Blog

Monday

Psalm 119.64 “The earth, O Lord, is full of your steadfast love. Teach me your statutes.”

The longest of the Psalms, by a long way. It’s a celebration of Torah, God’s guidance for a good life lived in obedience to God’s will and God’s ways. Upholding the follower of God’s law and God’s way is the steadfast love of God; variously described as unflinching mercy, trustworthy faithfulness and the goodness of God’s will towards us. It is the steadfast love of God that keeps life stable when so much else changes. “Teach me your statutes” is a prayer for grace to know and do God’s will.

Tuesday

Psalm 119.76 “Let your steadfast love become my comfort, according to your promise to your servant.”

There it is again, God’s promise and our obedience. We are at our best as God’s servants, finding our life’s meaning and joy in following his ways – or as the Psalm poet so often says, “walk in the way of the righteous.” In contrast to an unstable world, God’s love is steadfast, immovable, always and forever dependable. That is our comfort. Whatever the circumstances we have to work through in our lives, the unforeseen crisis or the predictable demands of life as it is for us, we can be sure of this one thing – the earth is full of God’s steadfast love, which enfolds and holds us.

Wednesday

Psalm 119.77 “Let your mercy come to me that I may live; for your law is my delight.”

This long psalm-poem is in 22 sections. All 8 verses of section 1 begin with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; all verses in section 2 with the second letter; and so on through the 22 letters of the alphabet. There’s a lot of repetition, with words and themes woven like the recurring colours of a Harris Tweed pattern! One of the primary colours is delight in God’s law, and how the way to life is by loving obedience and joyful yes to God’s wise instructions for a fully human and fruitfully faithful life. By God’s mercy and enabled by grace, such a life of grateful obedience is possible.

Thursday

Psalm 119.156 “Great is your mercy, O Lord; give me life according to your justice.”   

In another Psalm the poet is realistic about our ability to get it wrong and to go wrong. If not for the mercy of God, where would we be? “If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?” (130.3) Mercy is never the overlooking of sin and wrongdoing as if they didn’t really matter. For Christians the cost and consequence of sin is on full display on the Cross. “Guilty, vile and helpless we, spotless Lamb of God was he; full atonement can it be? Hallelujah! What a Saviour.” In the death and resurrection of Jesus, justice and mercy combine to make peace and bring about forgiveness and reconciliation in hearts that confess, “Great is your mercy, O Lord!”

Friday

Psalm 119.132 “Turn to me and be gracious to me, as is your custom to those who love your name.”

Grace is the disposition of God towards sinners, a combination of love, mercy, kindness and an inner transformation of heart and mind towards God. Grace is God’s love provoking an answering love, God’s mercy kindling such gratitude that it fuels obedience. The Psalm poet understands the kind of relationship God seeks, one of enabling grace and answering love. Of course, behind all this is that constant theme of delighting in God’s law, statutes, and ordinances, as given in God’s Word – “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Imagine this picture – we are faithfully trying to follow after Jesus, and every now and then, He graciously turns to see if we who love his name, are keeping up with Him!

Saturday

Psalm 119.142 “Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and your law is the truth.”

Truth is a luxury we cannot afford to lose, or ignore, or despise. The opposite of truth is made obvious in acts of deceit, betrayals of trust, prejudice set as cement in a closed mind; and yes, the lie – deliberately told and deeply damaging to every kind of relationship, including our relationship to God. There is constancy, permanence, and eternal commitment on God’s part to the truth of words. How can it be otherwise of a God who when he spoke “Let there be light”, there was light? So the Psalm poet knows in his deepest self, following the law of God, walking the way of Torah, delighting in God’s instruction, that is the way of righteousness, God’s way.

Sunday

Psalm 119.25 “Make me understand the ways of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works.

The Psalm poet loves God with mind and heart. Time and again he prays so that he can understand, meditates to go deeper into God’s precepts, remembers in the sense of mulls over, considers further. But it’s God who enlightens the mind; it is the Spirit of God’s wisdom that teaches us. Our part is the receptive mind, the teachable heart, and a life-commitment to think about and think through the great mystery of God’s gift of life, God’s enabling grace, and God’s great beyond-our-grasp love. It’s quite a prayer: “O Lord, make me understand the ways of your precepts.”

Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Janet Soskice. (Cambridge: CUP. 2023) 247pp.

The sub-title of this book indicates the scope of the volume: Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Two short extracts encapsulate the burden of the book. "Naming God is indeed about knowing God but knowing too in the sense of 'being in relation to God', for what is vital to the believer is not to know a great deal about God but to be in loving relation to God."(6-7) Throughout, the book builds this case for a form of knowing and naming God that is profoundly and essentially relational, concluding on a clear affirmation: "To be a Christian, or a Jew, is to stand as one who has been addressed…The Christian life is one of call and response." (225)

The text and traditions surrounding Exodus 3 are fundamental to what Soskice is arguing. The name of God is God-given, itself an act of grace. The given Name is not a description but a statement of identity, divine accommodation as a concession to the inadequacy and indeed finitude of human language. Given the inherent limitations because of the created nature of human language, to address God the Creator, and to speak appropriately and meaningfully about God, requires analogy and metaphor, intellectual reverence and semantic reserve.

In her study of Augustine and Aquinas, Soskice engages in a wide-ranging conversation across the traditions of Jewish and Christian reflection on the Divine Names. On display is a career-long study of the philosophy of language, the use of metaphor, and the devout reticence of all who acknowledge the limits of human language: 

"[Augustine and Aquinas] did not doubt God's existence nor invoke the inadequacy of our language in order to retreat from sceptical fire. That all our speaking falls short of the divine reality was not for them an admission of defeat but the primordial religious insight on which all our true speaking of God must depend. The background for this, in Judaism as in Christianity, is an overwhelming awareness mediated by Scripture of the holiness and Otherness of God before whom even the prophets speak as those of unclean lips." (105-6)   

At this point, Soskice makes a move that is crucial to the case she is making, that naming God is a human impossibility without the divine intervention of a gracious God initiating the conversation by uttering the gift of God's name. Over recent years Soskice, along with others, has made a significant contribution highlighting the contemporary importance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in contemporary Christian theology. Through this quite specific form of the doctrine of creation Soskice identifies the fundamental reason for the frustrating linguistic impasse of human speech in relation to God.

"It is the teaching of creatio ex nihilo which makes the distinction between God and the world more radical (and at the same time the relation more intimate) than any to be found in the texts of the ancient philosophers — a distinction not just between God and the world but between Creator and creature. Strictly speaking, God cannot be said  to exist, since this for us has the connotations of materiality and temporality. God is beyond existential categories, yet we do say 'God exists' and in so doing speak analogically." (105-6) 

The writer asks, "how could we speak of One so wholly other as to be not a being at all?" Her own best answer to that question, still provisional as all such attempts must be, is the book she has written which is an extended progress report of a long journey still being undertaken. On the way she is in conversation, both critical and appreciative, with Jewish and Christian thinkers and traditions; Philo, Maimonides and Rosenzweig, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Aquinas, and several philosophers including Descartes and John Locke. It is here that Soskice demonstrates her capacity to listen carefully and read generously from such varied and substantial philosopher theologians. The book allows the reader to follow her steps from that burning bush in the wilderness to our own times of being addressed, and seeking to name and call upon the name of God. 

The concluding chapter is the longest chapter, and I read it twice. Not because it was difficult and demanding; but because here are to be found the fruits of long study, disciplined reflection, and I daresay frequent and regular practice of calling on the name of God, and personal experience of calling and being called. It is a summary of findings along a research path still being walked.

Some brief notes on this concluding chapter might give a sense of why I (a pastor theologian) think this book is important. It is a significant contribution to philosophical theology which provides a well conceived systematic underpinning for the practice of personal prayer and the naming of God in the spiritual and pastoral care of praying with and praying for others.

1. From the start there is a quite deliberate challenge to any approach to God based on 'divine attributes', such as 'eternal', Almighty, 'infinite' and these used as abstract descriptors. "Better would be to return to seeing these not as free-standing philosophical determinations but as divine names profoundly anchored in Scripture." (198)

2. We are regularly reminded that a term only becomes a name when we use it as such. As in the Psalmist's invocations God is summoned, or praised, or petitioned by names such as 'my Refuge', or 'my Shepherd'. "Names do not name God. People using names name God." (199) This is put with succinct firmness early on: "The primary mode then for naming God is the vocative – calling, invoking, beseeching, praising." (34)

3. The question of how to name God, and whether a Christian can use a new name for God that arises out of their own life situation is answered in a qualified affirmative. This book has regular surprises as Soskice earths even the most exalted analytics in the more familiar everyday: "I may invoke God in prayer as 'my Carolina wren' and those who know me may understand something of its significance for me but it will not mean much – without a good deal of back story – in a sermon preached in Zimbabwe." (204) I so want to hear that back story!

4. Praise becomes an important key to understanding how and why we name God. "Our question should be what is the most appropriate name by which to praise God for God's gifts to us?" (207) That is an exact and exacting question, and throughout the book Soskice has been helping us address it. Reading the book acts as a quality check on the language we use in prayer, enhancing the tone of reverence by recalling us to the mode of wonder and awe that we are here at all, and that we are here because called into being, summoned into relationship with the One who creates, redeems and addresses us.  

5. The name 'Being Itself', or 'the One Who Is', "have been understood to be divine self-designations -  names which in Scripture, God was credited with giving to Godself." (208) This train of thought brings Soskice back to creatio ex nihilo as an explanation of the prime importance of God being named 'the One Who Is'. "From creatio ex nihilo comes this key understanding: all the world, 'all that is', is gift. Our own being and that of all creatures is gift. God alone 'is' and we (and angels, earthworms, stars and planets) have at every moment our own being from God." (211) To name God as 'Being Itself' is not an exercise in abstraction; it is a recognition that we are held in being by the 'One Who Is' and from whom and in whom we exist at all.

6. Throughout the book Christology is woven as a primary colour in the overall pattern of naming God. For example, Soskice comments on Aquinas: "For Thomas and all his contemporaries the 'I AM WHO I AM' is already Christ as witnessed in John's Gospel, Paul and in the Book of Revelation: the one who was, and is, and is to come. Christ is the God whose presence to us as the source of being is unfolded to us in those first questions in the Summa." (224)  

I'll finish by quoting a key paragraph written with a rare combination of lucid analysis and theological excitement, as an author energised from her own position of faith seeking understanding. 

"This calling and creating God can be with the people – indeed with all creatures and all creation – at every moment and in every place without ceasing to be the transcendent God. This, as I have argued, is not despite but because God is the Creator. God is not distant from creatures but wholly present to them in every moment, creating and sustaining them, which amounts to the same thing. God's ultimacy and God's intimacy are one. Christian belief is not a 'flight to another world', for the deity does not inhabit an elusive elsewhere. There is only 'all that is' and God is wholly present to 'all that is'. (228-9)

Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Janet Soskice. (Cambridge: CUP. 2023) 247pp.

There's a back story to this book review. In the mid 1990s I came across an essay by Janet Soskice, a Cambridge philosophical theologian whose name was new to me. The essay was entitled 'Love and Attention', which I discovered in Michael McGhee, (Ed.), Philosophy, Religion and Spiritual Life.(Cambridge: CUP, 1992).

It changed the way I as a minister and theology teacher thought about spirituality and the mundane and unavoidable demands of ordinary and everyday life for the vast majority of people, especially for women who are mothers. The mystic way as traditionally understood and prescribed is hard to follow in the chaos of feeding and comforting young children, changing and washing nappies and doing much else to make family life at least functional.

So there surely must be alternative approaches to how the spiritual life can be nurtured and sustained, if people who have major life responsibilities are to accommodate the essential human activities by which most people are required to live in our late modern and post-modern iterations of human culture. The traditional views of contemplative silence, a covenanted rule of life, and regular time-expensive forms of devotional discipline, are more likely to be guilt-making barriers than authentic paths to human growth in Christian spiritual maturity.

Traditional models are unrealistic to the point of unattainable for people caught up in the daily obligations of family, career and social obligation. That kind of common-sense, characteristic of much that Soskice writes, is very welcome in areas of life where unreal expectations and assumptions create unnecessary burdens by demanding ideals unrealisable for the great majority of ordinary folk seeking God in the mixture of chaos and order that is the life they are given to live. I've read that essay a number of times since, as an important reminder of pastoral realism as itself a spiritual discipline.  

Fast forward twenty years and in 2010 I am sitting at an illustrated lecture in the University of Glasgow, as Janet Soskice speaks about her recent book, Sisters of Sinai. Full disclosure – I count this book one of the most fascinating, informative, and straight out enjoyable books on the history of New Testament texts and the discovery of one of the most important extant NT manuscripts. More than that, it is a full account of how two Scottish sisters of financial means, became self-educated experts in Semitic languages and manuscript research, travelled and trekked Middle-Eastern deserts, and despite the rejection, patronising dismissals, and male academic snobbery of the age, became celebrated in their own right as major players in NT textual criticism and manuscript identification.

I have since learned that one of the purposes in researching and writing Sisters of Sinai, was the writer's long term research interest in Moses, in particular Moses' encounter with God as told in Exodus 3. Naming God by Janet Soskice, published in 2023, gathers years of research into metaphor and the use of religious language, into the meaning of prayer and responsiveness to God, and the understanding of God as One who creates 'all that is' ex nihilo, so that all existence and life is gift. This is the God who calls and addresses God's creatures, and whose name is 'I AM WHO I AM', symbolised in the letters YHWH.

This book has been a long time coming, and acts as a major status report on one philosophical theologian's study of the ways we name God, the limits of human language, and the search for a mode of speaking that avoids reducing God to manageable conceptual proportions, such as daring even the attempt to define the ineffable Being whom God is.

My next post will be a review of Naming God. It is less a critical review, and more an appreciation of what the book achieves in the reader upon a careful reading. It is also an affirmation of the importance of the work done on those 'borderlands of theology' (the late and redoubtable Professor Donald Mackinnon's phrase) where philosophy, theology and scripture come together and overlap in a Venn diagram of theological disciplines.  

Psalm 18.1-3

I love you, Lord, my Strength.

The Lord is my Rock, my Fortress and my Deliverer;
    my God is my Rock, in whom I take refuge,
    my Shield and the Horn of my salvation, my Stronghold.

I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise,
    and I have been saved from my enemies.

Monday

The Psalm-poet begins with a declaration of love – “I love you, Lord, my Strength.” Our prayers and singing, our reading and living into Scripture, are exercises in devotion, habits of faithfulness, regularly nourishing our relationship to God, the Holy Spirit helping us find strength in God. These verses are about who God is, assuring us that God is for us. The words in bold are ways of naming God, calling on God as my rock, my fortress, and so on. Each word suggests God’s dependability, God’s durability, and the sufficiency of God’s mercy and power to save us and to keep us. In trouble, these names comfort and hold us firm in the struggles of faith. 

Tuesday

“The Lord is my Rock.” Ancient, solid, a strong foundation, a shelter from desert sun, its clefts a hiding place, a constant always there presence on the landscape. Perhaps a trip to the Scottish Highlands might help us understand better what it means to call upon God the Rock, my Rock! Those huge overhanging boulders bringing to mind shelter and safety in a hostile landscape. If you’re caught in a storm, call upon the name of God the Rock. “O safe to the rock that is higher than I, my soul in its conflicts and sorrows would fly…Thou blest Rock of Ages, I’m hiding in Thee.”

Wednesday

“The Lord is my Fortress.” God is the place of maximum protection. Faith looks backwards and forwards as we live faithfully in the present. God has been my fortress, God will be my fortress – because God is, now and always, my fortress. The whole of our life, past, present and future, God remains the same wise and loving providence, protection and surrounding care. We live in time and within the limits of our days; God is eternal, unchanged and unchangeable in faithfulness to his promises in Christ, and to his eternal covenant of love. Nothing is safer than knowing that our life is hid with Christ in God. “My shelter, my fortress, tower of refuge and strength…”

Thursday

“The Lord is my Deliverer.” Many of the names of God in this Psalm recall the Exodus deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. To look to God as the one who delivers, who brings us through danger, who is the One strong enough to protect – that faithful trust is central to the faith of Israel, and every Christian feeling hemmed in and unsure how to find a safe place and solid ground again. “Strong deliverer, strong deliverer, be Thou still my strength and shield…” I often think that many praise songs we sing might be greatly improved if instead of telling God how wonderful we feel, they called upon and named the God whose mercy, grace, and power have brought us here in the first place. Or so it sometimes seems to me.

Friday

“The Lord is my Shield.” Every fighter knows that their life depends on having a shield to protect and deflect the blows that wound or kill. At those times in our journey of faith, when we feel under attack, in temptation, in relationships gone wrong, facing circumstances that threaten and trigger anxieties, this is the name of God, who has our back, and our front. From a Psalm like this came the lines: “We rest in Thee, our Shield and our Defender. We go not forth alone against the foe.” Of course Paul also spoke of the shield of faith to deflect the fiery darts of the evil one. Combine the two strong texts: The Lord is my Shield, so I will take the shield of faith.

Saturday

“The Lord is my Horn, my Stronghold.” These terms refer to those high peaks where it’s possible to flee to hide, and find shelter. Again, a hostile landscape, the presence of enemies, and the urgent search for a place of safety. To cry, “O God, my Strong Tower”, both names God and pulls our eyes upwards to where safety lies. For David on the run from Saul, every place of safety was a reminder that “Help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” Large boulders in which to hide, and high peaks where he could throw off his pursuers, reminded him that in the end, it is God who is our best defence: “A safe stronghold our God is still, a trusty shield and weapon…”

Sunday 

“I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise, and I have been saved from my enemies.” This rich cluster of military terms has provided David with names for God who has saved and delivered him. On our own faith journey, there are enough times of struggle and confusion, of anxiety and seeming hopelessness, when faith comes hard. These verses give us a vocabulary for faith, and a grammar for prayer. These are God’s names, to be used in the prayers of the desperate, those who feel hemmed in by difficulties, those who would gladly run a mile from all this. “O God, my Strength, my Rock, my Fortress, my Deliverer, my Shield, my Strong Tower.” 

 

 

"Although God does not need creation to be God, the creation stands in a real, if contingent, relation to God. God's creatures are gratuitously created from abundant love. In classical theology it is because God is always already abundance and fullness of life that creation is wholly gift and grace. It is not out of need but from pure love and delight that God creates."

(Janet Soskice, Naming God. Page 81)

Monday

Romans 11.33-36 “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever!”

Sometimes prayer is to feel the breath-taking wonder of who God is. Truly, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and in the end we simply bow before the glory of God, trusting wisdom unsearchable and love beyond the furthest reaches of our thought. Doxology is what happens when we stand in the radiant light of God’s mercy, and lift our heads in grateful praise. “To God be the glory, great things he has done!” Yes indeed! “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the earth hear his voice.”

Tuesday

Romans 15.13 “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

All the big words are here – hope, joy, peace, trust, power, and all them embedded in the love of God in Christ from which nothing whatsoever can separate; and each of them sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is as comprehensive as a prayer of blessing can be. “Blessed assurance! All is at rest, I in my Saviour am happy and blessed.” I often insert someone’s name in this Benediction, turning it into a brief but powerful prayer of intercession for someone in need of such assurance.

Wednesday

2 Corinthians13.14 “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

The irony is that “The Grace” is the closing sentence in one of Paul’s most upsetting, tension-laden and emotionally intense exchanges with any church. The Corinthian Christians gave Paul many a headache and serial disappointments. He writes to them out of his hurt, his anger, his daily anxiety for them; he leans over backwards to bring about reconciliation; he doesn’t hide the hurt he feels. Then, at the end, he writes the Grace! What finally and ultimately underpins Christian fellowship is the grace of Christ, the love of God, the communion of the Holy Spirit. We exist as Christians only as we are drawn into the life of the Triune God of grace, love and communion.  

Thursday

Ephesians 3.20-21 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all generations, for ever and ever. Amen”

Each one of us is a work in progress, and it is God who is at work. In ways we can never fully understand, we are being transformed by the inner working of God in our mind and hearts, and in our inward and outward lives. That’s also true of each Christian community – in even the smallest faithful and faith-filled church, God can do immeasurably more than our boldest prayers. Remember. God is able, and God is at work, within us and amongst us, in ways we don’t always perceive.

Friday

Philippians 4.20, 23 “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.”

Paul’s closing words are quite confident about where the necessary resources come from that enable us to live in faithful and loving obedience to God. This letter is prompted by the generosity of the Philippian church – it’s a letter of thank you for gifts of money and for sending the valued and beloved Epaphroditus. Paul is saying, nothing we give is ever given away; however generous we are, God is more generous still. The glorious riches in Christ Jesus contain everything necessary to sustain our faith, deepen our love, strengthen our peace, kindle our joy, and nurture our hope.

Saturday

1 Thessalonians 5.23-24 “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”

God has called us to holiness, and it is God himself who makes us holy, “through and through.” The whole of who we are, thought and motive, word and action, desire and choices, the God of peace is at work in us as we grow into the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”. And all of this looks forward  to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, when all that God has promised in Christ comes to full fruition in a people found blameless in Him. And if all that seems a bit far-fetched, Paul has an answer to that as well – “The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”

Sunday

2 Thessalonians 3.16 “Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you.”

This is a wish prayer. This is what Paul wants for these young converts, new Christians still finding their way in a culture hostile to these followers of a strange religion. Paul prays for them a comprehensive peace “at all times and in every way.” Inner peace can be elusive. We all have our anxieties, times of sadness, the friction of worry. Paul’s wish prayer is for us too. This is a good Benediction to say to each other at the close of a worship service – and then to say The Grace!  

Prayer of Intercession written for our Morning Worship today in Crown Terrace Baptist, Aberdeen.

Lord God, whose power is the power of love in pursuit of justice, we pray for our broken world.

Forgive us when we close our ears and eyes to the relentless deluge of heart-breaking news and endless analysis, of facts and figures, of graphic images of human suffering and human cruelty.

Give us inner strength to overcome compassion fatigue, so that we never stop caring; renew in us the power of conscience to recognise and to name injustice and cruelty; give us words to pray, and words to say that make for peace and reconciliation, in a world divided into enemies and allies and everyone claiming they are right and everyone else is wrong.

God of Love, Mercy and Justice,

We follow the crucified and risen Jesus, the one called the Prince of Peace. Help us today to kneel at the cross and look again at the cost of forgiveness and the price of reconciliation; then help us to stand at the empty tomb and hear the words of life, “He is not here – he is risen!”

So may we in our daily lives be peacemakers, bridge-builders, life-givers, couriers and carriers of the love of God, light shining in the shadows of fear and sadness, ambassadors of Christ whose message is spoken in acts of grace and words of healing and forgiveness.

God of grace

use us, each one of us, in your ministry of compassion for the broken

equip us, each one of us, with the gift of a forgiving spirit and a passion for reconciliation

Strengthen us, each one of us, to speak the truth in love, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you, our God

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Monday

Proverbs 12.1 “He who loves correction loves knowledge, he who hates reproof is stupid.” (REB = Revised English Bible. One of my favourite Bible translations)

The writers of Proverbs might today be called life coaches, or relationship counsellors, work place mentors, or even therapists. But they would prefer to be described as what they were – wisdom teachers. And behind their wisdom was the assumption that the best life is the righteous life, and each life should be lived with God in mind. In which case how we live, the way we treat each other and everyone else, our everyday choice of words and the long-term formation of our character – each of these matters in our relationship to God.  

Tuesday

Proverbs 12.25 “An anxious heart weighs a person down, but a kind word cheers them up.” (REB)

Russell Harty, was a British TV presenter of the 1970s. He once gave this advice: “There are two kinds of people, radiators and drains. Always stand near the radiators.” We have all experienced a heavy heart, whether grief, a sense of failure, anxiety about ourselves or those we love, even a low mood that’s hard to explain and harder still to shake off. That’s when it’s wise to stand beside those people in our lives who are radiators, and whose kindness and care radiate around us. In turn, our own spoken kindness can make all the difference to someone else who is struggling.

Wednesday

Proverbs 12.10 “A right minded person cares for his beast, but one who is cruel is wicked at heart.” (REB)

Care of creation is a recurring theme throughout the Bible, and time and again teaching about compassion and care for God’s creatures. To be right minded is to be wise, it is to know that we have a responsibility of kindness, empathy, practical care and respect for all the life around us. Stewardship of creation and care for the world around us is a daily and practical recognition of God the Creator. Cruelty to animals is incompatible with worship of God – we can’t celebrate the Creator God and God’s creation while being OK with the avoidable suffering of God’s creatures.   

Thursday

Proverbs 12.6 “The wicked by their words lay a murderous ambush, but the words of the upright save them.” (REB)

The book of Proverbs keeps coming back to the damage caused by wrong words spoken for wrong reasons. Dishonesty aiming to deceive, anger intended to wound, flattery that is insincere, gossip that undermines a reputation, aggressive self-assertion for the joy of conflict – the wisdom teachers had heard it all, and they kept coming back to the damage limitation of words that are upright, honest, peaceful, careful and care-filled. Put bluntly, “The Lord detests a liar, but delights in honesty!”

Friday

Proverbs 12.2 “The good man wins the Lord’s favour, the schemer his condemnation.” (REB)

Proverbs makes a strong distinction between intelligence and cunning, a right mind and a warped way of thinking. “Intelligence is commended, but a warped mind is despised.” (12.8) God is faithful, just and compassionate, and those who love and worship God reflect minds of similar virtue. To be faithful in our thinking, and just in our behaviour, and caring in our imagination – that is the mind-set of wisdom, a God-given intelligence, a way of thinking that “wins the Lord’s favour.” Christians don’t ‘scheme’ in that negative way that’s always thinking of how to get our own way, or making sure things work out for our own interests. Wisdom is sanctified intelligence.

Saturday

Proverbs 12.20 “Those who plot evil delude themselves, but there is joy for those who seek the common good.” (REB)

Several retired people wearing high visibility vests, with hoes and buckets, clearing the edges of the paths in the town to restore their neatness. A man with a large water container on his back, pumping water above his height to the hanging baskets that make the roundabout colourful. Instead of plotting evil, they are plotting and doing good, and not their own good, the common good. Now there’s a phrase, and a social attitude that requires repristination in our communities, and in our politics. Joy is not at its best when it is private and mine, but when it is public and ours. Common good means “Love your neighbour as yourself.” So get started on the path edges, and the water pumping, and anything else that makes life better for all and each of us.

Sunday

Proverbs 12.28 “The way of righteousness leads to life, but there is a well-worn path to death.” (REB)

Yes, finally and ultimately, how we live our lives is a matter of life and death! We either build on sand or on rock, on deceit or truth, on cruelty or kindness, on a self-serving lifestyle or a God-honouring way of thinking, speaking and behaving. One is foolishness, the other is wisdom, one leads to the death of all that matters, the other to life in all its fullness. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God and it will be given him, for God is a generous giver who neither grudges nor reproaches anyone.”