Our text scripture answers these questions. Instructions regarding justice, judgment and equity proceed from wisdom, and we need grace to perceive and receive these instructions! It demands the stillness to hear, the heart to understand and know how to navigate and make right decisions.

There are benefits to hearing and understanding the dark situations of life and how to walk is what qualifies us as wise.

Recognizing wisdom begins with the FEAR OF THE LORD. O teach us, Lord:

1. Your fear and how to correctly respond to it.
2. To approach You with the honour and the respect You rightly deserve, our creator, our maker (Malachi 1:6).

He is both Father and Master to all His Creation! In this capacity, what are we offering to Him with our lives, moments, thoughts and days? Meaningful or mindless praise? Piety or unrighteousness associated with idolatry or allegiance to the distractions of the usurper, the prince of this world.

Without holy fear and honour to our king how can there be discernment and direction in making decisions? Oh, that we may see in these dark days the glory of Your power and Your rulership, Your abiding control over the chaos, the stillness of death and the tension that weighs on all men (Luke 21:18; Psalm 121).

Proverbs 1:7-9 contrasts with the acts of the yahoo boys in verses 10-19, best captured in the Septuagint translation. It is a prophetic demand for a choice to be made between the benefits of the fear of the Lord which speaks to delayed gratification versus the allure of deadly, transient, short-term gains. Will you be content with the royalty granted to you by your godly parents or the woes of hell, empty lives yet plenty of stuff! Your choice to be made.

The Septuagint rendering of Psalm 144:11-15 reveals a nuance that is not common in other translations. Search it out and make the right choice because gain is not godliness.

Deliver me, and rescue me from the hand of strange children, whose mouth has spoken vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity; whose children are as plants, strengthened in their youth: their daughters are beautiful, sumptuously adorned after the similitude of a temple. Their garners are full, and bursting with one kind of store after another; their sheep are prolific, multiplying in their streets. Their oxen are fat: there is no falling down of a hedge, nor going out, nor cry in their folds. Men bless the people to whom this lot belongs, but blessed is the people whose God is the Lord. Psalm 144:11-15 LXX

Shalom.




Pastor Afolabi Oladele