Money can’t buy love, they say, but that’s manifestly false. People ‘buy’ friendship and love all the time. The grossest forms of this, of course, are sex slavery, prostitution, and pseudo-prostitution. We live in a world where riches get you friends....

I might, as I have probably done in other parts of this series, focus on the ways in which God has woven this into the earth, and to some extent, those mechanisms will....

No man has more friends than when his star is in ascendance, when his hand is on the scepter, when his paycheck is freshly cashed. A ‘fair-weather friend’ is a common sight. The halls of power....

When we hit our rock bottom, we will do anything except admit that we’re to blame. This talent we inherited from Adam, and this talent we pass along to our children. Everybody can be to blame, except....

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. It’s a dangerous thing to desire without knowing what we desire, a recipe for folly, destruction, and disaster. Yet we’re all too prone to the error. We’re all too prone....

Integrity is the quality of holding together under pressure, in all circumstances, as a whole. A building’s integrity lies in its ability to stay upright and undeformed through wind and storm and weight and age. A plan’s integrity lies in its parts all cohering....

In a world so rough and fractured as this we poor sons of Adam create, it is easy to despair of finding true relationship, to despise all search for it, to expect treachery and therefore eschew covenant. I cannot be....

Above all else, men desire to be rulers of themselves. This statement holds for the righteous and the wicked- except that these two understand rulership in very different ways. The righteous man would rule....

He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. [ Proverbs 18:22 ] The two great passions of mankind are marriage and death. In ‘marriage’ is gathered not merely itself but family, sex, and all relationship with our fellow man, all authority and cooperation, the smallest thing which society is an outworking of; in ‘death’ is gathered not only itself but sin, violence, and all relationship with God, in relationship to whom all righteousness and unrigh

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits. [ Proverbs 18:21 ] James 2 is the standard passage for pressing home the power and danger of the tongue, but God didn’t wait till the New Testament’s latter half to give us that knowledge. In the Garden, God’s tongue brought life and the potential of death (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 6:23, 7:7-10). In the Garden, Adam ordered the world with his tongue (Gen. 2:19). Then, in the Garden Adam and Eve

Modernity is the domain of the expert. In the eyes of many, white lab coats ought to rule the world, deciding policy in government and running the church....

Strong relationships hold strong, and when they break, they break badly, brutally, and apparently irreparably. So when brothers find themselves in enmity....

People are a study in contradiction. On the one hand, we tend to want control, to decide what happens to us and to everybody else. On the other hand, we hate responsibility, in our fallen state; we strongly dislike....

Getting both sides of the story is an absolutely essential part of argument and judgement; it’s also a choice we don't like to make. We get a first impression, and we stick with it, for pride and other reasons. Particularly if we've....

One principle of reading Proverbs is that recognition is not endorsement. The way things are is often not the way they should be. Proverbs deals with reality; Proverbs teaches us....

Fire does not burn without fuel; smoke does not rise without fire. Every result has a prerequisite and a cause, leading back to Him....

A man's spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear? [ Proverbs 18:14 ] A heart attack can be triggered by shock, spiritual triggering physical. Anger or despair can be elicited by a long-running injury, physical triggering spiritual. In daily life, a ray of light, impacting the eye, can cause the spirit to perceive beauty- of a flower, a story, another person. Words, heard or written, can bring wise counsel, and wise counsel can become words. We humans liv

If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame. [ Proverbs 18:13 ] The classic error in math, the one that plagues me at least, is swapping one sign for another. Subtraction becomes addition, addition becomes multiplication, a negative number becomes positive. On multiple choice tests, too, my constant bane is missing that one ‘not’ which changes the expected answer 180 degrees. I’m sure that you too can think of times, academic or social, where you’ve an

We all know that humility is good. The question that comes after that doesn’t have quite so clear an answer: what is humility? Often we equate it with self-debasement or....

We attach great importance to the here and now. The past and the future often fall out of sight, all our thought turned to the foreground. Then the past comes into focus....