Since the Bible is the very words of God (it doesn’t merely contain the word of God), it comes to us with the authority of its primary author, God himself. Those for whom the book of the Bible are named, tell us that Bible is God’s word written, and that it must be seen as divine speech given through human agency. And this speech instructs, corrects, and trains us in righteousness, because it repeatedly points us to its central character, Jesus, the Son of God who came to save us from our sin.

In Genesis 1:1 we read “in the beginning was God.” Echoing the opening declaration of the Bible, in John 1:1 we read that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But John goes on to say “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The fact that God chose to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ (the eternal word made flesh) brings us to the subject of the inspiration and authority of the Bible. This is where God primarily chooses to reveal himself and his purposes to his people—in a collection of sixty-six written books which tell the story of God’s mighty deeds and words of explanation, all of which point to Jesus, the Word made flesh.
The Bible never claims to be an “inspirational” book which grants its reader greater spiritual insight or self-enlightenment. The Bible was not given to motivate us to live better lives, or to do great things. The Bible is given to us by God as a testimony to the Word made flesh (Jesus), who came to save us from our sins. This is what the various human writers of the Bible say about the Bible itself. What kind of book is it? What do they testify about it?
Paul says in his second letter to Timothy that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” Although the term “inspiration of Scripture” is often used to describe God’s revelation of himself to us in written form, modern translations of the Bible (such as the ESV) correctly note that the word which the King James Version famously translated as “inspired” (theopneustos) is better translated as “breathed out” by God.
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In 2 Chronicles 13, we find Judah about to face off in battle against Israel. Following the glorious, climactic reign of Solomon, the kingdom by this point had split in two.
We know that Rehoboam took foolish counsel from other young men and answered the people harshly. When the overburdened people asked for a lightening of Solomon’s heavy-handed rule, Rehoboam doubled down, walked into a fight with his words, and divided a nation. One man’s folly ended the golden age of Israel’s national existence.
Some years later, Abijah (Solomon’s grandson and David’s great grandson) led Judah in battle against Jeroboam and Israel. The wide angle view of Abijah’s life was hardly the picture of obedience to God’s law, yet in this snapshot he seems to have been in the right.
As the battle neared, Judah was outnumbered, with 400,000 set against Israel’s 800,000. Despite the fact that Jeroboam’s armies surrounded and began to ambush Judah’s fighting men, Abijah’s troops would win a stunning victory. In the end, some 500,000 Israelites—chosen men, the most valiant warriors—were slain. The victory went to Judah because unlike Israel, it had not forsaken God.
Despite the “victory,” it was ultimately tragic—a civil war that cost nearly as many lives as the American Civil War. You could trace all the senseless carnage and shattered lives back to the failure of leadership displayed by Rehoboam. One man’s soft character led to the death of three quarters of a million of his own people and changed the direction of the nation forever.
Abijah’s speech before the battle focuses in on this aspect of Rehoboam’s character and past actions.
Hard Words About a Soft Man
As the two armies formed battle lines, Abijah told Jeroboam that he, Jeroboam, was able to revolt against Rehoboam and divide the kingdom because Rehoboam was “young and irresolute and could not withstand them” (2 Chronicles 13:7).
You might pass over a word like “irresolute,” as I almost did, except that I noticed the ESV gives us a footnote. As an alternate meaning, the Hebrew word being used denotes that Rehoboam was “soft of heart.”
While the ESV translates the Hebrew word rak as “irresolute,” it means “tender, delicate, soft.” It can mean “tender, delicate, especially in body, implying weakness of undeveloped character.” It can also mean “weak of heart, timid,” or referring to “soft words.”
Keep in mind, at this pivotal time Abijah is speaking about his father. Maybe Rehoboam passed on the lesson of his own failure to his son so that he would not repeat it. Maybe Abijah simply knew his history. In any event, the son didn’t miss the point made by a generation-impacting failure of leadership: one man’s soft character can destroy a nation. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
Rehoboam altered the fate of his nation because he was a soft man. His softness seems to have come from a number of factors: his youth, inexperience, and perhaps the circumstances of his upbringing. He was weak of character and delicate, likely because he was raised in opulence, wealth, and comfort. We also know that he wasn’t faithful to God’s Word. Soft men come from soft places and soft people.
It reminds me of something John Piper once said in Chapel at Southern Seminary. He warned the students that the pristine and decadent campus could destroy their souls because it was so “posh and nice.” Those are the kind of surroundings that can make men soft, cowardly, and compromising when they should be hard, resolute, and courageous to oppose evil. Piper’s words were an accurate foreshadowing of what would happen to the seminary because of Critical Race Theory and Woke Politics.
You can also think of the Spartans, who realized hard warriors came from hard training and a hard life. Or John, who didn’t grow up with white collar amenities but in a wilderness with sparsity and danger.
John: The Hard Man Par Excellence
Compare Rehoboam’s softness to what Jesus said about John the Baptist in Matthew 11.
Speaking to the crowds about John, Jesus asked, ““What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses” (Matthew 11:7-8).
I’ve talked about this before, but the word here for soft in the Greek is malakos, which also translates elsewhere to effeminate. Soft men in soft places (king’s palaces) wear soft clothing. They live in, fellowship with, and adorn themselves with softness. Their environment and friends are soft, and it seeps into their bones—much like xenoestrogens that soften plastic & human skin tissue.
Rehoboam was that son raised in a king’s house. He was delicate and, as a result, dangerous to his people. He lacked the courageous character to confront rebellion with competence. Ironically, a wise, hard man would have spoken a soft word and would have saved the nation; instead, a soft man spoke a hard word and caused horrendous national division, death, and destruction. Too often, soft men wrongly think “tough talk” will make up for their own insecurity, when it actually works to fan the flames of conflict. A wise man knows when to use a gentle word of appeal and when to roar like a lion.

The process of compiling an anthology of devotional classics was for me a continuous process of tracking down bits and pieces that were part of my literary and religious life that I had never pursued in detail. I will feel rewarded if my readers come to love the entries in my anthology as I have come to love them, and I will be doubly rewarded if my readers catch a vision for finding devotional riches in overlooked corners of their own reading lives.

The Devoted Heart
The following reflections on the devoted heart are occasioned by the recent release of my anthology of devotional classics, a book in which each devotional text is accompanied by a 500-word explication by me. I called the texts classics to denote that they possess qualities that raise them above the conventional entries in a daily devotional guide. The problems with the conventional devotional guide are multiple, as Charles Spurgeon discovered when he made a survey of existing devotional books. What Spurgeon found was predictability, monotony, a tendency toward abstraction, and lack of fresh insight and expression.
In compiling my anthology, I worked hard to find devotional riches in unexpected places. Many of the authors would doubtless be surprised by what I chose for devotional purposes. Although I did not primarily go in quest of superior expression, I found that freshness of insight and expression just naturally appeared, often because of the real-life situations from which the devotionals arose.

I will adduce four examples to illustrate what I am describing, and then I will explore the common ingredients that the selections in my book share, in effect offering a definition of the genre of a devotional classic.

Devotional Riches in Unexpected Places
The burial service in The Book of Common Prayer was not composed as a devotional. It was instead intended to be part of a funeral service. Yet it is a moving meditation on human mortality and immortality. Here is a brief excerpt:
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for help, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? . . . O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death . . . [and] suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
When Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was walking with a visitor in a garden, the visitor asked the poet what he thought of Christ. Tennyson’s response was not offered as a devotional, but it nonetheless rises to that status: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul. He is the sun of my soul.”
William Shakespeare finalized and signed his will a month before his death in 1616. In doing so, he did not envision himself as writing something devotional, yet part of the preamble reads as follows: “I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior to be made partaker of life everlasting. And my body to the earth whereof it is made.”
Painter Lilias Trotter made a practice of drawing plants in Algeria, where she served as a missionary in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Trotter pondered the plants that she came to know intimately, the idea occurred to her that they were parables of spiritual truths. One of these parables was built around the idea that just as plants die and then revive to new life, for people, too, death is in multiple ways the gate of life. Here is a brief excerpt: “A gateway is never a dwelling-place; the death-stage is never meant for our souls to stay and brood over, but to pass through with a will into the light beyond . . . for above all and through all is the inflowing, overflowing life of Jesus.”
A Devoted Life is the Seedbed of a Devoted Heart
Before I turn to an analysis of the common ingredients of the genre of a classical devotional, I will pause to draw a conclusion from the examples I have just quoted.
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