Here, we find words of delight, but not much truth. As in Athens, his verbal idols are well crafted. But then you turn to another writer whose beliefs all but nauseate, but whose prose allures. It has words of truth, perhaps, but not delight. You travel on, if you travel on, against the wind. You’ve experienced it, right? Halfway through the second paragraph, the writing tastes stale, unappetizing. We almost hear his exhaustion (and see his smile) as he finally puts down the quill: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). “The wise never lose sight of a God greater than our pens can ever tell.”Īgain, the man to whom God gave “wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore” (1 Kings 4:29), had to work at writing (and rewriting) - but also in arranging (and rearranging). Such writers position their thoughts, others’ thoughts, and (most importantly) God’s thoughts into the vase with “great care.” Marvel has their Avengers Christian eloquence her Arrangers - of words and phrases and paragraphs and chapters. Beautiful writing is not a collection of notes struck on a whim, but a symphony not a handful of casually picked flowers, but a pleasing bouquet. Our God is a God of order and beauty, and he will not have his children fight. Assonance, alliteration, metaphor, contrast, and more - the science of lovely prose. How? Because beauty has its anatomy, its symmetry, its mathematics, its order. One note out of place disrupts the recital - and is detected even by those who have never heard the music before. Whether compiling proverbs of others or composing his own, he saw that truly beautiful writing has pleasing cohesion. He knew a proverb or poem could be less or more than its parts. He knew that to add order was to add beauty and force. He engraved the truth to be remembered, considering both style and structure. He forged proverbs, wisdom compressed into Hebrew poetry, what Robert Alter calls “the best words in the best order” ( The Art of Biblical Poetry). arranging many proverbs with great care.” He made straight, he put in order, he composed. The Preacher did not merely weigh and study, however he “taught the people knowledge. So, first, we weigh and study and place all in the light of God and his truth. “What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as servants for Jesus’s sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). The wise never lose sight of a God greater than our pens can ever tell. In all things, his Son must have preeminence (Colossians 1:18).

In other words, we love God’s diamonds more than our metal rings and sentences that hold them. No, the writing life gropes for metaphor and imagery and beauty because it has heard creation singing God’s praises and has seen his beauty in the face of Jesus Christ. I grimace when I discover myself painting, like the worst of modern art, indistinct displays of my own artistry, instead of the landscape or the glories beyond. Pride drags much of man’s toil over the edge to shatter upon the rocks. Here, some of us step along a cliff’s edge, tempted to preoccupy oneself with how we say over what is said. Particularly, we do not just study how to write, but what we write about. And we, with lesser wisdom and ability, also measure and ponder, read and study, roast the truth over in our minds, never tire to hunt each morning for fresh discoveries in the forests of God’s Book. He pored over the wise sayings of others he wrote wise sayings of his own. That the Preacher possessed superlative wisdom (Ecclesiastes 1:16) did not shorten his preparation.

Weigh the World, Study Scriptureīesides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying.įirst, to write well, this master-jeweler prepared well. Handcrafted writing, beautiful writing that adorns God’s wisdom, weighs and studies, arranges with great care, and seeks out words of delight and writes words of truth uprightly. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. Notice what was spoken of one such sage:īesides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care.

Briefly, then, I want to travel into the mountain of these sages’ eloquence, exploring the deeps of their craftsmanship. We are wise to enter their mines and learn their skill, not just to discover beauty but to adorn it beautifully. As dwarves with rare jewels, these authors didn’t just discover golden nuggets of wisdom they shaped them, forged them, hunched over their obsession, inspected them, held them up to the light, cut them, and framed them into sentences poetic and memorable. The Wisdom Literature (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon) is not simply insightful in its content, but delightful in its craft.

Eloquent writing definition