My Father's Bible

My mother passed into the presence of the Lord recently and we buried her a few days later. It was a good service that allowed our family to share precious memories and to bring together treasured mementoes. My father's Bible was one of these.
    He died over 25 years ago, leaving my mother a widow at 60 years of age. She kept his Bible as her own and treasured his highlighting and notes. She never added anything more to it.
    As I organized some of the things after her memorial, my father's Bible caught my attention. Surely it was something to investigate. I had leafed through it years ago, but I sensed this reading would be different; more of a conclusion.
    The cover of the Bible is cracked and torn. The zipper has lost its stitching in many places. The smell of the old leather is delicious.
    It was printed by the John C Winston Company out of Philadelphia. There is no publishing date, but clues suggest that it was printed in the late 1940's; around the time of my father’s wedding to Mum. That would make him just over 21 years old; barely a man in those days. In my exploration, I found it interesting to see what was important to him as a man...
    Most of his underlining is in Proverbs and much of it focused on the foolishness of pursuing loose women, the wickedness of the world and the benefits of the virtuous wife. 
    He was a young man who had just been married, so of course, he was concerned about what was important. His mother had died a few weeks before his wedding. His father had been gone for six years. Who was my father going to ask about being a good man and a good husband? Well obviously, someone came along and pointed him to God's Word. 
    His underlining was done with a ruler and a red pencil. It was done with precision. He even underlined the chain references in the centre column and then underlined the referenced verses themselves. It is fairly obvious what his concerns were as a young man growing to maturity in a fallen world with all its temptations. These were the very same concerns that I had at his age, and that my son had as he prepared for married life. We were three generations, but I know that we weren’t so different.
    Consider a few of his highlighted verses:
     “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.  Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” Proverbs 5:3-5. The chain reference took him to Ecclesiastes 7:2, where he underlined, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.” I can understand how these two verses would affect him. Essentially, they told him to give up the sin and not to worry about being sad at its loss, for it’s the way to life.
    The very next highlighting is in the same chapter of Proverbs, verse 19, but let me begin with the preceding verse, “Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.” Wow. In the very same chapter, God was telling him to reject the wicked woman and to cherish his wife. My father was learning to be a better man – a Godly man. He lived it throughout his life.
    He goes on to underline dozens of verses in Proverbs and then more throughout his Bible. At the end of the Revelation, he underlines, “And he said unto me, ‘These sayings are faithful and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the things which must shortly be done.’” (Rev 22:6). He then highlights two more verses in the same chapter. Verse 11: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” And verse 15: “For without (for outside) are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”
    These are words that resonate with me and frankly with all men. We know that Jesus is coming again; that He will make everything right with the world. But in the meantime, things are crap. We are stuck in a world that hates us, and hates the good that we do and the ideals to which we aspire. So, let the world be a dung heap – it’s not our responsibility – and let us focus on keeping our ways pure. That’s enough. Well, it’s enough to begin with. Then we can see where God wants to take us. This is the heart of men’s ministry.
    There is something very special about my father's Bible. It’s a study in itself. I can see it being more than a blog posting, but where is the time? Hmmm…

---