We must keep watch over our lives by guarding our heart’s affections. Let us make sure that we do rejoice in our spouse alone, even as we remember our Lord for the goodness of the gift he has given us.

It was the winter of 1986 when I first laid eyes on my future wife. Now, when I first spotted this radiant beauty, great confusion followed. For it was like I was seeing double, because I was seeing double. My wife is an identical twin. A little counsel for any young fella considering dating a twin: make sure you know which twin you want to go out with before asking one of them out. Otherwise, you might end up asking both of them out, as I did. Trust me, your beautiful bride will never let you forget the “mistake” of going out with her twin sister, as long as you both shall live. Well, all that took place in 1987, the same year that lovely girl became my bride, the wife of my youth. Thirty-five years later, I can affirm that a man finds a good thing when he finds a wife and has obtained favor from the Lord. I can likewise affirm the wisdom of Proverbs 5:18-19:
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.
Wisdom here instructs men to delight in the wife of their youth. Lest we misunderstand the meaning, the author is not speaking generically about the joys of marriage, but specifically about the delight one finds in marital intimacy. As one honors the marital bed (Heb. 13:4), one discovers the joy and delight of sacred union. So wisdom says to us to delight in the wife of our youth, and in her alone. So the ladies will not feel left out, wisdom declares the same message to you as well. Delight in that man of yours all the days of your life, and in him alone.
Indeed, we must keep utilizing that word “alone,” for vv. 18-19 are set in a broader context, which warns against adultery. The author in vv. 1-14 and 20-23 warns men about the “forbidden woman.” That is the woman willing to engage in an adulterous relationship, a seductress who desires to use her sexuality, not as a gift to delight a husband, but as a tool to trap a victim. The author acknowledges the allurement of her seduction, but also warns against such an illicit relationship:
Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and he ponders all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin. He dies for lack of discipline, and because of his great folly he is led astray.(Proverbs 5:20–23). 
So, just as we must rejoice in the spouse of our youth, we must keep watch over our life. We must keep watch even over what we watch. As I suspect all will agree, ours is a society drunk on sexual immorality. Not just adultery, but all sorts of sexual perversions. It is a great challenge to keep watch over our lives because so much in our lives seeks to promote a forbidden life. One need but type a few letters on a computer and one will find a world filled with pornographic images. Actually, one need not even expend that much energy, as a simple drive on a major highway or a walk in a public area will present a variety of seductive images, attempting to allure the heart toward a forbidden life. While nearly impossible to escape all such public images, we nevertheless must keep watch over our lives by guarding our heart’s affections. Let us make sure that we do rejoice in our spouse alone, even as we remember our Lord for the goodness of the gift he has given us.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by David T. Crum |
Monday, May 22, 2023
Eventually becoming a Presbyterian as an adult, Jackson held firmly to the Providential view of God, noting that nothing occurred in life without God’s blessing, guidance, and will. We can argue that Providence further shaped Jackson into the man he became. The Lord molded Stonewall Jackson from his early childhood years. Of course, the man experienced great sadness and heartache; however, perseverance, determination, morality, and discipline made him the general he was. His boyhood years set the stage for the legend himself.

Anyone familiar with Stonewall Jackson knows that the man experienced significant sorrow in his boyhood. Orphaned at age seven, Jackson lost his father and mother within a few short years. His older brother, Warren, whom he spent a significant amount of time with, died at the age of 20. Jackson, too young to remember his father, had several instrumental figures in his life who helped rear him into the man he became.
The memories of his mother, Julia, lay imprinted in his mind throughout his adult life. She was a kind, Christian woman who loved her children dearly. Jackson’s second wife, Anna, wrote of her impact on the young boy, “Such a mother could not but leave a deep impression upon the heart of such a son. To the latest hour of his life, he cherished her memory.”[i] Years after the death of Jackson’s father (Jonathan), Julia re-married a man named Blake B. Woodson. Unable to provide for the remaining Jackson children, the siblings separated, being sent to extended family. The separation devastated young Jackson and his mother:
Julia Woodson sobbed uncontrollably as she hugged her small son and tried to tell him goodbye. The child fought back tears while being placed on a horse. As the party of riders started away, the hysterical mother ran to her son and held him once more. Julia Woodson never recovered from that farewell. As for Jackson, his second wife observed many years later: That parting he never forgot; nor could he speak of it in future years but with the utmost tenderness.[ii]
A short time later, Julia gave birth to another boy (Wirt Woodson) and never recovered from a difficult childbirth. She died in December 1831. Though Jackson was a young boy, his memories of his mother never left his soul. On her deathbed, she prayed earnestly for the salvation of her children, knowing her time had ended.
Jackson’s older brother Warren played a vital role in his life, serving as another Christian example. Though the brothers spent several years apart in separate families, they united a number of times, even taking a nearly year-long journey together from Virginia to Ohio. Warren, by all accounts, was a mature young man who followed in his mother’s footsteps and relied on prayer in every aspect of life. As an adult, Jackson spoke fondly of Warren’s legacy, underscoring his Christian influence.
However, Jackson noted Uncle Cummins served as his life’s most significant role model. As a young adult, he wrote to his sister Laura, “Uncle had recently received a letter from our cousins in California and they say that Uncle Cummins is undoubtedly dead. This is news which goes to my heart, uncle was a father to me.”[iii]
Cummins, the half-brother of Jonathan (Jackson’s father), raised Jackson. He remained single his entire life, living on hundreds of acres. Here, Jackson roamed the land, learned how to ride horses, cut down lumber, and became the resilient and brave man the reader knows him as. Cummins, a laid-back uncle, let Jackson discover many of life’s questions independently. He did, however, instill discipline, bravery, and courage in the young boy. Anna later remarked that Cummins treated Jackson as if he were his own son. It was Cummins who shared the opportunity to attend West Point and urged his nephew to apply for the opening. The man was not perfect, and is said to have chased wealth to a disastrous level. Nevertheless, Cummins saw a gift in Jackson. The traits of resiliency, honor, and bravery grew exponentially in his young teenage years.
Before attending West Point, Jackson was a deputy constable, collecting debt. He gained this position around the age of 16 or 17, which was unusual. However, the local town’s officials knew of his reputation, honor, and strong moral character. The vocation was difficult; Jackson often collected judgments upon locals and even extended family. He disliked this position and longed for a change, which came with his invitation to study at West Point.
Outside of the family’s influence on Jackson, the Lord guided the boy into a man. Julia’s nurturing and prayers inarguably planted a seed of faith in the boy’s heart. By his latter teenage years, Jackson walked into town to attend church on his own. He sat alone in a pew at the back of the church. He borrowed Christian books from a friend’s library and contemplated morality. Biographer James I. Robertson Jr. supported Christianity’s influence in Jackson’s life, “At an impressionable period of Jackson’s life, religion entered his soul. He took it seriously. Sometime before 1841, he began praying nightly.”[iv]
Eventually becoming a Presbyterian as an adult, Jackson held firmly to the Providential view of God, noting that nothing occurred in life without God’s blessing, guidance, and will. We can argue that Providence further shaped Jackson into the man he became.
The Lord molded Stonewall Jackson from his early childhood years. Of course, the man experienced great sadness and heartache; however, perseverance, determination, morality, and discipline made him the general he was. His boyhood years set the stage for the legend himself.
David Crum holds a Ph.D. in Historical Theology. He serves as an Assistant Professor of History and Dissertation Chair. His research interests include the history of warfare and Christianity. He and his family attend Trinity Presbyterian Church (ARP) in Bedell, New Brunswick. 

[i] Mary Anna Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, (1892; reprint, New York: Harper & Brothers, 2019), 21.
[ii] James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend, (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 9.
[iii] Thomas J. Jackson, “Letter. Stonewall Jackson to his sister Laura. July 7, 1850”, https://digitalcollections.vmi.edu/digital/collection/p15821coll4/id/121/rec/22 (accessed December 15, 2022).
[iv] Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend, 19.
Related Posts:

If in humility we—Americans, moderns, Christians—reacquaint ourselves with an earth of the seventh day, in need of gardeners, namers, dominion makers, then perhaps we can avoid our great tower’s fall….For how, without knowing nature, can we know her laws, or know her God?

There is a capital in the east, a great city full of many peoples from all over the world, and it sits upon a river. Drawn there are the youth of all the states and territories, and of many foreign protectorates, to the halls of power where armies of civil servants administer the law. The city is full of parks and gardens and the treasures of fallen kingdoms. I write, of course, of Babylon.
American evangelicals living and working in Washington, D.C., like to invoke the prophet Daniel. Belteshazzar’s faithful service to an empire that swallowed up his people is a comfort to pilgrims who cannot help but notice their country that they love has ever less love for them, for Christ, or for his church. Daniel’s is a story that, on a superficial reading, might suggest the Christian in politics faces two futures: the power to do good, quietly behind the scenes, or martyrdom in the lion’s den. Few worry much about the far more likely outcomes—mediocrity and assimilation, for the sake of vulgar comfort.
Christians hoping to make policy—working close to power, seeking the good of the city—ought perhaps to look more closely at another character in Daniel’s story. King Nebuchadnezzar’s descent from royal grace to dumb beast, and then blessed return to imperial glory, presents us with a confounding illustration of man’s relationship to creation’s great chain of being and God’s providential work. The sin addressed, of course, is pride, which comes before a fall. But the way of humility and restoration is not an immediate turn to the high, to abstract theological doctrine, but rather a reacquaintance with the low, with the things of men stripped away: Nebuchadnezzar undergoes, we might say, a rewilding.
The prophet writes:
All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of the twelve months, he was walking about the royal palace of Babylon. The king spoke, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?”
While the word was still in the king’s mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: the kingdom has departed from you! And they shall drive you from men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make you eat grass like oxen; and seven times shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He chooses.”
That very hour the word was fulfilled concerning Nebuchadnezzar; he was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.
And at the end of the time I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me; and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever:
For His dominion is an everlasting dominion,And His kingdom is from generation to generation.All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing;He does according to His will in the army of heavenAnd among the inhabitants of the earth.No one can restrain His handOr say to Him, “What have You done?”
At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my honor and splendor returned to me….
The moral lessons here are plain and familiar: humility and piety, the beginnings of wisdom. The political lesson, perhaps less so. We are citizens de jure—though maybe, de facto, merely voters and consumers—of a republic, not kings of kings. But empires are empires. And America’s public reason, too, the glory and honor and splendor, cannot return unless there is a rewilding for us of a kind, and thus the conservation of a commonsense account of nature as God’s creation.
Here, now, in this year of our Lord, it hardly needs demonstration—to voters of either party—that the American people have by and large forgotten that the roots of their liberty are deeper than their own mighty power and majesty. We are a house divided, like the garments at Golgotha. The ground on which our political order and all its just freedoms stands is a recognition of the laws of nature and nature’s God, but, what are those?
In turning to a discussion of nature, we find ourselves, as we should expect to do when heading in the right direction, on a narrow road. It is the path to a right relationship with the rest of creation, which is really to a right understanding of ourselves. But two ditches lie on either side of us.
On the one hand—we might be tempted to say the left hand—lies a radical flattening of all distinction between the human being and that other “everything else” that humans call nature. This can be professed to such a degree that our self-awareness is seen as an accident, even a kind of cancer, concluding that our proper relationship to the rest of the earth can only be found in self-effacement. Climate conversations have all the hallmarks of our post-Christian condition: cosmic sin without cosmic grace. We look to the heavens and see not the stars but the vast emptiness of space, and sing the praises of annihilation.
On the other hand—one commonly coded as right-wing or conservative—the earth is reduced to mere matter at hand, and all of mankind has become, not Imago Dei, the sons of God, but a potential demiurge. Nature in this perspective is only flux and chaos, which presents an illusion of order that modern man, as modern toolmaker, can manipulate for his own ends. These ends continuously grow, progress, with the mastery by technicians of new techniques. Mankind, too, then becomes caught up in this self-made emergent arc of history, just more matter for manipulation, as C.S. Lewis observed in the opening of the third chapter of The Abolition of Man.
Many Americans, many Christians among them, have fallen into one of these two ditches, and the leviathan regime we live in straddles this narrow road, a foot rooted in both sides, set to prevent our passage. This regime, one oriented to the total rationalization of life through technology, is both a giant artificial man and tower reaching to the heavens. So let us go back to the beginning, and look at Genesis, chapter 11:
Read More
Related Posts: