“Those Who Tell The Stories Rule Society”
Plato (427-348 BC)
Lift Up Your Face To God
“Submit to God and be at peace with him; in
this way prosperity will come to you. Accept
instruction from his mouth and lay up his words
in your heart. If you return to the Almighty,
you will be restored:
If you remove wickedness
far from your tent and assign your nuggets to
the dust, your gold of Ophir to the rocks in
the ravines, then the Almighty will be your
gold, the choicest silver for you. Surely then
you will find delight in the Almighty and will
lift up your face to God.”
Job 22 :21-26
It Cannot Be Bought With Pure Gold
” But where can wisdom be found? Where does understanding dwell?
Man does not comprehend its worth; it cannot be found in the
land of the living.
The deep says, ‘It is not in me’; the sea says, ‘It is not
with me.’ It cannot be bought with the finest gold, nor can
its price be weighed in silver.
It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx
or sapphires.
Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it, nor can it be
had for jewels of gold. Coral and jasper are not worthy of
mention; the price of wisdom is beyond rubies. The topaz of
Cush cannot compare with it; it cannot be bought with pure
gold.
Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell?
It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even
from the birds of the air.
Destruction and Death say, ‘Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.’
God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it
dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under
the heavens.
When he established the force of the wind and measured out the
waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the
thunderstorm, then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he
confirmed it and tested it.
And he said to man,
‘The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is
understanding.’ “
Job 28:12-28
His Eyes Are On Their Ways
“There are those who rebel against the light,
who do not know its ways or stay in its paths.
Job 24:13
In the dark men break into houses, but by day
they shut themselves in; they want nothing to do
with the light.
Job 24:16
For all of them, deep darkness is
their morning; they make friends with the terrors
of darkness.
Job 24:17
But God drags away the mighty by his power;
though they become established, they have no
assurance of life.
He may let them rest in a feeling of security,
but his eyes are on their ways.
For a little while they are exalted, and then they
are gone; they are brought low and gathered up
like all the others; they are cut off like heads of grain.
Job 24: 22-24
Leave Us Alone!
Why do the wicked live on, growing old and
increasing in power?
They see their children established around
them, their offspring before their eyes.
Their homes are safe and free from fear;
the rod of God is not upon them.
Job 21:7-9
Yet they say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We
have no desire to know your ways.
Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him?
What would we gain by praying to him?’
But their prosperity is not in their own hands,
so I stand aloof from the counsel of the
wicked.
“Yet how often is the lamp of the wicked
snuffed out? How often does calamity come
upon them, the fate God allots in his anger?
How often are they like straw before the wind,
like chaff swept away by a gale? It is
said,’God stores up a man’s punishment for
his sons.’ Let him repay the man himself,
so that he will know it!
Let his own eyes see his destruction;
let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty.
For what does he care about the family he
leaves behind when his allotted months come to an end?”
Job 21: 14-21
The Beginning of Wisdom
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
all who follow his precepts have good understanding.
To him belongs eternal praise.
Psalm 111:10
Can it then be said that the non-religious world is without wisdom?
Has it no Aristotle, no Socrates, no Tacitus, no Goethe, No Gibbon?
Let us understand what wisdom is. It is not any mere amount of knowledge
that constitutes wisdom. Appropriate knowledge is essential to wisdom.
A man who has not the knowledge appropriate to his position, who does
not know himself in his relation to God and to his fellow-men, who is
misinformed as to his duties, his dangers, his necessities, though he
may have written innumerable works of a most exalted character, yet is
he to be set down as a man without wisdom.
If you have learned to estimate things in some measure as God estimates
them, to desire what he offers, to relinquish what he forbids, and to
recognize the duties that he has appointed you, you are in the path of
wisdom, and the great men we have been speaking about are far behind you-
far from the narrow gate which you have entered. He only is wise, who can
call Christ the wisdom of God.
George Bowen (1816-1888)
From The Treasury of David by Charles H. Spurgeon P.12 of Classic Reflections
on the Wisdom of the Psalms
I Fear No Longer
But now let my God cry more loudly in my soul,
so that your truth may tell me, “No, that is
not the case; it is not true.
The primary teaching
is better in every respect.” I am undoubtedly more
ready today to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and
so forth than how to write or read. Curtains may
well hang at the entrance to schools of literature,
but they serve less to signal the prestige of elite
instruction than to conceal error.
Let not those buyers
and sellers of literary studies shout me down, my God,
as I confess to you according to my soul’s need, and
acquiesce as you chide me for those evil ways of mine
and bring me to love your good ways;
let them not shout
me down, for I fear no longer.
Saint Augustine (354-430)
the Confessions (Book 1 P. 26. 22)
The Works of Saint Augustine A Translation for the 21st Century
from the Augustinian Heritage Institute