Category Archives: Wake-up calls

Most of us spend a great deal of energy watching the walls. We know who is against us: the colleague angling for our position, the relative who has never forgiven us, the neighbour in the boundary dispute. We rehearse what they said. Some of us pray about them every night.

This week’s seven Scriptures begin exactly there, with Psalm 59: deliver me from my enemies, O my God. But they do not stay there. Day by day they move from the enemies outside the walls to something already inside them, and today’s verse names it plainly: perverse thoughts separate people from God (Wisdom 1:3).

Paul once listed everything that might separate us from the love of Christ, hardship, persecution, famine, sword, and concluded that none of it can. Every item on his list is something that happens to us. Wisdom uses the very same Greek verb and names the one thing that happens in us.

Along the way we meet a persecuted prophet whom God tells to turn back, a word in Romans 13:14 that really means forethought, and a God who spares his enemies because he is strong, not because he is weak.

One line has stayed with me all week: the enemy can surround the house, but only a thought you agree with can open the door.

It is longer than a daily devotional, and that is deliberate. Depth over speed. Take your time with it, and tell us in the comments what you found.

RISE & INSPIRE | SUNDAY BIBLE SERIES Category: Wake-up Calls Sunday Series No. 8 — 4 October 2026 Scriptures of the week: 28 September – 4 October 2026

If No Enemy Can Separate Us from God, What Can?

Opening — Enter the Passage

For ten years, according to the old story, the city of Troy held out.

Its walls were high, its gates were strong, and the army camped on the plain outside could not get in. Then one morning the army was gone, and on the shore stood an enormous wooden horse. The Trojans argued about it. One priest, in Virgil’s telling, warned that he feared the Greeks even when they came bearing gifts. Others said it was an offering to the gods, a trophy, a sign that the war was over. The argument went the comfortable way. They broke open a section of their own wall to bring the horse inside.

Troy did not fall to the army that besieged it. It fell to a decision made within it.

The story has lasted nearly three thousand years because we keep recognising ourselves in it. We have even named a kind of computer attack after it: a harmful program that does not batter its way in, but is welcomed in, because it looks like something we wanted.

Most of us spend a great deal of our energy watching the walls. We know who is against us — the colleague angling for our position, the relative who has never forgiven us, the neighbour in the boundary dispute, the critic, the rival, the person whose name still tightens something in the chest years later. We rehearse what they said. We plan what we will say. Some of us pray about them every night.

Scripture does not tell us this is foolish. The first of this week’s seven verses is exactly such a prayer, prayed — if its ancient heading is right — by a man whose house was surrounded in the dark by soldiers waiting to kill him at dawn:

Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me.

But the week does not end there. It moves, verse by verse and day by day, from the enemies outside the walls to something already inside them. And the verse given for this Sunday names it with startling precision:

For perverse thoughts separate people from God…

Not persecution. Not enemies. Not hardship. Thoughts.

Paul once asked the most confident question in the New Testament: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”(Romans 8:35). He answered his own list with a resounding no: nothing “in all creation” can do it (8:39). It is worth noticing that every item on Paul’s list is something that happens to us. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek a generation or two before Paul, uses the very same verb — chōrizō, to separate — and names the one thing that happens in us.

This week’s Wake-up Call comes from Paul himself, in a verse that sits right beside one of ours: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep… the night is far gone, the day is near” (Romans 13:11–12). The danger is not only the people prowling outside the house at night. It is what we have been quietly agreeing with, inside, while we watched the gate.

Some questions are better asked in daylight. This is one of them:

If no enemy can separate us from God — what can?

The Passage

Wisdom 1:3 (our anchor text this week)

For perverse thoughts separate people from God, and when his power is tested, it exposes the foolish.

Scripture is quoted throughout from the New Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition), the translation in which this week’s verses were given, unless another version is named.

Six further verses accompany it, one for each day of the week. Usually in this series we rearrange them to follow the argument they make together. This week, unusually, the order of the calendar is the order of the argument.

The week begins outside the walls, with a besieged man praying against his enemies (Psalm 59:1). It turns to the God from whom no one — enemy or friend — can hide (Jeremiah 23:23). It names the test that comes to all of us, and the crown that waits beyond it (James 1:12). It tells us what to wear for the night and what not to plan for (Romans 13:14). It overhears God telling his own faithful prophet that hemust turn back (Jeremiah 15:19). It explains why God’s power, though complete, so often holds back (Wisdom 12:17). And it ends, today, inside the human mind, where the most decisive battle has been taking place all along (Wisdom 1:3).

From the enemy at the gate to the thought within. That is the road this Sunday walks.

Biblical Context

A book written for believers under pressure

The Wisdom of Solomon — in Catholic Bibles simply Wisdom — was written in Greek by a Jewish teacher whose name we do not know. There is broad agreement among scholars that it was composed in Alexandria, in Egypt, around the turn of the era: somewhere between the late first century BC and the early first century AD. Some, noting what looks like an allusion to the cult of the Roman emperor (14:16–20), argue for a date after Rome’s conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. The book is Scripture for Catholic and Orthodox Christians; most Protestant Bibles place it among the Apocrypha.

The book speaks in the voice of King Solomon, most clearly in chapters 7–9, though it never actually names him. Almost all scholars, conservative as well as critical, regard this as a recognised literary convention of the period: the author writes as Solomon in order to write in the tradition of Israel’s patron of wisdom.

Alexandria matters for understanding the book. It was one of the great cities of the ancient world, home to its most famous library and to one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere outside the land of Israel. It was there, according to Jewish tradition, that the Scriptures had been translated into Greek — the Septuagint, the Bible most New Testament writers would later quote. And it was a city of enormous intellectual glamour: philosophy, science, rhetoric, cults old and new. For a young Jewish man or woman there was every reason to drift — to find the faith of one’s grandparents provincial, to make one’s peace with the gods of the city, or simply to adopt the cheerful materialism of people who believed that this life is all there is.

The book is written into that pressure. Its first great section (roughly 1:1–6:21) sets the righteous person beside the ungodly and asks what becomes of each. It is here that the book makes its daring claims that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God” (3:1) and that God “created us for incorruption” (2:23). The second section (roughly 6:22–9:18) is Solomon’s praise of Wisdom and his prayer for her. The third (chapters 10–19) retells the Exodus as the story of God’s wisdom at work in history, with two long reflections woven into it — one on God’s mercy (11:15–12:27) and one on the folly of idolatry (chapters 13–15). Scholars draw the boundaries in slightly different places, but this three-part shape is widely recognised.

The opening sentences of the book

Our anchor verse is the third verse of the book. It belongs to the book’s opening appeal (1:1–15), which begins by addressing kings:

“Love righteousness, you rulers of the earth, think of the Lord in goodness and seek him with sincerity of heart; because he is found by those who do not put him to the test, and manifests himself to those who do not distrust him.” (1:1–2)

The royal address belongs to the Solomonic voice — a king speaking to kings — but the book plainly means it for every reader who rules anything at all: a household, an office, a classroom, a parish, a single human heart. Then comes our verse, joined to what precedes it by the small word for. Verse 3 explains verse 2. Why is God found by those who do not test him, and hidden from those who do? Because crooked reasoning separates; and because God’s power, when it is put to the test, does not perform on demand. It exposes.

The verses that follow fill out the picture. Wisdom “will not enter a deceitful soul” (1:4); a holy spirit “will flee from deceit” (1:5). God is “witness of their inmost feelings, and a true observer of their hearts, and a hearer of their tongues” (1:6), because “the spirit of the Lord has filled the world” (1:7) — a line the Roman liturgy has long sung at the beginning of the Mass of Pentecost. “A jealous ear hears all things”(1:10). And then the book’s first great warning: “Do not invite death by the error of your life… because God did not make death” (1:12–13).

What a “perverse thought” looks like when it grows up

Chapter 2 does something remarkable. Having warned against crooked reasoning, the book lets us listen to it. “For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves…” (2:1) — and what follows is the inner monologue of the ungodly, set out at length in their own words.

It is not stupid. It is articulate, and in places almost lovely. Life is short and sorrowful (2:1). We were born by mere chance (2:2). Our name will be forgotten (2:4). So “let us enjoy the good things that exist” (2:6); “let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither” (2:8). Then, without a pause, the philosophy becomes a policy. If might is to be our law of right (2:11), the weak are fair game (2:10). And one person in particular has become intolerable:

“Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions…”(2:12)

He calls himself a child of God (2:13, 16). Very well: “let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries” (2:17–18). “Let us condemn him to a shameful death” (2:20).

Christians have never been able to read those lines without thinking of Calvary, where the bystanders said of Jesus, “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to” (Matthew 27:43). But notice how the book arrives there. It begins with a reasoning and ends with a plot to kill. “Thus they reasoned,”the author concludes, “but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them” (2:21).

That is the key to the whole week. The enemies of Psalm 59 are not a different species from the rest of us. They are what crooked reasoning becomes when it is acted upon.

Where the other six verses come from

Psalm 59:1. The psalm’s heading sets it on one particular night in David’s life: “when Saul ordered his house to be watched in order to kill him.” The story is told in 1 Samuel 19:11–17. Saul’s messengers surround David’s house with orders to kill him in the morning. His wife Michal — Saul’s own daughter — warns him: “If you do not save your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed” (19:11). She lets him down through a window, and he escapes into the dark.

Two cautions are needed. Many scholars regard the psalm headings as early editorial additions rather than original parts of the poems, so the link with that night is ancient tradition rather than certain history. And the psalm itself contains features that sit awkwardly with a purely private setting: it calls on God to “punish all the nations” (59:5) and speaks of “my people” (59:11). Some interpreters therefore think it was written for, or later adapted to, a king or a community under attack from foreign enemies. The two readings need not compete. A prayer first prayed by one hunted man could easily become the prayer of a whole hunted people — which is precisely what the Psalter is. The heading also names a tune, “Do Not Destroy,” and calls the psalm a miktam, a term whose meaning is no longer known.

The psalm is built with unusual care. Twice the enemies return at evening, “howling like dogs and prowling about the city” (59:6, 14). Twice the psalmist answers with a refrain that addresses God as “my strength” and “my fortress” (59:9, 17). The repetition is the point. The night does not end after one prayer. The dogs come back. So does the refrain.

Jeremiah 23:23 belongs to a collection of oracles headed simply “Concerning the prophets” (23:9–40), gathered from Jeremiah’s preaching in the turbulent decades before Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 587/586 BC. Readers who were with us last Sunday will remember the atmosphere: a city convinced it was safe, a Temple treated as a charm. The prophets who flourished in that city told people what they wanted to hear. “They keep saying to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you'” (23:17). Jeremiah’s verdict is that they have never “stood in the council of the LORD” (23:18, 22). Our verse is God’s own question to them.

Jeremiah 15:19 comes from one of the most intimate passages in all the prophets. Scattered through Jeremiah 11–20 are a handful of raw, personal prayers that scholars call Jeremiah’s “confessions”(usually identified as 11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; and 20:7–18). In them the prophet argues with God, curses the day he was born, and pleads for vengeance on his persecutors. The second of them begins: “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land!” (15:10). It reaches its lowest point in an accusation almost unthinkable on a prophet’s lips: “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (15:18). Our verse is God’s reply.

James 1:12. The Letter of James is addressed “to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (1:1) — Jewish believers in Jesus scattered beyond the land of Israel. Ancient tradition identifies its author as James, the brother of the Lord, leader of the Jerusalem church, who was put to death in about AD 62. Many scholars accept that attribution; others think the letter was written later in his name. It reads less like a letter than a collection of wisdom teaching for communities under strain — poor believers pressed by the rich (2:6–7; 5:1–6) and, it seems, by their own quarrels (4:1–2). Commentators often describe our verse as a hinge: it gathers up the teaching on trials in 1:2–11 and opens the warning about temptation in 1:13–18.

Romans 13:14. Paul wrote Romans, probably from Corinth around AD 57, to a church he had not yet visited. Chapters 12–15 turn from the great argument of the letter to its practical consequences. Immediately before our passage Paul has told the Romans how to treat their enemies — “Bless those who persecute you” (12:14); “if your enemies are hungry, feed them” (12:20); “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (12:21) — and has summed up the whole law in a single command: love your neighbour (13:8–10). Then, in 13:11–14, the tone changes. It is late. The night is nearly over. Wake up.

Wisdom 12:17 belongs to the book’s long reflection on God’s mercy (11:15–12:27). Looking back over Israel’s history, the author asks a hard question: if God is all-powerful, why did he deal so slowly with Israel’s enemies — the Egyptians at the Exodus, the Canaanites in the land? His answer is that God’s slowness was not weakness but mercy: “judging them little by little you gave them an opportunity to repent” (12:10). Our verse stands near the climax of that argument.

Honesty requires saying that many modern readers find these chapters difficult, especially their portrait of the Canaanites (12:3–7). What is striking is the direction in which the author reads his own tradition. Faced with stories of conquest, he lingers not on the victory but on the delay — on the God who “spares all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living” (11:26).

Three things ancient readers knew without being told

The night belonged to the scavengers. Dogs in the towns of the ancient Near East were not household pets. Most roamed in half-wild packs, feeding on refuse and, in the worst times, on the unburied dead (1 Kings 14:11; 21:23–24). To be surrounded by dogs was a picture of exposure and contempt (Psalm 22:16). The night itself was something to be kept, in shifts: Israel divided it into watches (Judges 7:19; Lamentations 2:19), and a city’s safety depended on the people who stayed awake on its walls (Isaiah 62:6). Psalm 59 is a night psalm, and its first readers would have heard the howling.

Testing was a trade. In the Greek world the verb dokimazō belonged to the assayer and the money-changer. Metals were tested in the fire; coins were tested for weight and purity; whatever passed was dokimos — approved, genuine, good currency. In Athens the same word family named the formal scrutiny, the dokimasia, that a citizen had to pass before taking up public office. When James and Wisdom speak of testing, their first readers heard the furnace, the counting-table and the examination of fitness. A test was not designed to destroy. It was designed to find out what was really there.

Clothing and standing were a language of status. To “put on” a garment in the Bible often means to take on an identity or an office. Priests are clothed for their service (Exodus 28). Joseph is dressed in fine linen when Pharaoh raises him to power (Genesis 41:42). Job says, “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me” (Job 29:14). And to “stand before” a king meant to serve in his presence, admitted to his counsel and ready to carry his word. Both images matter this week.

The theological context: three kinds of testing

Beneath the week runs a theme that threads through the whole Bible, and it helps to separate its strands.

God tests his people — to prove and strengthen them, never to destroy them. “God tested Abraham”(Genesis 22:1). Israel was led forty years in the wilderness “to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart” (Deuteronomy 8:2). “The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, but the LORD tests the heart” (Proverbs 17:3).

People test God — demanding that he prove himself on their terms while refusing to trust him until he does. At Massah, with the plagues of Egypt and the parted sea already behind them, the Israelites asked, “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). Deuteronomy forbids it: “Do not put the LORD your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah” (Deuteronomy 6:16) — the verse Jesus quotes to the devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:7).

The tempter tempts — not to prove, but to ruin. The same Greek verb, peirazō, can describe all three, which is why James has to stop and insist: “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). The Catechism of the Catholic Church draws the same line, speaking of the Spirit’s help to distinguish “trials, which are necessary for the growth of the inner man,” from temptation, “which leads to sin and death” (CCC 2847).

This week’s verses touch all three. James speaks of the test that proves the believer. Wisdom 1:3 speaks of people who test God — and find themselves exposed. And Romans 13:14 tells us how to deny the tempter his supply lines.

Lexical Notes

1. skolioi logismoi — “perverse thoughts” (Wisdom 1:3)

σκολιοὶ λογισμοί

The adjective σκολιός (skolios) is a picture word. Its basic meaning is bent, curved, crooked — a winding road, a twisted stick. From there it moves into character: devious, dishonest, perverse. The Greek Old Testament uses it in Moses’ lament over “a perverse and crooked generation” (Deuteronomy 32:5), a phrase picked up by Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2:40) and by Paul (Philippians 2:15). It is also the word in Isaiah’s great promise that “the crooked shall be made straight” (Isaiah 40:4, in the Greek), which Luke places in the mouth of John the Baptist (Luke 3:5). In Scripture, crookedness is what must be straightened before the Lord can arrive.

The book has set up a deliberate contrast. Two verses earlier it told its readers to seek God “with sincerity of heart” — in Greek, en haplotēti kardias (1:1). ἁπλότης (haplotēs) means singleness, simplicity, straightforwardness: the quality of something that is exactly what it appears to be, folded once and not twice. The opposite of a crooked thought, in other words, is not a clever thought. It is a single-hearted one. James uses the related adverb when he says that God gives to all “generously” — haplōs, simply, without a hidden agenda — and sets it against the dipsychos, the double-souled person who receives nothing (James 1:5–8). Readers of this series met that word two Sundays ago.

The noun λογισμός (logismos) comes from logizomai — to reckon, count, calculate — a book-keeper’s verb before it is a philosopher’s. A logismos is not a passing impression. It is a reasoning, a calculation, a deliberation: the case we argue to ourselves. Paul uses it of the inner courtroom in which people’s “conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them” (Romans 2:15), and of the fortified “arguments”that set themselves up “against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

That distinction matters, and English can blur it. “Thoughts” covers everything from a flicker to a philosophy. Wisdom’s word points to the second end of the range. Some versions render the phrase “twisted thoughts” or “crooked counsels,” which keeps the sense of something constructed.

The early Christian monks of the Egyptian desert — not far, as it happens, from where Wisdom was written — turned logismoi into a technical term. Evagrius of Pontus, in the fourth century, described eight such “thoughts,” from gluttony and anger to vainglory and pride — a list that later became the seven deadly sins. Later teachers, among them St John Climacus in the seventh century, traced the stages by which a thought takes hold: it first arrives, uninvited and not yet sinful; then we begin to converse with it; then we consent; and finally it holds us captive. The desert had no illusion that we can stop thoughts from knocking. Its whole wisdom lay in what we do after they knock.

Finally, the verb: χωρίζουσιν (chōrizousin), they separate. It is the word Jesus uses of marriage — “what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:6) — and the word Paul uses twice in his triumphant conclusion to Romans 8: who will separate us, and nothing will be able to separate us (8:35, 39). Wisdom and Paul meet on this one verb. We will come back to it.

2. dokimazō and dokimos — “tested” and “stood the test” (Wisdom 1:3; James 1:12)

δοκιμαζομένη (Wisdom 1:3) · δόκιμος γενόμενος (James 1:12)

This word family, as we saw, comes from the furnace and the counting-table. δοκιμάζω (dokimazō) means to test, assay, examine — and so to approve after testing. δόκιμος (dokimos) describes what has passed: genuine, approved, proven. Its opposite, ἀδόκιμος (adokimos), is the counterfeit coin, the rejected metal, the candidate who fails the scrutiny. Paul uses the negative in a single breath with an athlete’s prize: he disciplines himself “so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified” — adokimos (1 Corinthians 9:27).

Wisdom uses the word of the righteous in one of its most moving passages: God “tested them and found them worthy of himself; like gold in the furnace he tried them” (3:5–6). Peter speaks of “the genuineness of your faith — being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire” (1 Peter 1:7). And James opens his letter with it: “the testing of your faith produces endurance” (1:3).

Here is what makes this week’s pairing so striking. James and Wisdom use the same word in opposite directions. In James 1:12 the believer is tested, and comes through dokimos — proven genuine. In Wisdom 1:3 God’s power is tested — put to the proof by people who demand that he show himself — and it is not God but the tester who is shown up.

A test, in other words, is a revealer. It does not put into us what was not there. It shows what was.

3. peirasmos, hypomenō and stephanos — “temptation,” “endures,” “crown” (James 1:12)

Μακάριος ἀνὴρ ὃς ὑπομένει πειρασμόν

πειρασμός (peirasmos) covers the whole range of test, trial and temptation. Context decides — and in James 1 the context deliberately shifts. In 1:2 the peirasmoi are plainly outward trials “of any kind”: poverty, pressure, persecution. By 1:13–14 the same word describes the inward pull of “one’s own desire.” Verse 12 stands exactly on the turn, and translators must choose. The NRSV, quoted here, says “endures temptation”; the RSV and the ESV say “trial.” Both are right, and neither is complete. James seems to want us to see that every outward trial carries an inward temptation folded inside it — to bitterness, to despair, to the shortcut — and that the two are endured together.

ὑπομένω (hypomenō) is built from hypo, “under,” and menō, “remain.” It means to stay under a weight: neither escaping it nor collapsing beneath it. It is not passive resignation. Its noun, hypomonē, is the steadfastness James says the testing of faith produces (1:3) and the “patient endurance” with which, Jesus says, good soil bears fruit (Luke 8:15).

The verse opens with a phrase every Jewish reader would recognise: makarios anēr, “blessed is the man,” the first words of the whole Psalter in its Greek form (Psalm 1:1). James places the one who endures in the line of the righteous person of Psalm 1, the tree planted by streams of water.

Then the prize: τὸν στέφανον τῆς ζωῆς (ton stephanon tēs zōēs), the crown of life. Greek had two words for “crown.” The diadēma was a royal band, the sign of a ruler. The στέφανος (stephanos) was a wreath — of olive, laurel, pine or wild celery, depending on the games — given to victorious athletes, worn at festivals, and conferred as a civic honour. Paul contrasts the “perishable wreath” of the games with the imperishable one (1 Corinthians 9:25); Peter promises “the crown of glory that never fades away” (1 Peter 5:4). “The crown of life” is most naturally read as the crown that consists of life: the prize is life itself, the life of the age to come. The risen Christ promises the same crown, in the same Greek words, to the suffering church at Smyrna: “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).

Remember the ungodly of Wisdom 2, who wanted to “crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither” (2:8)? Their verb comes from the same root as stephanos. Two crowns are on offer in this week’s readings: one you weave for yourself and watch wither, and one you receive at the end of the test — and it is life.

Two small textual notes. First, the NRSV reads “the crown of life that the Lord has promised.” The earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts do not name the giver at all; they say simply “which he promised.” Later copyists supplied “the Lord” or “God.” St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate supplies Deus, “God” — and fittingly, this verse fell on 30 September, his feast day. A parallel later in the letter, “the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him” (2:5), suggests that God is meant. Nothing in the meaning changes.

Second, notice a quiet echo. James had warned that the double-minded person “must not expect to receive anything from the Lord” (1:7–8). Now he says the one who endures “will receive” the crown. In Greek it is the same verb, lēmpsetai. The divided heart receives nothing. The steadfast heart receives life.

And one theological detail that is easy to miss. The crown is promised not to “those who are strong,”nor to “those who never fall,” but “to those who love him.” In James, endurance is not grit. It is love that refuses to let go.

4. hatsileni and tesaggeveni — “deliver me” and “protect me” (Psalm 59:1)

הַצִּילֵנִי מֵאֹיְבַי אֱלֹהָי מִמִּתְקוֹמְמַי תְּשַׂגְּבֵנִי

(In Hebrew Bibles, where the heading counts as verse 1, this line is numbered 59:2, and the verse numbers that follow run one ahead of the English.)

The two verbs of the opening line are more vivid than their English equivalents.

נָצַל (natsal), in the form used here, means to snatch away, to pull someone out of danger. David uses it of the shepherd who rescues a lamb from the mouth of a lion or a bear (1 Samuel 17:35); Amos uses it of the shepherd who rescues from the lion’s mouth “two legs, or a piece of an ear” (Amos 3:12). It is an urgent, physical rescue word. Keep it in mind; it returns on Friday.

שָׂגַב (sagav) means to be high, and in this form to set on high — to place someone beyond reach. “Protect me” is a fair translation of the result, but the picture is of being lifted to a height the enemy cannot climb. The noun from the same root, מִשְׂגָּב (misgav), is the word the psalm keeps using for God: “for you, O God, are my fortress” (59:9, 17; compare 59:16). A misgav is a high refuge — a crag or tower too steep to storm.

Readers of this series will hear an echo of Psalm 61, which we studied four weeks ago: “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” The psalmists keep asking for the same thing: not a stronger wall at their own height, but a height that is beyond them.

Proverbs sets the true misgav beside a counterfeit in two neighbouring verses that could stand over this whole week. “The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and are safe” — literally, are set on high (18:10). And then: “The wealth of the rich is their strong city; in their imagination it is like a high wall” (18:11). Same root, same image — but the second fortress exists only in the mind. Some fortresses are built by God. Some are built out of our own reasoning. From the inside they can look exactly alike.

One more word. The heading says that Saul’s men watched David’s house — vayyishmeru, from שָׁמַר(shamar), to watch, guard, keep. In the first refrain the psalmist answers with the same verb: “O my strength, I will watch for you” (59:9). Two watches are kept that night. Saul’s men watch the house; David watches for God. (The Hebrew of verse 9 actually reads “his strength,” as the King James Version preserves; most modern translations follow the matching refrain in verse 17 and read “my strength.”) And when the refrain returns at the end of the psalm, one verb has changed: “O my strength, I will sing praises to you” (59:17). The night has passed. The watcher has become a singer.

5. miqqarov and merachoq — “near by” and “far off” (Jeremiah 23:23)

הַאֱלֹהֵי מִקָּרֹב אָנִי … וְלֹא אֱלֹהֵי מֵרָחֹק

The Hebrew opens with the question particle ha-: literally, “Am I a God from near… and not a God from far?” It is a rhetorical question — and an ambiguous one. Which half is God denying?

Most translations and commentators take the question to expect the answer: No — I am not only a God close at hand; I am also a God far off. The New American Bible makes this explicit by adding a single word: “Am I a God near at hand only…?” On this reading the emphasis falls on God’s transcendence. The false prophets had shrunk God into a local deity, a God of the neighbourhood whose words they could manufacture and whose attention they could manage. God refuses to be that small. He is far above them — and therefore sees everything they do.

The ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint — along with Theodotion’s Greek version and the Syriac — has no question particle and reads the line as a statement: “I am a God who is near, says the Lord, and not a God far off.” On this reading the emphasis falls on God’s nearness. The false prophets imagined a distant God who would not notice; God replies that he is close enough to hear every word.

Both readings arrive at the same place, because the next verse settles the matter: “Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD”(23:24). Whether we stress the nearness or the distance, the point is that there is no place — no dark corner, no private chamber of the mind — beyond his sight.

“Near” and “far” are covenant words in Scripture. Moses marvelled that no other nation had “a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him” (Deuteronomy 4:7). The psalmist sings that “the LORD is near to all who call on him” (Psalm 145:18). Paul tells Gentile believers, “you who once were far off have been brought near” (Ephesians 2:13). Jeremiah 23:23 is the warning folded inside that comfort. The God who is near is not a God we can manage. The God who is far is not a God who has stopped looking.

6. endysasthe and pronoia — “put on” and “provision” (Romans 13:14)

ἐνδύσασθε τὸν κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, καὶ τῆς σαρκὸς πρόνοιαν μὴ ποιεῖσθε εἰς ἐπιθυμίας

ἐνδύω (endyō) is the ordinary verb for getting dressed. Paul uses it here as a command to the reader’s own action: clothe yourselves. Two verses earlier he has said, “put on the armor of light” (13:12). Now the armour turns out to be a Person.

What makes the verse remarkable is that Paul has already used the same verb, in Galatians, for something that has already happened: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3:27). In Galatians it is a fact; in Romans it is a command. The Christian is told, in effect, become what you already are — put on, day after day, the garment you were given once. The Church keeps the image alive at every baptism, when the newly baptised are dressed in white and told that they have “clothed yourself in Christ.”

The second half of the verse turns on a word that is easy to read past. πρόνοια (pronoia) means forethought — planning ahead, making arrangements in advance. In Acts, a lawyer flatters the Roman governor Felix by crediting his pronoia, his “foresight,” with reforms for the nation (Acts 24:2). In Greek philosophy, and in the Wisdom of Solomon itself, pronoia is the word for providence: “it is your providence, O Father, that steers its course” (Wisdom 14:3).

So Paul’s command has an edge that English softens. Do not act as the flesh’s providence. Do not be the one who plans ahead for it, provides for it, keeps a supply laid by. Temptation rarely wins by ambush. It usually wins because someone, earlier, quietly made arrangements.

σάρξ (sarx), “flesh,” is not, in Paul, simply the body, and not simply sexuality. It is human life turned in on itself — organised around its own cravings and grievances, apart from the Spirit of God. That is why Paul’s list in the verse before ours includes not only “reveling and drunkenness” and “debauchery and licentiousness” but also “quarreling and jealousy” (13:13). The flesh is as much at home in a grudge as in a tavern. And the ἐπιθυμίαι (epithymiai), the desires the flesh wants gratified, are the same epithymia that James says lures and entices a person into sin (James 1:14).

7. shuv — “turn back” (Jeremiah 15:19)

אִם־תָּשׁוּב וַאֲשִׁיבְךָ לְפָנַי תַּעֲמֹד … יָשֻׁבוּ הֵמָּה אֵלֶיךָ וְאַתָּה לֹא־תָשׁוּב אֲלֵיהֶם

The verb שׁוּב (shuv) — to turn, return, turn back, and so to repent — appears four times in this single verse. Its first two occurrences form a play on words that English cannot quite reproduce: im-tashuv va’ashivekha — “If you turn, I will turn you,” that is, “if you come back, I will bring you back” or restore you. The last two close the verse: “It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them.”

Repentance in the Bible is not first a feeling of remorse. It is a change of direction. And this verse shows it as a movement in which two parties act. Jeremiah must turn; God will turn him. Elsewhere the order is reversed: “bring me back, let me come back, for you are the LORD my God” (Jeremiah 31:18); “Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored” (Lamentations 5:21). Scripture keeps both orders, and both are true. We cannot turn without grace; and grace does not turn us without our turning.

Then: “If you utter what is precious and not what is worthless…” The Hebrew is more physical: ve’im-totsi yaqar mizzolel — literally, “if you bring out the precious from the worthless.” The verb means to bring out or bring forth. The NRSV’s “utter” reads it of speech, which suits the promise that follows. But many interpreters also hear the language of the refiner, separating precious metal from dross — an image Jeremiah knew from the inside, since God had once appointed him “a tester and a refiner among my people” (6:27). On that reading, God is asking the prophet to sift his own speech: to separate what was precious in his outburst (his honesty, his hunger for God’s word) from what was worthless (the bitterness that called God a deceitful brook).

יָקָר (yaqar) means precious, costly, weighty — and also rare. It is the word in the line “The word of the LORD was rare in those days” (1 Samuel 3:1), from the chapter in which the boy Samuel says, “Speak, for your servant is listening” (3:10), a line we met last week. Precious words are rare words, because they cost something. זוֹלֵל (zolel) is its opposite: cheap, worthless, without weight — elsewhere the word for a glutton (Deuteronomy 21:20; Proverbs 23:21), one who consumes without restraint. Cheap words are the easy, greedy ones.

Then the promise: כְּפִי תִהְיֶה (kefi tihyeh), “you shall be as my mouth.” It recalls Jeremiah’s call — “Now I have put my words in your mouth” (1:9) — and, further back, God’s words to Moses about Aaron: “he shall serve as a mouth for you” (Exodus 4:16). Last Sunday, with Ben Sira, we prayed for a guard over our mouths. This week God offers something more: not only a guarded mouth, but his own words to speak through it.

And one more phrase: “you shall stand before me.” To stand before a king was to serve in his presence. The phrase is used of priests and Levites (Deuteronomy 10:8) and of Elijah, who introduces himself as one who stands before the LORD (1 Kings 17:1). At the very beginning of this chapter God had said, “Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people” (Jeremiah 15:1). By its end he is offering the complaining prophet the place of Moses and Samuel. It is precisely the place the false prophets of Jeremiah 23 had never taken: “if they had stood in my council…” (23:22).

8. apistoumenos and elenchō — “doubted” and “exposes” (Wisdom 12:17; 1:3)

ἰσχὺν γὰρ ἐνδείκνυσαι ἀπιστούμενος ἐπὶ δυνάμεως τελειότητι, καὶ ἐν τοῖς εἰδόσι τὸ θράσος ἐξελέγχεις

Wisdom 12:17 is compressed even in Greek. Rendered very literally: “For you show strength when you are disbelieved as to the completeness of your power, and among those who know, you expose their boldness.”

ἀπιστέω (apisteō) means to disbelieve or distrust. It ties this verse to the opening of the book, where God “manifests himself to those who do not distrust him” (1:2). θράσος (thrasos) is rashness, audacity, insolence — not the holy confidence the New Testament praises, but the brazenness of someone who knows better and acts anyway.

The two halves of the verse describe two different groups. Some doubt that God’s power is real or complete; to them God shows his strength. Others know perfectly well, and are insolent anyway; them God rebukes. The book names no examples, but the Exodus story it is retelling supplies one of each. Pharaoh doubted: “Who is the LORD, that I should heed him?” (Exodus 5:2). Israel knew, and tested God regardless: “your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work”(Psalm 95:9).

Both of this week’s Wisdom verses end with the same verb — ἐλέγχω (elenchō), which in 12:17 carries an intensifying prefix (exelenchō). It means to expose, bring to light, refute, convict. It is the verb in Jesus’ saying that those who do evil avoid the light “so that their deeds may not be exposed” (John 3:20), and in his promise that the Spirit will “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). Paul uses it of the light itself: “everything exposed by the light becomes visible”(Ephesians 5:13).

That matters for the whole week. God’s first answer to the crooked thought is not to crush it. It is to bring it into the light. Exposure is painful. It is also the first stage of healing — for, as John goes on to say, “those who do what is true come to the light” (John 3:21).

Reading the Passage Closely

Read Wisdom 1:3 slowly, in its setting, and six things come into view.

First, the verse is an explanation. It begins with “for.” Verse 2 has made a claim: God “is found by those who do not put him to the test, and manifests himself to those who do not distrust him.” Verse 3 gives the reason. God is not hiding from anyone. A few chapters later the book says that Wisdom “is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her” (6:12). What prevents the finding lies on the human side.

Second, notice who does the separating. The subject of the verb is not God. It is the thoughts. The verse does not say that God withdraws from people who reason crookedly; it says that crooked reasonings put distance between people and God. Isaiah had said the same thing, in almost the same shape: “See, the LORD’s hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:1–2). The distance is real. But it was not God who moved away.

Third, notice the two movements of the verse. The first half is hidden and inward: reasonings that bend, slowly, until a person finds themselves at a distance from God. The second half is public and outward: a moment when God’s power is put to the test and the fool stands exposed. The book’s whole first section dramatises this sequence. In chapter 2 the ungodly reason among themselves and decide to test the righteous man, to see whether God will rescue him (2:17–20). In chapter 5 the tables turn. The righteous man stands “with great confidence” (5:1), and his persecutors, seeing him, say: “This is the man whom we once held in derision… fools that we were! We thought that his life was madness”(5:3–4). In Greek, “fools” there is aphrones — the very word of 1:3 — and “we thought” is elogisametha, from the same root as logismoi. The reasoning that begins in chapter 2 is exposed in chapter 5. The verse at the head of the book is the plot of its first five chapters in miniature.

Fourth, notice who is doing the testing. In 1:2–3 it is not God who tests human beings. It is human beings who test God. Do not put him to the test, says verse 2. In Scripture, testing God in this sense is not asking an honest question. Job asked questions; the Psalms are full of them; Jeremiah, as we shall see on Friday, asked some of the harshest questions ever put to God, and none of them was rejected for being asked. To test God is something else: to set conditions — if you are real, then do this — having already decided not to trust him either way. It is the demand of Massah, “Is the LORD among us or not?”, and the dare of the mockers at the cross. Wisdom’s warning is that this kind of testing always rebounds. Whoever puts God in the dock ends up in it.

Fifth, notice the word “foolish.” The aphrōn is not an unintelligent person. The ungodly of chapter 2 are articulate, philosophical and organised. Aphrōn means senseless in the moral sense, lacking the deepest kind of understanding, and it is the word the Greek Psalter uses in the line “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1). That fool is not a philosopher of atheism. He is a practical atheist: someone who lives as though no one is watching. It is exactly the assumption the enemies of Psalm 59 make when they say, “Who will hear us?” (59:7), and exactly the assumption Jeremiah 23:24 demolishes.

Sixth — and this is important — notice what the verse does not say.

It does not say that every thought that crosses our mind separates us from God. Its word is logismoi — reasonings we build and keep — not impressions that arrive uninvited. A person troubled by unwanted thoughts that they hate and resist is not the “fool” of this verse; the desert teachers would say that such a person is fighting, not consenting.

It does not say that doubt or protest separates us from God. The whole of Scripture refutes that idea. The crooked thought is not the honest question; it is the dishonest answer — the reasoning we construct precisely so that we will not have to face God.

And it does not say that the separation is final. The same book goes on to describe a God who corrects “little by little… so that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in you” (12:2) and who “give[s] repentance for sins” (12:19). The verse is a warning, not a sentence.

Finally, here is an inference — and it is ours, not the verse’s. If crooked reasoning is what separates people from God, then the most important ground in the spiritual life lies not in the street outside but in the mind. The enemies outside can surround us. Only an argument we agree with can lead us away.

Scriptural Connections

Now walk with the week’s other six verses, in the order in which they were given. Each one brings us a step closer to the anchor.

Monday — Who is outside the walls?

Psalm 59:1 — “Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me.”

Begin where the week begins: with someone who genuinely has enemies.

Psalm 59 does not spiritualise them. They “lie in wait” for his life (59:3); they “run and make ready”(59:4); their weapons include their mouths — “bellowing with their mouths, with sharp words on their lips” (59:7). And the psalmist insists that he has not provoked them: “For no transgression or sin of mine, O LORD, for no fault of mine” (59:3–4). That is not a claim to be sinless. It is a statement about this particular attack. Some people really are attacked for no fault of their own, and Scripture gives them words to pray.

This needs saying clearly at the start of a week that will turn inward. Nothing in these readings tells the victim of injustice that it was their fault. The inward turn of Wisdom 1:3 does not mean “you must have deserved this.” It means “do not let them take your soul as well.”

Notice next what the psalmist asks God to do. He asks him to wake up. “Rouse yourself, come to my help and see!… Awake to punish all the nations” (59:4–5). In the middle of the night, with the dogs howling, he calls on God the way a frightened household calls on a watchman who has dozed off. It is one of the oldest wake-up calls in the Bible — and it is addressed to God. Another psalm answers it: “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). God was never the one asleep. As the week goes on, we will discover who was.

Notice, too, the enemies’ theology: “‘Who,’ they think, ‘will hear us?'” (59:7). Their violence rests on a crooked thought — that no one is listening. They are practical atheists in the fullest sense, and that is exactly where Wisdom 1:3 says enmity with God begins.

Then comes the most surprising line in the psalm:

“Do not kill them, or my people may forget; make them totter by your power, and bring them down, O Lord, our shield.” (59:11)

A hunted man asks God not to destroy his enemies at once. His reason is not sentimental. He wants God’s justice to be slow and visible enough that his people will remember it. Two verses later the psalm swings the other way — “consume them in wrath” (59:13) — and we should not pretend it does not. The Psalms are honest about the whole tangle of what a persecuted person feels. But the strange plea for restraint in verse 11 will meet us again on Saturday, in Wisdom 12, where it turns out to describe how God himself prefers to act. Whatever tune the heading’s “Do Not Destroy” once named, the title sits remarkably well with this line.

The psalm ends in the morning: “But I will sing of your might; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning” (59:16). If the heading’s story is in view, there is a quiet irony here. Saul had ordered David killed “in the morning” (1 Samuel 19:11). The morning appointed for his death became the hour of his song.

And remember how he lived to see it. David prayed — and he also climbed out through the window that Michal opened for him. The Bible never sets prayer against prudence.

A word for anyone whose “enemies” are not a figure of speech. If someone is threatening, stalking or harming you, Psalm 59 does not ask you to stay in the house and pray. David prayed, and then he went out through the window. Seek safety and help today: in India, call 112 in an emergency, or the Women Helpline on 181; wherever you are, your local emergency services exist for exactly this. Prayer and protection were never rivals.

Tuesday — Can anyone hide in the dark?

Jeremiah 23:23 — “Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off?”

This verse was given on 29 September, the feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. Michael’s name is itself a question: in Hebrew, Mi-kha-El, “Who is like God?” Jeremiah 23:23–24 is one of Scripture’s most searching answers.

The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day had made God manageable. They spoke “visions of their own minds” (23:16) and called them his word. They told people who despised God, “It shall be well with you” (23:17). They strengthened the hands of evildoers, “so that no one turns from wickedness”(23:14). Their God was near enough to be useful and far enough not to interfere.

God’s reply refuses both halves of that arrangement. He is not a pocket God, close enough to be managed. Nor is he an absentee God, too far away to notice. “Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?… Do I not fill heaven and earth?” (23:24).

Set that beside Monday’s psalm. The enemies said, “Who will hear us?” Jeremiah’s God answers: everyone is heard; no one is hidden. For the persecuted, that is one of the deepest comforts in the Bible — the plotting in the dark is seen. But Jeremiah aims the verse at prophets — at religious professionals, at people who spoke in God’s name. The God who sees the enemy’s ambush also sees the believer’s private reasoning. Monday was about the enemies outside the house. Tuesday turns the lamp around.

Psalm 139 says it most beautifully and most uncomfortably: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day” (139:11–12). Every night scene this week — the house watched in the dark, the prophet’s private bitterness, the reasoning no one else can hear — is lit from God’s side.

Then Jeremiah draws a distinction that will matter on Friday: “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat?” (23:28). Straw and wheat — the worthless and the precious. Hold that pair in mind.

Wednesday — What will the test reveal?

James 1:12 — “Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.”

If no one can hide from God, the next question follows at once: what will he find? James answers that every believer will be tested, and that the test will tell the truth.

Read the verse together with the three that follow, because James deliberately sets two outcomes side by side. On one side a person endures — stays under the weight — is found dokimos, genuine, and receives the crown of life. On the other:

“But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.” (1:14–15)

The images of being “lured” and “enticed” come from hunting and fishing: the bait on the hook, the creature drawn out of its hiding place. And the sequence that follows is a life story told in fast motion. Desire conceives; sin is born; sin grows up; and its child is death. The test is the same for everyone. The endings could hardly be further apart: a crown of life, or a death that grew up quietly from one unresisted desire.

Notice, too, what James refuses to say. He will not let anyone blame God for the pull towards evil (1:13). God permits trials; he does not plant temptations. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above” (1:17). The bait, James insists, is always our own epithymia — the very word Paul will use tomorrow.

And here James and Wisdom touch. Wisdom 1:3 says that when God’s power is tested, it exposes the foolish. James says that when the believer is tested, the trial proves the faithful. The furnace is the same furnace. What comes out depends on what went in. Gold comes out as gold. Straw does not come out at all.

The crown, James says, is promised “to those who love him.” That phrase is the secret of endurance. People who simply grit their teeth tend to give way when the pressure lasts longer than their determination. People who love tend to hold on — not because they are strong, but because they will not let go of the One they love.

Thursday — What are you wearing, and what have you planned?

Romans 13:14 — “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

In the summer of AD 386, in a garden in Milan, a brilliant professor of rhetoric lay weeping under a fig tree. For years he had argued with himself. He knew what he believed; what he could not do was live it. His prayer, he later confessed, had long been: “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” Then he heard a child’s voice from a neighbouring house, chanting over and over, “Take up and read; take up and read.” He picked up the letters of Paul lying nearby, opened them, and his eyes fell on this week’s verse and the one before it. “No further would I read,” he wrote, “nor needed I.” The man was Augustine, and the scene is in the eighth book of his Confessions.

Notice what Augustine’s struggle actually was. He was not short of arguments. He was over-supplied with them. Every time he moved towards God, a fresh logismos appeared: not yet; not this way; not until I am ready. And every not yet was, in Paul’s terms, a provision for the flesh — an arrangement made in advance to keep a door open.

That is why the word pronoia matters so much. It means forethought — even providence. Paul is not mainly talking about the moment of temptation. He is talking about what we arrange beforehand. The bottle kept “for guests.” The number saved “just in case.” The app left installed “for emergencies.” The grievance file kept up to date “for the record.” The private plan held in reserve in case God’s plan disappoints. None of these is yet a sin. Each one is a provision.

Paul’s answer is not merely negative. Before he says make no provision, he says put on. The Christian life does not begin with resisting; it begins with being clothed. You cannot defeat the flesh by standing before it unclothed and simply trying harder. You put on Christ — his mind, his habits, his way of speaking, his way of treating enemies — and there is steadily less room left for the old garments.

Remember, too, where this verse stands. Just before it, Paul has told the Romans how to treat their enemies: bless them, feed them, overcome evil with good (12:14–21). In the list of night-time sins just before our verse he includes “quarreling and jealousy” (13:13). The flesh Paul warns against is not only appetite. It is also the grudge. One of the most common provisions we make for the flesh is the rehearsed resentment — the speech to an enemy, polished at two in the morning, that will never be delivered and never be dropped.

And notice the clock. “You know what time it is… the night is far gone, the day is near” (13:11–12). This is the Wake-up Call at the centre of the week. On Monday the psalmist, in the dark, asked God to wake up. On Thursday Paul turns to us and says: it is you who have been asleep.

Friday — What if the one who needs to turn back is me?

Jeremiah 15:19 — “Therefore thus says the LORD: If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth.”

This is the turning point of the week, and one of the most surprising verses in the prophets.

Look first at what Jeremiah has just said to God. He has been faithful, at real cost. He tells God that when his words were found, he ate them, and they became his joy (15:16). He has refused the company of merrymakers and sat alone under the weight of God’s hand (15:17). Everyone curses him (15:10). He has prayed, like Monday’s psalmist, for God to “bring down retribution for me on my persecutors”(15:15). And then, in his pain, he says the unthinkable: “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (15:18).

To feel the force of that, remember how Jeremiah’s book began. God had called himself “the fountain of living water” (2:13). Now his own prophet compares him to a wadi — one of those stream-beds that rush with water in the rainy season and lie bone-dry in summer, betraying the traveller who comes to them thirsty (compare Job 6:15–20). The man who once proclaimed the fountain now says it has run dry.

And God’s answer is: Turn back.

Not to the enemies. To Jeremiah.

The persecuted, faithful prophet — the most innocent man in the city — is the one told to repent. Not because his persecutors were right; they were not. Not because his suffering was deserved; it was not. But because somewhere in the long night of being attacked, bitterness had crept into his speech and his picture of God had begun to bend. His enemies could not separate him from God. His own conclusions about God were beginning to.

This is Wisdom 1:3 happening to a saint.

And look at the grace in the reply. God does not dismiss Jeremiah; he invites him. If you turn, I will turn you. He does not tell him to stop speaking; he tells him to sift his speech — to bring the precious out of the worthless, the wheat out of the straw. Jeremiah’s complaint contained both. There was something precious in it: honesty, a refusal to pretend, a hunger for God’s word that was entirely real. And there was something worthless: the verdict that God had failed. God wants the first and asks him to release the second.

Then the promises gather. You shall stand before me — the place of Moses and Samuel. You shall be as my mouth — his prophetic calling, renewed. It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them— he will not need to become like his enemies in order to survive them. And in the verses that immediately follow, Monday’s prayer is answered almost word for word: “I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the LORD. I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked” (15:20–21). Both times the Hebrew verb is natsal — the very word of Psalm 59:1. Deliverance from enemies is promised. But it is promised to a man who has first been turned back.

That is the order this week keeps insisting on. God does deal with the enemy outside. He begins with the one inside.

Saturday — Why does God not crush his enemies at once?

Wisdom 12:17 — “For you show your strength when people doubt the completeness of your power, and you rebuke any insolence among those who know it.”

By Saturday a question has been building all week. If God sees everything (Tuesday), tests everyone (Wednesday) and promises to deliver his servants (Friday), why does he so often seem slow? Why do the dogs come back every evening?

Wisdom 12 asks the same question of Israel’s history and answers it in one of the most beautiful passages in the Old Testament. Read the verses on either side of ours:

“For your strength is the source of righteousness, and your sovereignty over all causes you to spare all.” (12:16)

“Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness, and with great forbearance you govern us; for you have power to act whenever you choose.” (12:18)

The logic is breathtaking. God does not spare in spite of his power; he spares because of it. Weak rulers strike quickly because they are afraid. Only someone whose power is complete can afford to wait. Earlier the book had said so outright: “you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent” (11:23). In the Roman Rite, the opening prayer of the Mass last Sunday said the same in a single line, addressing God “who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy.” St Thomas Aquinas drew on that ancient prayer when he wrote about the omnipotence of God.

Verse 17 supplies the necessary edge. God’s patience is not indifference. When people doubt that his power is real, he shows it. When people know it is real and presume on it anyway, he rebukes them. Mercy is not the same thing as permission.

Four weeks ago, in Sunday Series No. 4, we studied Wisdom 15:1: “But you, our God, are kind and true, patient, and ruling all things in mercy.” The very next verse shows exactly the kind of knowing that 12:17 warns about: “For even if we sin we are yours, knowing your power” (15:2). It is among the most comforting sentences a believer can say — and, said carelessly, among the most dangerous. I know God is merciful; therefore I can wait. That is the insolence of those who know. Many scholars have noticed echoes of these chapters of Wisdom in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and none is clearer than this question: “Do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4).

Then comes the sentence that turns the whole passage into a lesson for us:

“Through such works you have taught your people that the righteous must be kind.” (12:19)

The Greek word for “kind” is philanthrōpos — literally, a lover of human beings. How God treats his enemies is how he is teaching us to treat ours. Monday’s psalmist, in his best moment, prayed “Do not kill them” (59:11). Wisdom tells us this is what God had been doing all along — and that he means us to learn it. Jesus will say it without any softening: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45).

The larger conversation: a night in a garden

One scene in the Gospels gathers up almost everything this week has said.

It is night. Armed men are on their way with swords and clubs, guided by a friend. In a garden across the Kidron valley, Jesus says to his disciples: “Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

Every thread is there. The night of Psalm 59, with armed men coming. The command to wake of Romans 13. The trial — peirasmos — of James 1:12. The flesh — sarx — of Romans 13:14. And at the centre, the One who endures the test to the end; who does not call down destruction on those who come for him, but heals the ear of the high priest’s servant (Luke 22:50–51) and hands himself over.

Two Sundays ago we reflected on David’s refusal to fall into human hands and Christ’s choice to be handed over into them. Here is the night on which that choice was sealed. It was made in prayer, in the dark, while his friends slept.

Notice what Jesus asks of them. Not that they fight the soldiers — Peter tries that and is told to put away his sword (26:52). He asks them to stay awake and pray, because the real danger that night is not the soldiers. It is the trial that will come to their own hearts when the soldiers arrive: the fear, the self-protective reasoning, the sentence “I do not know the man” (26:72). No enemy laid a hand on Peter that night. What separated him from his Lord, for a few terrible hours, was a crooked thought by a fire in a courtyard. And what brought him back was a look from Jesus (Luke 22:61) and, later, a question asked three times by a lakeside (John 21:15–17). If you turn, I will turn you.

Jesus had already given his disciples words for that night. The prayer he taught them ends with this week’s two concerns side by side: “And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13). Trial and deliverance — James 1:12 and Psalm 59:1 — prayed every day by Christians all over the world.

Paul, who faced more enemies than most, makes the argument of the week explicit in two places. In Romans 8 he lists everything outside us that might separate us from Christ — hardship, persecution, famine, sword, death, life, angels, rulers, powers — and concludes that none of it can (8:35–39). In 2 Corinthians 10 he names where the real fortifications stand: “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ”(10:4–5). The word for “arguments” is logismoi. Paul’s war is not against the people at the gate. It is against the reasonings that build strongholds in the mind.

And Jesus himself had named the source: “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:21). The Greek word for those intentions, dialogismoi, means inner debates — reasonings conducted with oneself.

The whole Bible, it turns out, agrees with this Sunday’s verse. The enemies at the gate are real. But the decisive door is on the inside.

Interpretive Insights

1. Scripture takes our enemies seriously — but never lets them have the last word about who we are.

Psalm 59 gives the persecuted full permission to name their enemies, to protest their innocence and to cry for help in the night. Nothing this week tells the victim of injustice that it was their fault. But the week also refuses to let the enemy define the story. The enemy can surround the house. Who we become inside it remains a question between us and God.

2. Separation from God rarely begins with an act. It begins with an argument.

Wisdom’s word is logismoi — reasonings, calculations, the case we build. Long before the ungodly of Wisdom 2 lay in wait for the righteous man, they “reasoned unsoundly.” Long before Augustine was set free, he was held for years by “not yet.” Long before Peter denied his Lord, he had reasoned his way to a fire in a courtyard. The decisive ground is the mind’s private courtroom, where we decide what will count as reasonable.

3. A test does not create what it finds. It reveals it.

The same word, dokimazō, runs through James and Wisdom in opposite directions. The believer who is tested is proven; the fool who tests God is exposed. Trials will come to everyone — Scripture never promises otherwise. The real question is what they will find when they arrive, and that is being settled now, in ordinary days, long before the crisis.

4. God is too near to hide from and too far to manage.

Jeremiah 23:23 is both comfort and warning, and we need both. To the person plotted against in the dark, it says that nothing is hidden. To the person quietly arranging a private religion around their own preferences, it says exactly the same thing. The God of the Bible is never a pocket God and never an absent landlord.

5. Even the faithful need to turn back.

This is the insight easiest to miss. The person told to repent in this week’s readings is not the persecutor but the persecuted prophet. Suffering for the right reasons does not protect us from drawing the wrong conclusions. A long season of being wronged can bend a good person’s picture of God until it is unrecognisable — you are to me like a deceitful brook. God’s response is neither condemnation nor indulgence. It is an invitation: turn, and I will turn you.

6. God’s power is most itself when it waits.

Wisdom 12 teaches that God spares because he is strong, not because he is weak, and that his patience is a door held open for repentance. That changes how we read the delays in our own lives. It also changes how we are meant to use whatever power we hold over others. “The righteous must be kind” is not a soft sentiment. It is what resembling an all-powerful God looks like in a human being.

7. Holiness is first a garment, and only then a guard.

Romans 13:14 does not begin with resist. It begins with put on. The Christian answer to the flesh is not white-knuckled vigilance alone, but being so clothed in Christ that the old provisions have nowhere left to hang. The watchman at the door matters. The One we wear matters more.

The Central Tension

Here is what this week’s Scriptures ask us to confront.

We would much rather guard the gate than guard the mind.

Guarding the gate has great advantages. It keeps the danger outside us. It makes us, by definition, the innocent party. It gives us someone to watch, someone to pray against, someone to explain our unhappiness. And sometimes — often — the danger outside is real. The psalmist was not imagining the dogs.

Guarding the mind is harder, because the enemy there speaks in our own voice. It does not howl. It reasons. It says not yet. It says after what they did, you are entitled. It says no one will know. It says God will understand. Sometimes it says God has failed you. Its arguments are often clever, sometimes partly true, and nearly always flattering. And unlike the enemies outside, it does not need to break in. We let it in. We feed it. We make provision for it.

So the week sets two watchmen before us. One stands on the wall, scanning the dark for enemies. The other stands at the door of the heart, deciding what may come in and stay. Most of us have posted a strong guard on the wall and left the door of the heart unattended.

And the uncomfortable truth of Wisdom 1:3 is that the second door is the only one through which anything has ever separated a human being from God.

So the question this week is not Who is against me? Most of us could answer that in seconds.

It is far more searching:

Which am I watching more closely tonight — the people who might harm me, or the thoughts that are quietly leading me away from God?

What This Means for Us Today

When you really do have enemies. Many readers of this series know what it is to be opposed — in a workplace, in a family property dispute, in a case that has dragged through the courts for years, in an institution where someone has decided you are in the way. Psalm 59 is your prayer; pray it without embarrassment. But watch what the conflict is doing inside you. An enemy who takes your position, your reputation or your peace has taken a great deal. Do not let them take your picture of God as well. That is the one thing Jeremiah nearly surrendered, and the one thing God asked him to take back.

In the grievance file. Anyone trained in law or administration knows how to build a file: dates, documents, statements, precedents, the patient assembly of a case. It is a valuable skill. It is also a perfect description of how a grudge is kept alive. The inner file on a sibling, a former colleague, a fellow parishioner, a former spouse — reviewed at night, updated with each new slight, kept ready for a hearing that never comes. Paul’s name for that file is provision for the flesh. You may need to keep records for a court. You do not need to keep them for your soul.

In leadership and authority. Wisdom 12:18 is addressed to God, but it describes something every person with power over others must learn: “you have power to act whenever you choose” — and therefore you can afford to be patient. The official who could end a subordinate’s career with a single note, the senior colleague who could humiliate a junior, the parent who could win every argument by force: the strength of authority shows most clearly in its restraint. Insecure authority strikes fast. Secure authority can wait for a person to change.

Online. Our phones have made it possible to have enemies we have never met, and to be supplied, hour by hour, with reasons to despise them. Much of what crosses our screens has been carefully designed by people who planned ahead to provoke the very epithymiai Paul warns about: outrage, envy, appetite, the itch to win. In a quite precise sense, someone else is exercising pronoia on behalf of our flesh. Romans 13:14 asks us to plan back — to decide in advance which apps, which feeds, which late-night habits we will simply not provide for.

In our speech. Jeremiah 15:19 offers a test every Christian can apply before pressing send: precious, or worthless? The forward that spreads a rumour, the complaint in the family group, the clever remark at someone’s expense — these are zolel, cheap words, easily consumed and long regretted. Precious words are rare because they cost something: the sincere compliment, the honest correction given privately, a word of blessing about someone who has hurt us. God’s promise to people who speak this way is extraordinary: you shall be as my mouth.

At night. Many crooked thoughts do their best work after dark. The three o’clock replay of an insult, the imagined confrontation, the slow slide from I was wronged to God has abandoned me — these are the howling dogs of Psalm 59, but they are inside the house. The psalm’s practice is simple: name the danger to God, keep watch for him rather than for the enemy, and wait for the morning. The Church’s Night Prayer has long asked God to “protect us… as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep.” Some nights the most faithful thing you can do is decline to argue with your own mind, and hand the case to God until daylight.

In seasons of doubt. There is a difference between asking God a hard question and putting him on trial. Job, the psalmists and Jeremiah asked questions as sharp as any modern sceptic’s, and God did not reject them for asking. What Wisdom warns against is the conditional faith that says I will trust you if — if you heal this, if you fix that, if you prove it now. Honest questions keep us talking to God. Tests keep us talking about him from a safe distance.

In ageing and in grief. Long sorrow, like long persecution, can bend a person’s picture of God. You are to me like a deceitful brook has been the private prayer of many widows, many parents who have buried a child, many people whose prayers were not answered as they hoped. Jeremiah’s story is a mercy to them. God did not reject the man who said it. He asked him to keep the honesty, let go of the verdict — and take back his place in God’s presence.

A word for anxious and scrupulous consciences. Wisdom 1:3 is about reasonings we build and keep, not about unwanted thoughts that arrive uninvited and distress us. If you are troubled by intrusive thoughts that you hate and cannot stop, you are not the “fool” of this verse; you are fighting, not consenting. Speak with a confessor, and if the thoughts persist or overwhelm you, with a doctor or counsellor. In India, Tele-MANAS (14416) is free and available at any hour.

A Rise & Inspire Moment

Troy was never taken by the army outside its walls. It was taken by an argument inside them.

Ten years of siege could not break that city. One persuasive conversation did: it’s a gift; it’s harmless; the war is over; let’s bring it in. The Trojans opened their own wall to make room.

That is how separation from God almost always happens. Not by force. By invitation. No enemy has ever dragged a human soul away from God; Paul searched the whole of creation and could not find one able to do it. But a crooked thought, reasoned through and welcomed in — not yet, no one will see, after what they did, God has failed me — can walk a person out of God’s presence without a single blow being struck.

So keep your guard on the walls if you must. But post your best watchman at the door of your mind.

The enemy can surround the house. Only a thought you agree with can open the door.

Living the Passage This Week

1. Pray Psalm 59 honestly — and then pray verse 11. Write down the name of the person you would most like God to deal with. Pray Psalm 59:1 for yourself, aloud, without pretending you are not hurt. Then pray one sentence of blessing for that person in Paul’s words: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (Romans 12:14). Do this on three separate days this week. You are not pretending they are innocent. You are refusing to let them make you like them.

2. Remove one provision — and put on one garment. Name one “not yet” in your life: something you have arranged in advance to keep a door open — an app, a contact, a hidden supply, a browsing habit, a speech to an enemy that you rehearse at night. Remove it this week, physically and specifically, before Friday. Then, each morning as you dress, say Romans 13:14 under your breath as you put on your first garment: “I put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Let the most ordinary act of the day become a daily renewal of your baptism.

3. Sift one complaint before you speak it. Jeremiah’s lament held something precious and something worthless. The next time you are about to complain — at home, at work, in a group chat — take the complaint to God first, as Jeremiah did. Then ask: what in this is precious — the truth, the real need, the honest grief? What is worthless — the contempt, the verdict, the exaggeration? Speak only the precious part, and only to someone who can do something about it.

4. Bring one crooked thought into the light. When you catch yourself building a case — I deserve this, no one will know, God doesn’t care — write the sentence down exactly as your mind said it. Read it again the next morning, in daylight. Ask Jeremiah’s question: can I hide this from God? Then do what Wisdom says God does with crooked thoughts: expose it — in confession, or to one trusted friend. Thoughts that cannot survive daylight rarely survive being spoken aloud.

5. End each night with a handover, and begin each day with a song. For seven nights, before you sleep, hand over by name the person or problem that keeps you awake, and do not reopen the case until morning. On waking, before you check your messages, say the closing words of Psalm 59: “I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning” (59:16). Then do what today’s second reading at Mass invites: name one thing that is true, one that is just and one that is lovely — and “think about these things” (Philippians 4:8).

Questions for Personal Reflection

1. According to Wisdom 1:3, what actually separates people from God — and what does the verse not say separates them? Read it again beside Romans 8:35–39 before answering.
2. Who are the “enemies” I most often bring to God in prayer, and what do I usually ask him to do with them? Is my prayer closer to Psalm 59:11, or to 59:13?
3. What argument have I been rehearsing in my own mind — about someone else, about myself or about God — that has been slowly putting distance between me and him?
4. What provision have I made for the flesh? What “not yet” am I keeping in reserve, and what would it cost me to remove it?
5. Where is God saying to me, as he said to Jeremiah, “Turn back”? What precious word will I speak this week — to whom, and on what day?

Prayerful Response

God my fortress, who neither slumbers nor sleeps,

You know who is against me. You have heard every word spoken against me in the dark, and you have seen every plan. Deliver me. Set me on a height they cannot climb.

But you have also heard the words I speak in the dark — in the courtroom of my own mind, where I keep the files and rehearse the speeches, and where, on some nights, I have called you a dry stream.

You are nearer than my thoughts and greater than my reasons. Nothing I think is hidden from you. I am glad of that, and I am afraid of it.

Straighten what is crooked in me. Where I have made provision for the flesh, take the provisions away. Clothe me again in your Son, as you did at the font, so that there is less of my old self left to tempt.

When the test comes, let it find gold, not straw; and where it finds straw, burn it gently and keep me.

Teach me the mercy of your power. You could crush your enemies in a moment, and you wait. Do not let me be quicker with mine than you are with yours.

Turn me, and I shall be turned. Sift my words, and let the precious ones be yours.

And when this night is over, I will sing of your steadfast love in the morning.

Through Christ our Lord, who kept watch in the garden while we slept. Amen.

Key Takeaway

The enemy can surround your house, but only a thought you agree with can lead you away from God — so ask him to keep the door of your mind as faithfully as you ask him to guard your gate.

Closing

This week began with a house surrounded in the night. It ends this morning in a vineyard.

In parishes of the Roman Rite around the world today, the Gospel is the parable of the tenants (Matthew 21:33–43). A landowner plants a vineyard, builds a watchtower, leases it to tenants — and goes away “to another country.” The owner is far off. Left alone with their reasoning, the tenants decide what people so often decide about an absent owner. When his son arrives, “they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance'” (21:38). In Matthew’s Greek, “they said to themselves” is exactly the phrase with which the Wisdom of Solomon introduces the crooked reasoning of the ungodly who lie in wait for the righteous one (Wisdom 2:1). The tenants thought distance meant impunity. They mistook the owner’s patience for absence. Jeremiah could have warned them: Am I a God near by, and not a God far off?

And today’s second reading answers them both. “The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). Paul’s verb for guard is a military one — the word for a garrison keeping watch over a city. The fortress Psalm 59 asked for is offered not only around our houses but around our minds. Then Paul adds: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just… think about these things” (4:8). His verb for think is logizesthe— from the same root as Wisdom’s logismoi. The cure for crooked reasoning is not to stop thinking. It is to think straight, about what is true, in the presence of the One who sees.

So this week, by all means, ask God to deliver you from your enemies. He has promised to. But ask him first to keep the door you cannot see — the one inside. Then do your part: notice what you let in, stop providing for what you have been feeding, and turn back wherever you have begun to bend.

The dogs, the psalm says, come back every evening.

But the psalm does not end in the evening.

It ends in the morning, with a song.

Which passage of Scripture would you like us to study together in a future Sunday Series? Tell us — the passages our readers are wrestling with are usually the ones worth a whole Sunday.

Rise & Inspire — Sunday Bible Series Depth over speed. Understanding over volume. Formation over information.

Written by John Britto Kurusumuthu.

The verses shared each morning by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, are collected over seven days. These seven verses together form the basis for the weekly Sunday Bible Series.

© 2026 Rise & Inspire.

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