Power, Brilliance, and Success -“Epstein was not an aberration. He was a test.”

Power, Brilliance, and Success Do Not Exempt a Man from Moral Law

Bruce K. Waltke, born in 1930 and now approaching his remarkable 96th year, is widely regarded as the foremost living authority on the wisdom literature of the Old Testament - a distinct body of Biblical writings concerned not primarily with Israel’s history or ceremonial law, but with how God’s moral order is embedded in daily life, where truth, character, and obedience produce tangible outcomes in both personal conduct and public order.

The noted Hebrew scholar Dr. Waltke holds doctorates in Greek and New Testament studies as well as in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature. His scholarly study Genesis: A Commentary received the 2002 Gold Medallion Christian Book of the Year award, and his next book An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach earned the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book Award in 2008.

But it is his two-volume, landmark exegesis of the Book of Proverbs [chapters 1-31] that is most clarifying for our moment. In his treatment of Proverbs 7, Waltke observes that the two temptations always enticing mankind are easy sex and easy money. Not occasionally. Not contextually. Always.

This, of course, was precisely the thrust of early American education. The connection was not incidental, it was foundational, as having been purposively established by the Founders and their predecessors throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Early American educational theory was not designed to produce specialists, technicians, or credentialed professionals, but to form moral character capable of sustaining liberty.

That is why John Adams warned in 1798 that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

That early educational model did, in fact, produce the intellectual and civic titans who brought about American independence. Among them were the men who wrote the colonial charters, framed the constitutions of the 13 original states, authored the Declaration of Independence, and drafted the United States Constitution. These men were not trained as narrow technicians, but were formed as moral reasoners steeped in Biblical wisdom, classical philosophy, and historical understanding.

Early American education cultivated the capacity to rule oneself, morally, intellectually, and emotionally, as the necessary prerequisite for ruling a free society. Education, therefore, aimed first and foremost at shaping the inner life before entrusting citizens with outer power.

Solomon, notably, does not address Proverbs to fools on the margins of society. He writes to sons of privilege - future rulers, judges, merchants, and governors - men who would move in elite circles and be tempted to believe the rules no longer applied to them. He pleads with them to “Keep my commandments and live,” warning that obedience itself is the only real protection “from the immoral woman, from the seductress who flatters with her words.” Wisdom here is not mere information; it is moral insulation.

Along the same vein, Solomon writes in Proverbs 2:7 that the LORD “lays up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity.” In reference to this verse Michael V. Fox makes plain that “God’s protection is not a reward extraneous to the knowledge, but rather a consequence intrinsic to it. The first step toward becoming a wise man is to imbibe the teachings, even before understanding and applying them.”

Which brings us to Jeffrey Epstein [1953-2019], the American financier and convicted sex offender who cultivated an elite social circle of politicians and celebrities. Epstein did not make his money the old-fashioned way, by building value, creating products, or serving markets, but by embedding himself among elites, monetizing secrecy, trading in access, exploiting moral weakness, and turning vice into leverage.

When the system finally cracked, it was not merely a criminal network that was exposed. It was a culture that mistook sophistication for wisdom as well as a textbook product of America’s higher and lower levels of secular educational theory.

Solomon’s warning in Proverbs is precisely where the Epstein scandal belongs. As Waltke reminds us, easy sex and easy money are always the two temptations facing mankind.

Epstein was not an aberration. He was a test. He offered powerful men exactly what Proverbs warns against: sexual access without covenant, money without accountability, influence without visibility, and pleasure without consequence. He did not ensnare naïve men; he trapped confident ones; men who mistook legal sophistication and institutional prestige for moral immunity.¹

Many of Epstein’s financial victims appear to have missed Solomon’s exhortation in Proverbs 1:10: “My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent.” Sinners love company, and they excel in enticement.

Jeffrey Epstein was not the disease. He was the delivery system. And when that system finally broke, it revealed a truth early American youth were taught to embrace, and our contemporary secular age desperately wants to deny: No amount of power, brilliance, or professional success exempts a man from moral law.

Dr. Waltke points out that it isn’t too hard to imagine what the revealed wisdom will do for those who find it regarding a LORD who “with wisdom as his tool accomplished the wonders of creation: the immeasurable weights of wind and sea, the trackless paths of lightning, the foundations of the earth, and the ordering of the heavens.”

Gideons and Rahabs have entered America’s public square.

Glory be to His name.

David Lane

American Renewal Project

1. Wall Street Journal, “The Lawyer Who Could Fix Anything - Except His Epstein Problem.”