Signposts | September 20 | King of Kings
5 Minute Bible Study
Signposts | September 20 | King of Kings
Proverbs, chapter 30, verses 29 through 31. There are three things that are stately in their stride, four that move with stately bearing. A lion mighty among beasts who retreats before nothing, a strutting rooster, a he goat, and a king with his army around him. It's funny, you know, if you were to believe the people that cast the Bible aside as an irrelevant and out of date book, and that we have progressed in our own time so far beyond anything that these people who wrote the Bible could read. I'm talking like a secular person right now. The Bible is absolutely irrelevant because we have sort of progressed beyond it, right? But then you get passages like this in Proverbs and we've gone through a few others where they put four or five together, you know. So tell me about the lion. Has it changed? Since it was at that time, thousands of years ago, mighty among the beasts? No, the strutting rooster or the he goat and the king with his army around him. What person of power in political power or whatever, you know, isn't tempted to strut about like the rooster or, you know, be called the lion, not like C.S. Lewis called Jesus, but I've also, in my own personal life and all the traveling I've done and I have a 34-year-old son who is an outdoor person. He's a guide, but what he really loves is photographing animals, wild animals, bears and all kinds of things. And he does a wonderful job and he's traveled all over the world doing this and he's just fascinated by them and they are fascinating. But they also kind of present a sort of stability. In other words, you know, weak humans haven't changed just like the lion hasn't changed. And the facts of our humanness are the things that you and I discuss all the time. Yeah, that's cool that your son takes those pictures and I think that's what the writer of Proverbs is wanting us. It's almost like he's a photographer here. He's showing us this lion. He's showing us a strutting rooster, a he goat, and then this king and all of these kind of strutting confident, you know, stately is the word that Proverbs uses. And I love what you did in your devotional where you talk about Jesus. He's a king of kings and Lord of lords. You know, he ought to strut so to speak. Yeah, and he humbled himself. And as I was reading this in the book, Eric, my mind wandered to. I wonder, I wonder literally how Jesus walked into the room. He could have if he wanted to strutted. He's the king of kings and Lord of lords. He could have come in with all the pomp and arrogance of a king. I doubt he did that. So does that mean he came in like super meek and mild tail between his legs looking down at his own navel? Well, I doubt that too because he has, you know, this authority, this mantle of authority also. And so how did he walk into the room? And I'm just picturing it now. Not with arrogance, but also not with false humility. I think he probably walked in and just, you know, scanned the room, looked around, who needs love here and just did it. And you know, he was driven, I think, by love and joy and compassion and kindness. I just pictured kindness in his eyes when he walks into the room and care for people around him. And anyway, my mind just wandered to picturing that to be holding. How did Jesus walk into the room? And then sort of the takeaway is, how can I get more of him in my life so that when I walk into the room, I walk in in the same way as him? Isn't there a scene in Matthew where Matthew, the text collector invites Jesus to his home? Yeah. And the only people criticizing him are the powerful people. That's right. And he, I'm not sure if he's feet or washed there, but he just seems to, I mean, what's annoying the other people see, he's fitting in with all these centers. And it's kind of what you're talking about. But when in my past, when I've gone to what you might call sumptuous parties, big parties, you know, big bands, big money, big everything, kind of seen out of Gatsby. I think it was an annoying parade of people trying to impress other people there, the greatness of themselves, in connection, not in connection so much, but over them. And it was a parade in futility because they were all important people. They all had a lot of money. They all dressed in gowns that are too expensive and so on and so forth. That world is kind of foreign to me, but I did see it from time to time, and I certainly read it in literature. But that's not Jesus. They probably wouldn't even know he's in the room.