of the universe we live in.

Charles Simeon trembled to take the Lord's Supper without repentance.

Many of the people we admire as great historical Christians went through severe distress before their conversions, fearing God and his judgment. Perhaps best known of these was Martin Luther, whose agonies have been well documented. But David Brainerd, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Simeon, John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon and dozens of others might also be cited as examples. Perhaps God permitted them such anguish of soul that he might awaken in them a desire to rescue others from spiritual danger.

Charles Simeon’s dread fell upon him when he learned he was absolutely required to take communion at Cambridge. He knew that anyone who eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks damnation to himself. Many of the godless students did so without regard to their spiritual danger. Simeon quaked at the thought. “Conscience told me that, if I must go, I must repent and turn to God.” That act of repentance was the beginning of a walk with the Lord that led him by degrees to become a zealous college chaplain who captured the souls of many of England’s upper class students.

Jesus exemplified the fear of the Lord more than any person who has ever lived. Absolutely determined to obey God with his whole heart, he refused to cut a single corner or escape a single detail God had planned for him. He accepted hunger, thirst, rejection, cold, and even a cruel death rather than defy God by so much as a thoughtless word.

Among his notable sayings was this, “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: fear Him who, after the killing of the body has power to throw you into Hell. Yes, I say, fear Him.”

King Louis IX dispensing justice.

King Louis IX of France was named a saint just twenty-seven years after his death in part because he pled the cause of the little guy. He appointed just men to hear grievances throughout his kingdom. There are instances in which he punished powerful lords for contempt of the laws, compelling them to pay compensation to those they had trampled upon. If they were acting on an order from a previous king, he paid the compensation himself. As a consequence of his even-handedness, he was even asked to arbitrate the quarrels of other nations.

No one, however, embodied this dictum more faithfully than Christ, who not only spoke up for all of us, poor and needy in our sin, but died for us and remains our advocate to this hour in heaven.

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.