Inmate Sylvester Jiles was recently hospitalized for heavy loss of blood that resulted when he fell into the razor wire around the prison in Brevard County, Fla. The odd thing about this story was that Jiles was a former inmate. He wasn’t trying to break out of the prison; he was trying to break in! The man said he wanted back in jail for protection from threats to his life he had received since he had been released. I guess he found out prison isn’t safe after all. Unfortunately, many people are as foolish as this inmate in term of their spiritual condition. We read about them in 2 Peter 2:20-22, which says, “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them.” This is why we must stay diligent to “continue to walk in truth”. A return to worldliness is the worst thing we can do.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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