Stupidity

For through wisdom your days will be many,
and years will be added to your life.
Proverbs 9:11

The abundant stupidity that is present in the great majority of people has always been an inexhaustible mine of inspiration for comedians. It is enough to mention the vast amount of jokes whose characters are Polish, Irish, Newfies, etc., with our apologies to the people with these demonyms. Although from a humorous point of view it is quite funny, from the spiritual point of view it is very sad and unfortunate. At every turn there are people who are killed or seriously injured by acting in a stupid or foolish way. Foolishness and poor judgment are the reasons why these people now suffer or lie to rest somewhere in a cemetery. However, the responsibility for acting foolish lies solely with each individual who has voluntarily decided to act that way by paying attention to what his nature tells him. His nature, being corrupt and sinful, can only recommend this person to behave silly and insolently.

Wisdom has been calling all these people in various ways and by different means and all who heeded her call were able to benefit with many blessings. Those who have ignored her call have fallen into severe suffering or are about to do. The word of God has always been available for continuous reading  and a systematic study of it will increase our wisdom. However, mankind has chosen to live by the foolish ideas of modern and postmodern philosophers that only bring anguish and despair upon themselves. If you love life you should act with wisdom. James, the brother of the Lord Jesus, wrote: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” What are you waiting to ask for what is within your reach? Remember that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Only to God be the glory!

Destiny

How useless to spread a net
where every bird can see it!
These men lie in wait for their own blood;
they ambush only themselves!
Proverbs 1:17-18

The fate of those who have decided to pursue a life of crime and perversion is announced and will come in due course. It is quite possible that those who do wrong are aware of what awaits them for their wrongdoing and yet little they care about their eternal future. They continue to act maliciously causing all the damage they can do to achieve their personal goals in this world. Not only they will do all the evil they may cause bu they will also invite those who do not act like them to accompany them in their outrages. They believe that if all do wrong their responsibility will be diluted in the collective responsibility. They do not understand that the judgment that will come is a personal one and saying that the wrong they did is no different from the bad that others will not work as an excuse or mitigating factor to reduce their sentence.

Let us not be convinced by these people to pursue evil purposes. Our destination is the heavenly country where the throne of God and the Lamb is. Our heritage is love, joy and peace in God’s presence for eternity. Our future is assured by Him who gave His life for us on a Roman cross. We have nothing to do with darkness or with the people who hide in them to satisfy their appetites and passions. Eternal life awaits for us and weeping and gnashing of teeth in eternal punishment awaits for them. Let’s look at the future with confidence and act with gratitude and loyalty to Him who rescued us from darkness to bring us into His marvelous light, our beloved Lord Jesus Christ. Only to God be the glory!

Contentment

A faithful person will be richly blessed,
but one eager to get rich will not go unpunished.
Proverbs 28:20

A characteristic of human nature is the uncontrollable desire to accumulate property and wealth. What seems to have begun as a simple but necessary self-preservation instinct, storing supplies for the days of scarcity, is uncontrollably unleashed in a compulsion for the accumulation of wealth, which goes beyond what we really need to live a comfortable and secure life. The prevailing economic style of our consumer society takes full advantage of this weakness of character and we get bombarded with advertising and promotion of lifestyles that only a few can achieve and maintain. Competitiveness, which has also been instilled from our earliest infancy is combined with this merciless advertisement attack to make us bend our knees before the despicable idol of money . Every way we look at it we lose because our own forces are nothing compared with the strength of the message that the world uses to control our lives.

The Lord Jesus warned us: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” The apostle Paul complemented: “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” The times of shortage we have been given are not for us to endeavor to leave them but to learn “what it is to be in need, and to know what it is to have plenty. To learn the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” These things also happen to us so that Christ’s power is perfected in our weakness. Let us, then, be forever grateful for the circumstances we have to live, for God has everything under his perfect control and everything that happens to us is for our own good. Only to God be the glory!

The joy of hope

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

There are things that are easily and quickly attained and there are other things that take a much longer time to accomplish. Usually the best things are those that take longer to be achieved. Hence, God has given us hope. Hope is to put our eyes on reaching that one day, which is not necessarily just around the corner, when all will be completed. All this looks all right until we put our hope in things that do not suit us. That’s where the problems begin because as our heavenly Father does not allow things to happen to us that do not work out for our good, that which does not suit us we will never achieve and it will be a cause for frustration. Since most do not understand God’s plan for our lives we put our hope in many things that are not aligned with the strategy and the perfect will of God, hence our problems and tribulations.

The word of God is full of fine promises the Lord Almighty has prepared with great love for all of us His children for us to enjoy them in due course. To know those promises we must read the word of God regularly and with an attitude of obedience and respect. For now, we rejoice in knowing that some day, which is not to far, all that causes pain and concern will disappear to give way to joy and happiness. However, we must not forget that these promises belong to those who have accepted Christ as Savior and Lord and those who honor Him by being obedient and showing good behavior.Only to God be the glory!

Live hope

“But now, Lord, what do I look for?
My hope is in you.
Psalm 39:7

If anyone needs an example of how to put his hope in God, just remember the last words of our Lord Jesus Christ as He hung on the tree seconds before submitting His spirit, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!” We know that Jesus’ hope was honored by God because on the third day, God raised Him from the grave, freeing Him from the chains of death and giving Him absolute victory over the great enemy of mankind and antithesis of all that Jesus Christ means to all creation. The Lord said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” The Lord, who is life Himself, could not be bound by death because God is above all things for He is the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen.

When you think that everything has failed and you have no more hope, approach the only one who truly you can go to and who will never disappoint you. He is our hope. We long for His return to get rid of this physical body full of sin and destined to fall into the clutches of death. Let us say together with the Psalmist King David: “I put my hope in you!” And let us rejoice like David also saying: “I put on the Lord all my hope, he leaned toward me and heard my cry. He took me from the pit of death, the mud and mire, and set my feet upon a rock, and planted me on solid ground. He put in my mouth a new song, a hymn of praise to our God.” Only to God be the glory!

Evil always loses

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:6

I can imagine how the Jewish religious leaders who were responsible for convincing the crowd that demanded Pilate the indignant crucifixion of the righteous, once having witnessed the bloody execution and confirmed that the humble carpenter would not be any longer a nuisance to them, returned to their homes to begin the Sabbath that Moses had instructed them to follow by orders of God himself. They should have arrived home minutes before sundown to start the day of rest. They must have felt very pleased to have achieved the goal that they had long had committed themselves to take the life of the humble but popular and dangerous (for them) Galilean leader. They should have eaten that night with great pleasure and joy because they believed that their problems had been solved once and for all. Little could they imagine that him who had died on the cross a few hours before was whom they had been waiting for so long and who was the fulfillment of the promise of freedom given to the people by God.

Just the night before they had held the annual ritual of the Passover, that is the commemoration of the protection with which God covered the people of Israel when the Angel of the Lord fulfilled the ultimate measure of pressure on Pharaoh to let free the people chosen by God. Little could they imagine that lamb that they were chewing on the night before was the sign of the true Lamb of God that few hours before had been sacrificed for all, Jews and non Jews. Like Satan, their guide, they were glad to see how things were going. By no means they came to suspect that the next day, the death that they had used to get rid of the teacher from Nazareth would be defeated forever. May the glory of the resurrection of the Lord always prevails over the sadness of the painful and bloody sacrifice which the Lord had to go through to rescue us from sin and death. Only to God be the glory!

Vital salvation

Wisdom will save you also from the adulterous woman,
from the wayward woman with her seductive words,
who has left the partner of her youth
and ignored the covenant she made before God.
Proverbs 2:16-17

For man it has always been a mystery what happens in the mind of a woman. Even more mysterious is what happens in the mind of an unfaithful wife. Everything she does to get away with it and give vent to her carnal passions even at risk of the stability of her marriage is beyond comprehension. The typical arguments that are invoked to “justify” an infidelity, namely hormone unbalance, quality of parenting received, examples watched at childhood and peer pressure, are forces that may exert certain influence but are not the fundamental reason for what happened. Underlying everything is the sinful nature of man. Another way to describe it is the weakness of the flesh. In marriage the man demands and deserves respect as a woman requires and deserves love. Obviously. adulterous behavior presents a stark contrast with the respect due to her husband.

Although adultery seems to have become something typical for human beings in all cultures, this does not make it less harmful and abhorrent. He or she who maintains an adulterous relationship can not say that he or she is being controlled by the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, that person is being absolutely controlled by his flesh, the world and Satan, that is, it is totally in the hands of the enemy. The apostle Paul wrote: “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Let us forget, then, the past and let us run towards our heavenly future state, always obeying God’s precepts. Only to God be the glory!

Hidden treasure

Her husband has full confidence in her 
and lacks nothing of value.
Proverbs 31:11

Every day I bless God for giving me an exemplary wife. In fact there are few people who can make this claim, not because their wives ares not exemplary but because in general husbands fail to appreciate what God has given them. In the Latino environment, Latin in the broad and true sense of the word, ie all those people whose language comes from the Latin of the Romans, and also in the Anglo-Saxon culture, is very common for men to hold the view that a good woman is one that quietly accepts all the verbal and physical abuse and infidelities committed by the husband; degrading the wife to the level of a beast of burden. For Latino men an exemplary woman is one who identifies with that song from the Colombian singer Shakira, “Blind, deaf and dumb.” This wrong perception of the qualities of the female partner is the cause of innumerable conflicts and disagreements that end up eroding the unity of marriage and its stability over time.

Husbands, I recommend that you take a short time of your busy life to stop and assess the blessing God has granted you through your wives. Like King Lemuel ─another nome de plume of King Solomon, make a list of all the virtues that you can see in your wife and please do not do this hastily but with the hand on your heart and taking all the time that need be. I am sure that after completing the list you will be pleasantly surprised by the accumulation of virtues that your wife owns and which you probably had not appreciated before as a whole. Then give thanks to God and to your wife for being always by your side. Remember that marriage implies that the two of you become one flesh and that together with the help of the main column of your marriage which is Christ the Lord you two build the house that will not fall despite the winds, rains and floods because the house has been built on the rock that is Christ. Only to God be the glory!

The joy of fear

Fear the LORD, you his holy people,
for those who fear him lack nothing.
Psalm 34:9

The concept of the fear of God is something that many people have trouble understanding. When they read the word fear they immediately associate it with dread and horror. They think that walking in the fear of God is living constantly scared and afraid that God will punish them. Many try to contrast the fear of God with the teachings of love that our Lord Jesus Christ gave and they have even tried to make others believe that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament by making one a being of wrath and the other a being of love. This is precisely where they get more confused because they can not understand that on God love and mercy as wrath and justice can coexist. What allows these conflicting concepts to be consistent in the person of God is his grace which has been shed in abundance and made available to anyone who wants to take shelter in it.

The fear of God is nothing but showing respect, reverence and obedience to God. The fear of God is the attitude that puts us in our just standing before God as creatures he has created and chosen and to whom he has offered grace and forgiveness so we can live now in righteousness and holiness through the merits earned by our Lord Jesus Christ in the cross of Golgotha.

This attitude of respect, reverence and obedience brings juicy rewards for  those who show it before God, making it doubly beneficial. Let us look, therefore, to always walk in the fear of God, and not to dread and panic but rather with peace and joy because we are children of God and the recipients of his matchless love. To God alone be the glory!

Obstinacy

A rebuke impresses a discerning person
more than a hundred lashes a fool.
Proverbs 17:10

There are people who definitely are a hopeless case. Their stupidity is beyond repair. They are people who can not change course or seek alternate routes but who persist in staying the course that their limited reasoning ability makes them think will lead them to the place where they want to be. It never comes to their minds to consider if they are doing the right thing or even consult God before deciding what to do next. Even the beasts of the field are more capable of reasoning to discern what is convenient and what is not. His folly is based on arrogance and therefore they will never accept advice or feel remorse or desire to change course.

The wise, however, can realize the obstacles approaching in their way and they  are able to take preventive action to change course according to the available alternatives. They always want to know the opinion of others, not to blindly follow their advice but to consider the options they have and select the most appropriate route. They always entrust to God all his actions and steps so they are always sure that God will show them the most appropriate way. When rebuked, they consider the feedback as an opportunity to improve their behavior and they are always grateful to those who take the time to evaluate their actions and make a recommendation.

To which of these two groups you think you belong? Are you stubborn and hardheaded and do not like being told how to do things? Or, conversely, you receive the comments of others as a token of the appreciation they feel for you? Do you look at things positively or prefer to see everything with scorn and skepticism? God wants to change your heart but not until you let him because he respects your will. Open your heart to him and leave the way open for him to clean and transform your heart with his love and mercy . Let him give you the wisdom to live with peace and joy and never leave his side. People will realize that now you are wise and prudent and not foolish and obstinate. To God alone be the glory!