Emil Brunner and the Fear of the Lord

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10). A familiar verse to those of us who have been in and around the church for some time. In fact, so familiar and seemingly straightforward that we commonly quote it to other Christians, refer to it in conversations, and even send it out as an encouragement or reminder to friends (I am a little surprised that I don’t see it on more t-shirts and coffee-mugs). Still, at least for myself, along with being a familiar verse it has also always been a kind of bewildering verse. Because while the argument is simple enough, that the fear of the Lord precedes wisdom, the question always remains, what is “the fear of the Lord”?

Be honest for a minute, how many arguments have you been in (lets call them robust dialogues) about whether the fear of the Lord is respect or terror; admiration or trepidation? You don’t have to answer that out loud, because I actually can’t see or hear you anyways, but I will assume that at least some who are reading this have had those dialogues. The Lord knows that I have. And to be honest, though I have earnestly argued in those times from one side or the other, for most of my life I have not been exactly sure who is more right. Of course, to the unredeemed the fear of the Lord must be mostly if not entirely terror. How could it be anything else when you are in the cross-hairs of God’s judgment? But is there not that kind of fear also mixed in with the worship and admiration of those who have been rescued out of His judgment?

A Fuller Picture

The fear of the Lord is not the only perplexing phrase found in Scripture. The Bible is full of them. In fact, there are so many words and concepts in the Bible that are difficult to unpack that sometimes I wish God had just included a lexicon in the back. It would have been a huge time saver and cleared up a lot of discussions. But alas, He did not. And so, for our own good (and truly for the delight of our souls) we are left to become students of the Bible; to search the Scriptures in an effort to put together fuller understandings of the biblical language, and also to read and learn from those who have gone before us and done much of that searching and putting together already.

All that to say, one of the most impactful and biblical definition of the fear of the Lord that I have ever come across is from the 20th Century Swiss Theologian, Emil Brunner, in the first volume of his three-volume dogmatics set, The Christian Doctrine of God. In his chapter on the holiness of God, while Brunner is discussing God’s incomparableness and his transcendence over and above his creations, he writes this beautiful and insightful passage,

“Man is not equal to God: he is indeed a creature, not the Creator; he is a dependent, not an independent, personality. Therefore, one cannot stand on a level with God and have fellowship with Him as if He were just one of ourselves. We must bow the knee before him…The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God. This humble recognition of the infinite distance between God and man is the “fear of the Lord”: that fear of the Lord which is the “beginning of all wisdom” (Prov. 1.7). This is the expression of the feeling that we are wholly dependent upon God, and that He is in no way dependent upon us.”[1]

Isn’t that wonderfully said? When I read that some months ago, I remember feeling like for the first time I had a picture of the fear of the Lord that was beyond the age old of debate of either respect or terror. Brunner makes the picture so much fuller than that, and he does so by putting together a couple of important biblical concepts.

Consider this passage for a moment and at least two of the components that Brunner sees as essential to a biblical fear of the Lord.

STARTING WITH HUMILITY

The first component is humility. Fear of the Lord is made up of the kind of humility that comes from seeing God as completely transcendent and wholly separate from mankind in His holiness: “The King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6.15-16). It is made of the kind of the kind of humility that comes from seeing the absolute incomparable nature of God, and the creatureliness of man; from seeing God as Creator and people as His created beings: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Ps. 8.3-4). It comes from the kind of humility that sees Isaiah, a prophet of the Lord upon encountering the Lord, proclaiming judgment upon himself because of his absolute unworthiness: “Woe is me! yFor I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Is. 6.5).

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then the humble admission and recognition that we are in no way equal to God is the beginning of that fear. Or to say it another way, the first essential part of the fear of the Lord is knowing that He is the Lord and that we are not.

FROM HUMILITY TO REVERENCE

The second component is reverence. Now a person might say that reverence is humility, but I would argue that they are not quite the same. People standing in the presence of God might be humbled; they might finally recognize their level of importance in comparison to Him; they may even bow their knees to Him as Paul says will be the case (Rom. 14.11). But in that moment, those knee bowers may still fail to stand in awe of Him and show Him the kind of deep honour and respect that is caught up in the term reverence. Without a doubt, reverence and humility are deeply connected. Reverence requires humility and it comes out of humility. Still, it is not the case that wherever you find humility before God, that reverence can just be assumed. And so, Brunner identifies reverence as another essential piece, “The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God.”[2]

The fear of Lord is not only recognizing the infinite chasm between us and God, it is following that recognition to a place of worship. It is recognizing not only His otherliness but also His worthiness. It is prostrating our lives before Him because we have seen not only his separateness but also His goodness. It is saying with Psalmist, “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (Ps. 95.6)

HUMBLE REVERENCE

All that to say, if Brunner is right (and I believe He is), for the believer the fear of the Lord is not simply respect, and it is not just plain fear. It is more then both of those. It is recognizing how transcendent and wholly other God is, not sharing His glory with any, and so recognizing how worthy He is of all of our praise. It is in Brunner’s own words, humble reverence. Or in the words of the elders in the throne scene of Revelation 4, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4.11).

To finish where we began, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10).

[1] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1946), 162-163.

[2] Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, 163.

The Church as the People of God

What is the church?

I grew up in a Christian family, and so the language of the church was all around me. And as far I understood it the church was a building, and it was a service. It was a literal place I went to and a weekly event I attended. This definition served me well up until eventually I started to look through scripture and realized that were no mentions of church strictly as a service or a building. Obviously, this realization was perplexing, and so I searched the scriptures even more, asking, “Well ok, what is the church then if not a service and a building?” But this new question brought me another realization, that the Bible actually never says, “This is the Church…” A clear definition is never given. Though that is not say that God is silent on the church. He is anything but silent. He just speaks about in ways that are slightly more hidden or that require a closer look.

There are really two main ways that God speaks about His church in the New Testament: marks and metaphors; this is what the Church is like, and these are the marks or the fingerprints that church must have. So, I want to look briefly at some of those marks and metaphors, though before I do that I will try to give a simple and biblical definition of the church. The New Testament word that we translate as church is the Greek word ekklesia, which just means assembly or legislative body. It is a people or group with shared beliefs and/or a common identity. When it comes to the Christian body then, we ought to ask “What is the common identity? What is it that unites these people?”

In Ephesians chapter 5, speaking to husbands about the treatment of their wives, Paul brings up the church for his analogy and he says, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” If we are looking for what unites Christians, there it is, Christs sacrificial love. In other words, the church is a gathering of people who have received what Christ gave up, namely himself. Or to say it another way, the church is the community of the redeemed.

If that is an accurate description, which I am convinced it is, then the church is even bigger than we could imagine. It is everyone who has been redeemed over all places and all time. It is a universal community. Still God seemed to have in mind that this community of redeemed people would also exist in smaller, local contexts. So, in Romans as Paul is giving his final greetings, he tells his recipients to greet Prisca and Aquila, and the church that meets “in their house” (Romans 16.5). Likewise, in his letter to the Colossians he says, “Give my greetings to the brothers3 at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house” (Colossians 4.15). Clearly, from the beginning then the church was a universal group of believers, and a local gathering of believers. Christians were spiritually connected as brothers and sisters across the known world and yet they also belonged to a local group of Christians with whom they could live out the metaphors and marks of the church.

The People of God

There are at least 96 metaphors in the New Testament saying essentially, “This is what the Church is like.” From those 96 just take one, The People of God.

Listen to the language of 1 Peter, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2.9-10). What stands out to me as I read that passage is the claim God makes upon Christians. He calls them, “A people for his own possession,” and then ends by telling them directly, “You are God’s people.” It stands out particularly because I have heard the language spoken before, but spoken about Israel.

In Exodus 19 God gives this conditional promise to Israel, “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine” (Exodus 19.5). In Deuteronomy Moses says something similar to them, saying “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7.6). In both references God’s promised blessing to Israel, if they would walk in obedience to Him, is that they would be His people. Now stop for a second and think of what that means, that they would be His people. It does not mean that He was going to make a bunch of individuals that belong to Him separately. No, it means that He was going to make them into a community that belonged to him, into a people group that was His, like a tribe or a nation. God was going to make Israel into a tribe or a nation that would be for His own treasured possession.

Think also about what it means that they would be His people. What does it mean to belong to God? Don’t overthink it. What does it mean for a husband to say to his wife, “You are mine.” It is not suppose to be an oppressive or objectifying statement. Instead, it says, “I will be your home. I will protect you. I will care for a nurture you.” It is a statement of cherishing. When God promises Israel that they will be His own people that is exactly what He is expressing. If you doubt that just listen to how God speaks of Israel in other places in the Old Testament. “But you shall be called, ‘My delight is in Her’” (Isaiah 62.4). “He kept them as the apple of His eye” (Deuteronomy 32.10). What a thing then to be called God’s people!

As it would happen Israel disobeyed and failed over and over to keep God’s covenant, and so judgement comes. Still, even in the midst of judgement, God does not forget about His people. He promises them through the prophets that He will have mercy and that He will one day restore them. Jeremiah 31 reads like this, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31.33).

The New People of God

And then Christ comes, and He dies on the cross. And in His death, He wipes away sin. He brings forgiveness. But it is not just to make a bunch of individually forgiven and separated people. He substitutes Himself in the place of sinners to recreate and reclaim His people, and this time in a way that their failure will never cut them off from Him again. So then out of Christ and through the cross comes this renewal of Israel as God’s own people again, only this time it doesn’t stop with Israel, it is worldwide. It is everyone, every tribe, tongue and nation who trusts in Christ’s sacrifice. They are incorporate into God’s people, so that the apostle Paul, referring to the gentiles, can quote the prophet Hosea, ““Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people’” (Romans 9.25).

This is the Church then, the fulfillment of the promise that Israel would be His people again. This is what Christ died to create, a new Israel. A people who can once again be called the apple of God’s eye.

Now isn’t that so different then the idea that the church is a building or a service?

Reasons to Praise

“It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night” (Psalm 92.1-2).

My simple question is this: Why? Why is it good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to His name and to declare His steadfast love? Of course it is good for God the receiver, to be on the receiving end of thanksgiving, praise and declaration, but the idea here is that it is also good for the giver. So again, I ask, why?

I think Charles Spurgeon sums it up nicely. He writes in his commentary on the Psalms, “It is good ethically, for it is the Lord’s right; it is good emotionally, for it is pleasant to the heart; it is good practically, for it leads to others to render the same homage.”

Take each one of those.

The Lord’s Right

It is good because it is the Lord’s right, or to say it another way, He is worthy of it. When something is worthy of praise, it is an offence to not give it the praise it is due. To talk to your neighbour while the New York Philharmonic plays Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; to make jokes in front Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son; it is borderline blasphemy. How much more blasphemous to not give praise to the God of the universe; the good, omniscient, omnipresent, all wise, all satisfying, reigning, ruling King; the one so glorious that no human can see His face without crumpling up like a piece of paper and dying; the one so magnificent that His very presence sent the prophet Isaiah into calling down judgment upon himself, “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6.5)?

It is good to give Him thanks, to praise Him, to declare His goodness, because it is good to give God what God is due. We ought to praise Him night and day because He is worthy of praise, because He just is that great. Really the question should be, how could we not give Him praise?

As the multitudes in Revelation sing, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5.12)

Pleasant to the Heart

It is good because it is pleasant to the heart. In other words, it is good to do because it is good to do what we were created to do.

Since He is worthy of all adoration, of all praise, thanksgiving, and declaration, and since we are the creations of a God who is worthy of all of that, it is no surprise that we were created to give it. We were created to glorify God. Isaiah 43.7 puts it like this, “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.” Now everyone knows how good it feels to do things that you were created to do. Humans were created to run, that’s why it feels good to run. We were created to enjoy food, and that is why it feels good to enjoy good food. If we were created first and foremost for the glory of God, then it is going to feel simply incredible to give glory to the God who created us. At the same time, it is going to feel empty and wanting to live a life that does not give Him glory, that does not live in the role we were created to fill. And isn’t that something we have all experienced at some point? The emptiness of self glorification?

All that to say, our hearts rejoice when we give glory and honour to God because it is what our hearts were made for. It is sweet to give glory to God.

Practically Good

And it is good because it leads others to do the same thing.

Hopefully as Christians we desire for all men and women everywhere to honour and rejoice in God. Well, the simple truth is that most people are followers. They tend to wait to do things until they see others doing them too. That doesn’t necessarily take away from the genuineness of the action, its just how humans usually operate. There might be a whole swath of people who know deep down that God deserves their praise, their thanksgiving and their declaration, but it is not until they see and hear others directing it all to God that they are driven to turn and to do it as well.

That should be enough reason in itself to want to praise God, to want to direct all our thanks to Him and declare His goodness, because we know that as we do it that others will do it as well. This one raises the question though of where. Where do we do this so that others are exposed to it? Are we supposed to stand in the streets and praise Him? Based on Jesus words in the Sermon on the Mount, I don’t think so. Instead I think it takes place as we speak in ways and live our lives in ways that give all glory and honour and power to God. As our lives direct all praise to Him then people around us will take notice, and, God willing, will direct their praise to Him as well.

I am sure the reasons could go on, but Spurgeon gives us a good place to start. For at least these three reasons, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night” (Psalm 92.1-2).

People of the Book or the Person

I used to think that the early church must have came into being with the Bible in its hands. I just assumed that they had, at least after a few short years of existence, a finished Old and New Testament compiled into one book just like we have today; all books completed and agreed upon as God’s divinely inspired and authoritative Word. The reality seems to be that it took a little big longer that.

Old Testament Variation

When it comes to the Old Testament there are those who would argue that the OT as we know it, the OT of the protestant church, had come together and found its final form as early 300-165 BCE.[1] The biggest problem with such early dating is the early church itself who’s collections of sacred writings seemed to be quite a bit broader than what we have today. While there was clearly some OT literature that the whole Christian church was agreed upon from the beginning as being authoritative (i.e., the Pentateuch), there was still some fluidity in terms of a complete and fixed list of sacred OT books.

Take for example Origen of Alexandria, a Christian scholar from the 2nd century. While Origen recognized the majority of our OT books as authoritative, he also states in his writing that it is not good to set before the reader either Numbers or Leviticus,[2] and at the same time recommends a number of deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) books for the Christian’s diet.[3] Or look at Augustine, who is arguably still the most influential voice in the church since the apostle Paul. Augustine’s OT list was made up of 44 books total, including (like Origen) deuterocanonical books such as Sirach, Tobias, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and so forth.

There are many more examples that could be given, but maybe these two are sufficient to show that while the church Fathers generally agreed that there were inspired and authoritative OT books, there remained through the early centuries variation as to which books those were exactly.[4] As Lee McDonald writes in his classic study, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, “If there was a precise list of authoritative and inspired OT books handed on by the apostles stemming from Jesus, then the early church has lost it. There are simply no references to it anywhere.”[5]

New Testament Was Not Much Different

When it comes to the New Testament, as early as NT books were composed and beginning to be placed alongside the OT Scriptures the similar kind of variation or fluidity showed up. Marcion, a Christian theologian in the 1st century, is the first person known to have published a list of NT books. His list included the Gospel of Luke, Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians Philippians, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Of course, Marcion’s list must be taken with a grain of salt given the fact his anti-Jewish ambition was to separate Christianity from any OT and Jewish influence and/or tradition. Nevertheless, he produced the first known NT list of books for the church. In response to Marcion and the damage that his biblical list did, Justin martyr, a 2nd century Christian apologist, worked to recover the OT to the status of Scripture and as a Christian book, while also in his writings paving the way for the gospels to be recognized as Scripture as well. Picking up where Justin left off, Irenaeus, a 2nd century Greek Bishop, made the first clear designation of Christian writings being Scripture and of being a separate collection from the Old Testament. Though even in doing so he never quite defined precisely what the boundaries of that New Testament were.

While Marcion was arguably the first to produce a list of NT books, a 3rd century Bishop named Eusebius was the first to set forth a list of authoritative NT books closest to the 27-book list that we have today. In an attempt to give an account of which NT writings were being used in churches in his time, Esusebius produced his NT list, made up of what he called 1) universally acknowledged books 2) disputed books, and 3) spurious books.[6] Acknowledged/accepted books were the four gospels, Acts and fourteen epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation. In the disputed category were Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 peter, 2 and 3 john and Revelation again. Finally, listed as spurious were several NT apocryphal books like the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache and then again Revelation.

Again, to quote McDonald, this time regarding the NT scriptures, “The Christian books that eventually received this normative status were not the same for all the churches and even when there was general agreement the authority of the literature was not acknowledged at the same time by every church.”[7]

Life Without a Finished Bible

Much, much more could be said about the process and timeline of the OT and NT books coming together to take the final form of the Christian Bible that we know and cherish today. Nevertheless, one thing is hopefully clear enough from this small collection of examples: that the early church did not immediately have a fixed and closed list of authoritative Scriptures. Now, to Christians who have had the finished form of the Bible in their hands their whole lives, this fact can be a little bit mind boggling. For many of us it is hard to imagine following Christ without the full and complete Bible as we know it. We feel like we would be lost without it. But for the early church, this was their reality.

Of course, it’s not that in those first few centuries that the church had no authoritative texts, but again that there was fluidity or variation in terms of which books were authoritative. Still, this begs the question for 21st century western Christians whose faith is built upon the Scriptures, how did the early church function without a completed Bible?

Well on the one hand, you don’t miss what you never had. It is probably safe to say that the early church was not consciously longing for the finished Bible. And in fact, it doesn’t even appear that the early church was that worried about or interested in figuring out which books belonged in the Bible until heresies began to emerge.[8] But on the other hand, and more importantly the early church as a whole seemed to understand well that final authority rested in the person of Christ. Their foundation was the news of his life, death, and resurrection as well as his teachings which were already being orally taught and passed on. Hans Von Campenhausen rightly states that early Christianity was not “a religion of the book,” because they didn’t have a precise and finished book. Instead, he writes, early Christianity was “the religion of the Spirit and the living Christ.”[9]

People of the Person

I say all of that to say this: there is a lesson there that I believe the modern-day church needs to continually be reminded of. With the unparalleled privilege of having the Bible in our hands comes the unseen temptation to elevate the bible higher than Jesus himself. We can foster such a passion for His Word and become so focused on His Word, that at times we can miss Jesus and become a people of a book instead of a person.

But the value of Scripture is never just Scripture in and of itself. Rather it is that it proclaims to us through both the OT and NT, the life death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus, the son of God, in whom eternal life is found. Without that, our Bible is just books and letters. And to the degree that we study the Scriptures without Jesus as the interpretive lens and the final goal, we remain like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5.39-40).

Please don’t mishear me, I am not trying to encourage you to be less passionate about Scripture. Actually, I hope I am encouraging you to be even more passionate and devoted to Scripture. But in that passion and devotion may we never lose sight of who the Scriptures are about. May we love the Bible; cherish the Bible; study the Bible and always thank God for the unbelievable privilege of having His words and revelation preserved for us in the Bible. But may we never forget the aim of the Bible, that is to take us to Jesus in whom all ultimate authority truly rests.

[1] William Sanford LaSor, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic Wm. Bush Old Testament Survey (Grand Rapids: Eardmans, 1983); David N. Freedman, “The Earliest bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible (ed. M. P. O’Connor and D. F. Freedman; Winona Lake, Ind,: Eisenbrauns, 1987); Roger. T. Beckwith The Old Testament canon of the New Testament Church and its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

[2] See: Homily 27 on Numbers.

[3] Lee. M. McDonald The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 111.

[4] To some degree this variation remains to this day, particularly between the canons of the Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.

[5] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 129.

[6] Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica

[7] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 9.

[8] Exploring the Origins of the Bible (Edited by Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 204.

[9] Hans, Von Campenhausen. The Formation of the Christian Bible (Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 62-63.

Books and Death

Brevard Childs, the late Old Testament professor, wrote in the intro to his Biblical Theology

“From my library shelves the great volumes of the Fathers, school-men and reformers look down invitingly. I have also acquired over the years many of the great classics of the Reformed and Lutheran post reformation tradition. However, life is too short for a biblical specialist to do more than read selectively and dabble here and there.”

You really don’t even need to know the context to grasp the quote. Simply put, Childs just understood that he couldn’t read everything. He didn’t have enough time.

In my own life books have taken on a powerful role in reminding me daily that my days are limited. Maybe it is just because I am a slow reader, but I can’t even glance at the unread books which sit there haunting me from their designated shelf space without realizing that there are a limited number of books I have time left on this earth to read. This reality is accentuated by the fact that I have a list of books in my head of which I want to read and which are not even on the shelf yet and yet which I know, again, amount to more reading time than I have left.

It is strange the things the Lord can use to remind us of and reinforce biblical truths. Who would ever think that books could have such a morbid and prophetic type voice, but they do, at least for me. They speak before I even crack the cover, saying in what I imagine to be an old scratchy, oxfordish, baritone sounding voice, something like, “You’re running out of time, choose wisely.” They help me, at least for a moment, to recover a right sense of my own finitude, and to be honest that is worth more than all the words that fill their pages.

A Limited amount of life

As far as I have experienced, it is really only when a person grasps the limits of their own life that they begin to use their life wisely. Think about money as the analogy: When you assume your supply of dollars is endless you don’t get wise with your spending, you get frivolous; you waste it because there is (allegedly) an abundance of it. But when you realize that you only have so much money and on top of that that you only have so much time in your life to make money, you start to account for every dollar and maybe even every penny; you begin to think about where every penny and dollar go.

I don’t think that time works much differently than money. When you start to take account of your time, that is when you start to think about how every hour and day are spent; you go from spending your time frivolously to spending it intentionally. And when do you start to take account of your time? You start to take account of it when you realize that it is limited, and that unlike money there will be no chance to make more.

Making the Best Use of Your Time

Again, for me it is books that remind me often of my finite life. Of course, those books aren’t saying anything new, they are just pointing me back to the Scriptures and reawakening the many verses living in the back of my mind that speak this very truth.

Job 14.1-2 “Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble. He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not.”

Psalm 39.5 “Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!”

Psalm 89.47 “Remember how short my time is! For what vanity you have created all the children of man!”

Psalm 103.15 “As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.”

1 Peter 1.24-25 “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

If there are only so many books you have time to read, choose wisely. If there is only so much money you have to spend, spend wisely. If there are only so many days and hours you have to live, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time…” (Ephesians 5.15-16)