When it’s a sunny day in the Midwest, and I’m flying in, it’s hard to beat–at least if you love farmland. There’s something about this region that gets me each time I fly in-the breadth of earth in cultivation, the churches that dot the landscape, the long driveways, the copses of trees marking property lines, the barns and silos, and on and on it goes.

The flight is full. A very kind retired couple is seated next to me to my left. I always try to get a window seat. I do not ever seem to tire of looking out. The woman is at my elbow. She sees me reading Dostoyevksy.

“How’s your book?” she asks.

“It’s great,” I say. “I have not read this one since college, and that was quite awhile ago. I had forgotten a lot of it.”

“I have never read that one, but I’ve heard it is good.”

“It is. It’s a tome,” I said. “It’s taken me several days to get through it. Almost a thousand pages, but worth it.”

She looks at me in uniform and asks, “Where are you headed?”

“To teach some soldiers,” I say. “In the Midwest this week.”

“Well, thank you for what you do.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She returns to reading on her Kindle and chatting with her husband on her left occasionally about golf.

They are both very tanned, and they look the part of a couple who spends a lot of time in the sun and on golf courses.

St. Louis, Missouri fades into the background and Iowa is in view below now. I read a few more pages of my Dostoyevsky novel. Raskolnikov is being interrogated by his mother and sister, and his conscience is murdering him for his earlier crimes.

I was reading and trying to wrap my head around all this identity politics insanity and the political vitriol erupting across our land. I was reminded of a note I have inside one of my Bibles: “Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.”  

I remember the story of Joshua when he was met by a man with his sword drawn. It’s important that this occurred just before the conquest of Jericho. Joshua asked him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” The meaning implied is that Joshua was likely being impulsive, impetuous, and overly zealous. He needed to be reminded of God and of God’s ways. Remember the man’s response? “No; but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come” (Joshua 5:13-14, ESV).  

The idea should be obvious. Conquest is to be done God’s way via God’s means. And God’s means in the metanarrative of Scripture is the cross of Christ. Political power cannot change the human heart; only the gospel does that. And Joshua, as mighty as he was, as gifted as he was in warfare, needed to be reminded that the ultimate battle is the Lord’s because only He is sufficient for such things.

I’m not one to lionize folks prematurely, but Thomas Sowell’s wisdom has been so consistent for so many years now, recognizing his wisdom is not premature but rather long past due. It is recognizing a man of courage who has told the truth for years and suffered the hatred of the foolish crowds.

“One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is en vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again” (Thomas Sowell).

Intro: I read the news online in the morning. Photo after photo, article after article, paragraph after paragraph—all of it carried the message that the West is amidst moral freefall and divine judgment. Students from Columbia and Yale are videoed screaming, “Tear down our society!” Students who, call me crazy, should be learning history, or in the library doing research, reading a classic, (remember those?), and discovering a coherent worldview are instead puppets on strings–demonic marionettes parroting demonic screeds, manifesting not so much a coherent argument or worldview as sophomoric hubris and utter immaturity.

It does not bode well for this culture or any culture. Education has been largely replaced by indoctrination. The result is predictable: automatons of rage who cannot think for themselves because they’ve not been taught how to think but only to rage, rage, rage, and all the while playing the victim. It’s so silly on one hand and so utterly predictable on the other. But this is where we are–tuition dollars going to pay for indoctrination camps that produce intellectual and moral children.  

Wisdom from God: Does God speak to this? Do His Scriptures speak to this? Of course. “When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD” (Pr 19:3, ESV). What we’re witnessing—national borderlessness; no prosecution of violent crime; justice for sale to the highest bidders; anti-Semitism; violence in the streets; a deliberate dumbing-down of every arena; the alphabet identities, et al.–is demonic and there’s no political cure, only a spiritual one—the one of Scripture, where man recognizes and repents of his own sin, and flees to God in repentance and faith. That’s it. But will we do that? We shall see. In the meantime, Rome burns. 

A Prayer from Daniel: “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act” (Dan 9:19a, ESV). For we have departed and are reaping the fruits of our fallen ways. 

He’s near the top for me in terms of his musical skills. A co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, he penned many of their most well-known, enduring songs–“Blue Sky,” “Ramblin’ Man,” “Jessica,” and my personal favorite, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” and more.

Dickey was a pistol, that’s for sure, a volatile, seemingly possessed man, for much of his career. I’m blessed to have seen him and the ABB in concert. Truly a force of nature on his guitar, on his long, long, long guitar solos. The blues, jazz, and country and western styles all influenced him. You can hear Albert King, B.B. King, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams, Sr. in him, plus many more.

Dickey, I don’t know where you were spiritually, but in terms of one using the gifts that God gave him to their fullest potential, I salute you with everything in me.

Introduction: At the church where my family and I serve, I am currently teaching through the most oft-quoted and well-known sermon in the Christian faith, the Sermon on the Mount. This coming Sunday, I will focus our attention on Matthew 7:13-28. Those sentences contain three striking metaphors that serve just one purpose. That purpose? To confront all of us with our only options. Option 1: the broad way; the way of destruction. Option 2: the narrow gate/the way of redemption. The three metaphors Jesus uses to burn the images into our imagination: 

• Narrow vs. Broad (Mt 7:13-14)
• True vs. False Prophets (Mt 7:15-23)
• House Built on Rock vs. House Buit upon Sand (Mt 7:24-27)

One of the beauties of Scripture is its clear imagery and unvarnished truth. God does not author confusion. He makes things plain. 

Connection to Today: When I returned from a flight this week and finally got back near post, I was very tired, and went to be early. I woke early this morning, did PT, showered, and sat to read some. And when I was reading the news on my computer, I was again struck by what I read. Of course, there was the latest about Iran and Israel, and all the politics about yet another war in the Middle East. But I literally laughed out loud when I read the article about students now biting and licking one another because they’ve drunk the identity politics and wokester Kool-Aid madness. Now the urchins are identifying as beasts, and sane people are asked to go along with it. Yes, this is what our taxes are going for, this kind of stuff. So much for reading the classics, learning history, learning to discern, teaching civics, and learning how to balance a checkbook. Now, the kiddos are barking and purring and using litter boxes: School district responds to rumors of kids identifying as ‘furries’ after student protest | Fox News

Encouragement & Application: See, when you reject God and the narrow way, you get the madness of the broad way. As always, it’s Christ or chaos. When you reject the Author of life, you inherit the prince of darkness and folly. That’s the beauty of the binary. When you have a generation of children who cannot write a coherent sentence or do much but play the victim and scream talking points, you should not be surprised. They’re just living out the lies they’ve imbibed. Yet the Word of Christ still stands with the offer to return to our senses: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt 7:13-14). 

My friend Jim loves his birds, especially hummingbirds. So, I am indebted to him for sharing his pictures with me.

How any honest person can look at hummingbirds in action and say they are the results of unguided accidental random purposelessness is, I shall say it nicely, willfully misguided.

(I’m with you, Jim. This is creation manifesting the Creator’s greater glory.)

I had stowed my ruck and my suitcase overhead, sat down in my window seat, secured my thermos of water in the seatback pocket in front of me, put on my reading glasses, and retrieved Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment to read again during the flight. I’ve read Dostoyevsky consistently since I first discovered his works as an undergraduate. Once I read Crime & Punishment as an eighteen-year-old boy, I was hooked for life. I devoured his other works then, as now. Dostoyevsky repays a lifetime of rereading.

I had begun to think I was going to have the little row to myself on this flight, and I again was captured by the tale of Raskolnikov, until a heavy man with a grizzled beard lumbered into the aisle and all but collapsed into the aisle seat. The whole row shook, but he seemed unaware of it. He reminded me of a character from a movie. He exhaled heavily–Ssssshhhhheeeewwwww!!!–every few breaths as if from frustration. I looked briefly up from my novel in his direction. To be such a large man, he had feminine hands with long fingers that ended in long and dirty fingernails.

I returned to my book, only occasionally looking up as the final passengers boarded and the flight attendants came by to check that our seatbelts were fastened, and the flight attendants went through their script about safety, etc. And soon we were out of Atlanta and headed to Pennsylvania.

Thirty minutes into the flight, we were offered a snack. It’s a good thing the man and I were not starving. We both looked at one another and chuckled when we each received our ginger ale and some chips. When we saw the ‘bag’ of chips, we laughed simultaneously. I put the ‘bag’ of chips on top of my novel and snapped a picture just so I would have a record of the irony. Dostoyevsky’s books are heavy and thick; this ‘bag’ of chips was just enough to keep one from passing out from starvation. Then, when my aisle buddy and I opened these ‘bags’ of chips, there were sixteen ‘mini’ chips at the very bottom of the bag, hiding out in the last regions, tiny orange shingles, daring us to forage for them, all sixteen of them.

The clouds were thick for most of the flight until we were over West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Then the clouds broke and I could see the ridges of WVA and PA below.

But my grizzled buddy and I made it. We ate the thirty-two tiny orange shingles. We drank our ginger ales. He fell asleep immediately after he took his last drink of ginger ale, and I read a few more chapters of Crime & Punishment and followed Raskolnikov’s mad plans in his wrestling with philosophical ideas of humanity, our good and evil.

Text: “Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reproof gains intelligence” (Pr 15:32, ESV).

Context & Teaching: As with much of Proverbs and the Wisdom Literature in Scripture, this verse is an example of literary parallelism where the second part of the verse parallels the meaning of the first part of the verse; it just teaches the same principle but with different words. The first part of the verse reminds me of the teenager attitude where the boy or girl thinks he/she knows better than anyone else, especially more than Mom and Dad. The teenager attitude is one where the boy or girl thinks the world is dumb but he/she is the lone sage amidst all the world’s folly, etc. But in the end, the teenager attitude usually dies a series of deaths to all that pride and bravado. The second part of the verse above teaches the same principle as the first part of the verse, namely, that listening to wisdom–and actually heeding that wisdom–go a long way towards the path to maturity and wise living.

Encouragement & Application:   Where I live through the workweek and from where I work, I do not own a TV. That’s deliberate. It’s largely vapid and a complete waste of my time. But I do read the ‘news’ online, and like you probably, I am nervous about the conflagration brewing in the Middle East. I don’t want to see yet another Middle East war that invariably affects the world. I’ve seen enough of those sands as part of my military life. But if I’m called, I will go in an instant. After all, I work for civilian politicians, most of whom have never served at all, but that’s a different topic for another day.

I cannot help but believe that the events we see unfolding are directly related to Proverbs 15:32. Are we not as a culture ignoring instruction from God? Would we not fare better if we would listen to the reproof of God and gain divine intelligence about who we are as sinners, and about what God has done to redeem and restore all those who will listen and heed?

I was perusing my notes for this morning’s homily at church and spotted this young doe at dawn. I weary not of these lovely creatures. This year’s fawns will appear soon. Spring has sprung.