Wisdom
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, and today I’m joined by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson. Welcome back.
Today we’ll be talking about the concept and, as we will probably find out, not necessarily just the concept of wisdom and what the scripture says about that. Greg, why don’t you start us off.
We all know Solomon, and if you ask any Sunday School child what he or she knows about Solomon you’ll probably get lots of wives and lots of gold. You might get the temple, but probably somewhere along the line you’ll get, “Oh, and he almost cut a baby in half.” It’s interesting what children remember, which is one reason God puts such things in scripture, having many reasons for everything he does.
Solomon had become king. God had asked him, “What can I do for you?” and Solomon, not asking for riches or the life of his enemies or a long life for himself, asked for wisdom to judge God’s people, and the first trial of this comes almost immediately in the text after the prayer, in that two prostitutes come before him.
They had full access to the courts because prostitution was not an automatic death sentence in Israel, even if you were caught. It was more complicated than that, but they received equal justice under the law, and normally this would be solved at the local level. Moses had instituted courts for 10 families, 50 families, 100 families, and 1,000 families, a graduated court system. Our own is modeled after it through Presbyterian intervention or mediation. So it should have been solved at the neighborhood level. Failing that, the larger quadrant of the city, then the city judges. Somehow it had moved very quickly up the court system as each judge apparently said, “I don’t know what to do with this,” so it came before Solomon as the high court judge.
The reason was, there was no evidence and there were no witnesses. Both women had given birth to children, and sometime during the night when the children were still very tiny, one woman apparently had overlaid hers and smothered it and, rather than face the law, had switched babies. So in the morning the other woman woke up and it looked like her baby was dead, and after thinking for a while she says, “No, no, this isn’t mine. You have mine.”
“No, you have yours. I’m sorry you can’t handle the reality, but it’s yours and this is mine.”
It had come before the courts and no one knew what to do with that, so it came before Solomon and he made that most famous of all judgements, which should be greater than the Judgement of Paris, because Paris screwed everything up, but Solomon gets it right.
That would not have worked at all times in all places, nor should you try this at home, children.
“We shall take the stuffed animal which you are fighting over and cut it in half and…”
Maybe not, but kings were strange things. Saul had not been the greatest of kings. I mean he did kill an entirely priestly family and chased David all over the place, and David had been a rather bloody man. There was that whole thing about Uriah, which was not exactly a secret. So here’s this new king. He’s an unknown quantity and he calls for a sword to cut the baby in half.
No one says, “Oh, you’re just joshing. That’s a put-on. You’re trying to make a point here.” Everybody there takes a deep breath and realizes, “He’s going to cut the baby in half,” at which point the real mom says, “No! Give it to her. She can have it. Don’t kill the baby!” The other one says, “Eh, cut it in half. It shouldn’t be anybody’s.” So Solomon looks to the real mom and says, “It’s hers. Give it to her.”
We’re not told what happened to the other woman or if Solomon inflicted any penalties, nor does it terribly matter for our purposes. The point was that Solomon’s ability here came from an understanding of human nature, not because he had taken classes in forensic or criminal law or in criminology or forensic chemistry or some such thing. He didn’t know about DNA. He knew what God said about sin and about grace and he moved in terms of those, and all Israel feared his judgement from there on out.
So when we think of Solomon we often think of him as the wisest man ever. That’s kind of what God said he would do for him, “You will have great wisdom like men before you.” Later on he manages to screw that up real well, but for now while he’s young he writes a book. We call it Proverbs, which probably is not the greatest name in the world for it. He writes to his son and instructs him in wisdom.
The reason I say Proverbs is probably not the greatest name for it is because when we think of proverbs we think of aphorisms ala Ben Franklin, or morals of the story ala Aesop, and it becomes sort of, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” and that’s about as far as we see into it.
People who are teaching Sunday School and want children to have nice little moral epigrams that they can recite at will or that they can remind them of to tell them to do right from wrong tend to latch onto Proverbs, but unfortunately I think often for the wrong reason. They become in effect a new program of work righteousness. “Do this and live. You want to be wise? You want to be healthy? You want God’s blessing? Well, follow these, memorize these, and keep them near your heart and do them.”
I think if you ask the average Christian, and unfortunately even the average pastor and sometimes the average commentator, “Where is Jesus in all of this?” I think you’re going to get kind of a blank stare.
Yeah, we’re already in the Old Testament. We’re in Proverbs now and you expect to find Jesus there? “Well, maybe there’s a couple verses here or there, I don’t know.”
“But Solomon wrote it, and he like wasn’t even a Christian. He had 700 wives.”
To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgement and equity.
Notice the things he wraps up there – wisdom, instruction, understanding, justice, judgement, equity – maintaining the proper balance between the different directions commandments may seem to be pulling.
To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.
So we come to this and Solomon has said to his son, “I’m going to write all this down so that you will learn how morality, ethics, wisdom, discretion, and knowledge are all intricately intertwined.” And anybody who’s studied philosophy, particularly epistemology, should have their ears perked up and say, “Wow, cool! We’re going to get a treatise on universals and particulars and epistemological self-consciousness and ontological arguments and presuppositional thinking.”
So first of all, wisdom is rooted in a right relationship with God, and that relationship is one of awe, seriousness, taking God seriously, being afraid to displease him, being afraid of his wrath if we are in the way of sin, standing in awe of his majesty and of his greatness, knowing who he is as Creator and Judge of the universe, as well as our Savior. That is where all knowledge not only of wisdom, which he’ll say later, but knowledge itself starts.
There’s some good foundation for presuppositional thinking. If you do not acknowledge God, in the long run you’re not going to know or understand anything as you ought, because if you don’t know the Creator you can’t understand creation. There are wonderful lectures on that, and people have over the years. It’s a favorite verse of Christian educators.
You would think, “Okay, so we’re going to go down that road, presuppositionalism,” but no, the next thing he says is –
My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother, for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head and chains about thy neck.
“Wait, I wanted to talk philosophy and you’re telling me to obey mom and dad?” Yeah.
That’s philosophy, a different kind of philosophy, isn’t it? It’s not what most people would expect, and when you start reading books on epistemology it is rarely the second thing you encounter. In fact, I don’t know of any book on epistemology, published at any rate, that has as its second chapter “Honor your father and your mother,” and yet that’s what he’s saying here.
And it’s not just honor your fathers in terms of ancient tradition. You could walk down some of the older conservative books, you could go to Edmund Burke, for instance, and it’s all about tradition and what we’ve received from those who went before us. He’s not only saying that, although there’s some truth in it, to be sure, but he’s talking about your actual mom and dad who are out there in the kitchen having coffee. Go talk to them and listen to them and let them remind you of what they have told you in the past and the rules they have set down for their household. If you want to be wise, do what they say. Listen to them. Take them seriously.
Is Solomon just propping up his own authority because he’s this person’s father?
You might think so. One of the things we’re going to see is that in the first several chapters of Proverbs he keeps coming back to, “Listen to me, my son. My son, listen. Listen. Open your ears. Take my words seriously. Write them on your heart. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m your father. Listen to my words.”
It would be easy to conclude in the abstract that he’s just making a bid for power in his son’s life, but we’re coming to this as the inspired Word of God and we will believe up front that that’s not what’s going on, although commentators are about that less generous when we come to Solomon and Ecclesiastes. “That’s Solomon with his sour grapes and just spouting the humanism of his old age.” No, this is the Word of God.
Having started with the fear of the Lord is the first thing, not the second thing, and honoring mom and dad is the second thing, not the first thing, I think we should assume that he knows what he’s talking about, but it does bring us to a question and it’s an important one. Why doesn’t he say, “Listen to the law of God”? I think there are two answers. First, he just did, to say “the fear of God.” And he’ll say this in Ecclesiastes in case anyone missed it. “Fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man.
“Some of you complained in your reviews of my previous book that I wasn’t clear. I thought I was very clear. When I said to fear God, that means keeps his commandments. Thank you very much.”
The temptation of youth is always to jump ahead of things. “I don’t need to listen to mom and dad because I’ve read the Bible and I’m studying theology and I know all kinds of cool stuff that mom and dad, bless their hearts, haven’t learned yet, so I don’t really have to listen to them and their things because they’re not really in harmony with scripture. I’ll skip ahead and stand on my own two feet and be a grown-up.” Solomon is saying, “Let’s not do that.”
Forgive me if I’m jumping ahead here, but this is kind of a reflection of Adam and Eve in the garden, isn’t it, where they have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and God said, “No.” We can theorize at least for now, and they wanted to jump ahead, so when Solomon asked the Lord for wisdom, and I’m not a Hebrew scholar but I’ve been told that what he asked for was the same thing, the knowledge of good and evil or discernment. He looked to the Lord for that, rather than assuming he had it or could seize it for himself.
Yeah, he presents himself humbly for God to receive this, and wisdom is the peculiar gift for kings, to discern between good and evil. It’s a characteristic of Messiah. “He shall not judge according to the sight of the eyes, nor reprove according to the hearing of the ears,” but decide with equity for the meek of the earth – from Isaiah.
Also it’s just a reiteration obviously of the fifth commandment, but in its extensions as well. The Westminster draws out from the fifth commandment not just mothers and fathers, but also all superiors in all situations. You could even read it as the people who have been placed in ecclesiastical authority over you.
Don’t go outside of them just because you think you’ve found this new thing in the scripture that everyone else has missed. Look at them and look at how they have stewarded the truth, and look at that in comparison to scripture. Scripture is the first, but these are your sureties, to an extent.
Yes, your helpers, your boundary lines. If your parents have been down this road and they turned left, turning right for you maybe is something you should think three times about, then still maybe follow your parents.
Unless your parents said, “Yeah, we turned left. Don’t do that. That was bad.”
“Never go that way.” So submission to parents, and yes in all of their failures. I don’t remember the phrasing in the Heidelberg Catechism but it’s similar, that we bear with them in all of their frailties and weaknesses and submit ourselves to their good judgement. It’s beginning again really with mom and dad.
The tendency is to skip past them to authorities that are further off, but let’s start real close to home. How do you treat your parents? You want to be wise? Then learn to listen to mom and dad. “Well, they’re weak Christians.”
You may find grounds at some points for departing from them if what they say is leading you away from the fear of God, but don’t start with, “I know so much stuff and I can just skip them and not listen to them. I can find truth and philosophy books or theology books without listening to my parents.”
What’s the line from Deuteronomy – God is not a God far off and not close at hand.
The point that the wise man here will make over and over and over again is, “Listen.” I even turn to my kids in class and say, “Why do you think God says to listen so much?”
Yeah. The third thing in Proverbs 1:10 – and this used to confuse me when I was younger, but it’s no confusion now at all –
My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, “Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause, let us swallow them up alive as the grave, and whole, as those that go down into the pit. We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil. Cast in thy lot among us. Let us all have one purse.”
My son, walk not though in the way with them. Refrain thy foot from their path, for their feet run to evil and make haste to shed blood.
What he’s talking about is gangs. Now, I’m older than you are by a lot, and when I grew up gangs were not a thing. Gangs were the 1920s and Al Capone. If you watch TV you may hear about the Crips and Bloods as some kind of youth thing in the big cities like New York and Los Angeles, but it didn’t touch us. “Warn kids about gangs? What’s the big deal here?”
God often picks extremes to make his points. For instance, meat offered in sacrifice to idols. I don’t think any of us very often actually encounter that as a thing, but he’s picked an extreme case. Meat that has come before demons for their approval is something that we can talk about and something that has a valid use. How much more everything less? And if you should not kill your neighbor, then does it not follow that he is valuable and there are other things you also should not do to your neighbor?
He picks gangs here not because every generation has them. Mine didn’t. This one does for sure, and it’s becoming more and more of a thing. They’re not always full-fledged gangs like the Crips and Bloods. Sometimes it’s just very dangerous cliques in schools, where if you don’t belong you are somebody’s enemy and liable to physical violence for not being part of that in group.
The word here is that whatever the nature in your generation and your time and your culture, there are going to be groups of people who are going to invite you in, and the temptation is to want to be in the inner ring. See Lewis’s essay, “The Inner Ring,” and the novel That Hideous Strength if you don’t know what that means.
What he’s saying is there is something in the human heart that desires to be in. It’s a corruption of our desire for fellowship with God, but rather than submit to God we make other relationships our idols. We want to establish our identity by belonging to some group that will make us feel good and will let us be on the inside and will give us power or wealth or something. Here, these people are offering money, a sense of community and unity, and a lot of fun killing people apparently.
Solomon says right up front, “If they come to thee and say, ‘Hey, you want to join?’ say no and go the other direction.”
The rest of the book is going to be a lot about that in the negative sense. “Here are the people you should not hang out with. They should not be your friends.” That doesn’t mean you don’t show them the love of God, pray for them, give them a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name when they’re thirsty and all that, but it does mean they shouldn’t be your best buds and they shouldn’t be defining your lifestyle for you. In many ways this is the question of Proverbs. Who are your people? Who do you belong to?
Some of you know the novel Good Omens, which I will neither recommend nor not recommend because it’s not to everyone’s taste, but the little girl Pepper says, “Sooner or later, everyone has to decide which gang they belong to.” I think that’s a profound statement. In many ways, coming to Christ is choosing relationship. Who are you going to belong to, not just who singularly, “I belong to Jesus,” but belonging to Jesus means you belong to his people, his crowd, his covenanted community, his church, and that’s the way of wisdom.
We see this later in Proverbs. He that walketh with wise man shall be wise. A companion of fools shall be destroyed. That’s pretty much a summation of the book.
Exactly. You want to be wise? Then you have to hang out with wise people. You cannot hang out with foolish people and be wise. It just doesn’t work, and wise people are godly people. We just said they’re people who fear God and who respect the people he’s put in authority in their lives. They’re not revolutionaries. They are in that sense conservative in that they look to the previous generation and see there God’s hand and God’s work.
It doesn’t mean that just because someone is old they’re right, but we look to the past and immediately to our parents and the older saints we know – our pastors and elders – to see what has God said, and we start there.
As a teacher in a school that is interdenominational, one of the things that I do and that I encourage others to do, and others encourage others to do, is if you run into a difficult question or something that’s controversial, you can say, “What do you all think? What do your churches say?”
Then you have to guard very carefully that people aren’t attacking each other, but usually the best answer is, “That’s a really great question. Go home and talk to your parents about that. Go ask your pastor. I’m sure he’d love to have a conversation with you about that. That is a wonderful question.”
There was actually a Facebook group for a while where that was the refrain of the admins, because it was a marriage advice group. Singles were allowed to join, which is why I was in it at the time, before it imploded violently.
In any case, that was the refrain because husbands and wives would be in the group together, or maybe just one of the couple would join and they would ask a question, and it was always this very leading kind of thing like, “Well, in this situation…” and then it was super-favorable to their side.
All this kind of stuff, and they were like, “That’s a stupid question. Go ask your pastor. Have you talked to your pastor? Have you done counseling with your pastor as a couple, because that sounds like a thing you need to do.”
To go back just a second, just talking about company again. Bad company has a corrupting influence. If you are not actively involved in rebuking either implicitly or explicitly their folly, you will be corrupted. You’re not going to be this bit of alcohol in sullied water. You’re just going to be water in sullied water and you will become sullied water as well.
It reminds me of – the only word I have for it is proverbs, not from the book of Proverbs but cultural proverbs like, “Don’t play chess with a pigeon because it will just knock the pieces over and think it won,” or “If a mad man steals your clothes, don’t chase after him because they’ll just see two naked madmen running through the streets.”
The idea is don’t play their game. Don’t join them in the thing that makes them foolish, because it just makes you look a fool, and eventually you will be the fool because you’ll be running through the streets without your clothes, metaphorically speaking I should hope.
I would hope. Euripides in 430 BC said, “Every man is like the company he is wont to keep,” except he said it in Greek. Paul said, “Evil communications corrupt good manners.”
Wisdom is a matter of community and communion. It is not a matter of being smart and reading books and knowing various schema and principles and facets and syllogisms. There may be a place for all of that, but the fundamental wisdom that God is after is not that. It has to do with walking with God and keeping his commandments. That implies justifying faith granted by the Holy Spirit and the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit to produce the fruits of obedience, and ongoing submission to the Word of God, which means ongoing fellowship with God through that work.
The danger is always to reduce it gnostically to just me and God, my soul and God. That’s all that really matters – maybe the Bible, maybe. That’s all we need. Solomon is saying, “No, there are people, and who you keep company with is going to affect you.” There’s no neutral position you can take where you’ll go and be the Christian witness among all these people, however never witnessing to anything except by your lifestyle and by the fact that you don’t join them with everything they do. That’s not a witness. I think it’s called treachery, actually. You’re betraying God and you’re betraying your evil companions.
Doesn’t this indicate that wisdom is personal by nature, which leads us to ask who is Wisdom.
And we will ask that question in just a second. Let me throw this out while I’m thinking of it. It’s not very much later because that’s the next verse, but let me throw this out in terms of who you keep company with.
One of the more common questions I get from my students over the years is, “Is it all right for me to have non-Christian friends? Because I was talking to my mom…”
The real problem here has to do with not listening to your mom and not trying to understand what she’s actually saying to you, but what I answer is, “Look…” and they’ll usually provide this. “If I don’t have non-Christian friends, how can I ever witness to anybody?”
“That’s great, yeah. Is that actually what you’re doing? When you have a non-Christian friend are you becoming the leader in the relationship? Are you at every point imposing the Word of God?”
There are Christians who befriend non-Christians, and the non-Christians follow the Christians because the Christians are strong, charismatic, kind, winsome, and worthy of being followed. Then there are other Christians who try to latch onto non-Christians and they end up being the tail. The Christian follows the non-Christian wherever they go, maybe stopping just short of blatant sin, but they’re never rebuking them.
“If I rebuke them, then that’s going to cause tension and he won’t want to hang out with me, and if I’m not hanging out with him how can I be a witness?”
There’s some political implications. “If I actually press for a godly program in government I won’t get re-elected, so how can I press for a godly program in government?”
We can look at Abraham and Lot. Abraham befriended non-Christians and won them to faith in the God of Israel, so that when he needed a strike force they were there with him ready to risk their lives. Lot went into Sodom and hung out with non-Christians and it destroyed everything.
When we’re saying this we’re not saying you cannot befriend a non-Christian. The question is how are you going to do it? Are you going to do it in wisdom or are you going to sell out Jesus?
Emily has brought us to the next step. What is this wisdom thing? This wisdom thing is not a thing and that’s the point. That’s where we’ve been going. Solomon immediately shows us wisdom in verse 20 –
Wisdom crieth without. She uttereth her voice in the streets. She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates. In the city she uttereth her words saying, “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?
Turn you at my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you. I will make known my words unto you. Because I have called and ye refused, I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded, but he have set at nought all my counsel and would none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your fear cometh.
When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind, when distress and anguish cometh upon you, then shall they call upon me but I will not answer. They shall seek me early but they shall not find me, for that they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. They would none of my counsel. They despised all my reproof.
Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way and be filled with their own devices, for the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely and shall be quiet from fear of evil.
So there’s Wisdom, and we’re still left with, “Okay, that’s nice but who? What are we talking about? Is this an abstraction? Is this a divine attribute? She’s female. That can’t have anything to do with God. God’s masculine, right? So what’s going on here?”
Generally, I think the solution has been to say this is some divine attribute being personified. I’ve never seen many explanations of why it would be labeled ‘she.’
We then leave Wisdom and we spend the next several chapters with the father saying, “Pay attention. Listen. My son, if though wilt receive my words…incline thine ear…cry after knowledge…seek her as silver. My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments. Happy is the man that findeth wisdom and getteth understanding. Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father. Attend to know understanding. My father taught me. He said ‘Let thine heart retain my words. Keep my commandments. Get wisdom. Get understanding. My son, attend unto my wisdom and bow down thine ear to understanding.”
You get the idea? That’s Chapter 4 or 5. It’s still, “Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen,” and some encouragement as to why – long life, riches, peace, the blessings of God.
“Keep thy heart with all diligence.” We’re not talking about a superficial external kind of law-keeping. We’re talking about something that gets into your heart and changes you, but you have to listen for it to happen. You have to pay attention, and you have to pay attention to the very people that maybe you by nature would slight, like your parents, say, or your elders.
Then finally he turns to something else. He begins to warn of the kind of people that Wisdom will keep you from. It will keep you from the evil man and the strange woman. Strange means foreign, that is someone outside the covenant, and there will be a lot about her. For instance in Chapter 5 –
For the lips of a strange woman drop as a 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.
Drink waters out of thine own cistern and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own and not strangers’ with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.
He gets very explicit in his language. We’re still at choosing relationships. We’re moving past father and mother, or through father and mother, to the next step. “Son, you’ve got to get married. You’re a prince. You need a princess. And as you look, let me show you Lady Wisdom.”
Now compare Wisdom with these two women. There’s the strange woman who is all superficial, all seduction, all appealing to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, and there’s the woman you ought to be looking for, who you can be faithful with and have kids with. You’re going to have to be making a choice here.
He comes back to this in Chapter 6, talking again about the commandments, starting in verse 23 –
For the commandment is a lamp and the law is light and reproofs of instruction are the way of life to keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart…”
When we get to Chapter 7 we have a long description of her. I suppose we can just say read it. You probably already know about it, but as we look this there’s a couple obvious things. She lives in the midst of the covenant people. She claims to be a convert. She’s just come back from the temple with peace offerings.
“I just came back from youth group. I just came back from the Lord’s Supper. Hey, they had some extra wine so I brought it with me. Come on over and celebrate.” She claims to be religious. She puts on a good front.
She dresses immodestly but she’s never called a prostitute. She’s not. She doesn’t charge but she dresses like one, so outward modesty is actually a thing. She is very impudent up-front and very actively tries to seduce this young man.
The young man, on the other hand, goes where he can find her. He knows where she lives, her corner. He goes in the dark and black night. It’s new moon in the time before streetlights. There’s no moon, just the stars, so he’s moving in real darkness here to get to this woman, and accidentally finds her! What are the odds?
Yeah. “I just happened to be wandering out here in the red-light district, just taking some exercise, and there you were!”
First of all, there is the real danger from flesh and blood women who are like this, but in the far bigger picture folly itself is like this. Thinking you can get through life apart from fearing God, apart from submission to the authorities that God has placed in your life, apart from God’s law, that’s a harlot and a seductress in itself.
Here we can flash forward to the book of Revelation where we see Babylon the great as the great whore. The implication in the text, which I won’t argue here, I’ll just say what I think, is that she represents a religious system, particularly works righteousness, particularly apostate Judaism.
“Here, come have all of God’s blessings, without having to ever have learned in your heart the fear of God,” and it is deadly. But just as Revelation has two women – the whore and the faithful bride – so Proverbs has two women, and it’s a deliberate connection.
The prince here should be looking for a woman who looks like Wisdom. When we come to Chapter 8 we’re back to wisdom again, and it starts much as it did before.
Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors.
Unto you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of man. O ye simple, understand wisdom, and ye fools, be ye of an understanding heart.
The fear of the Lord is to hate evil. Pride and arrogancy and the evil way and the forward mouth do I hate.
But she offers counsel and understanding, the ability to judge rightly even in political office. Riches and honor she offers. Her fruit is better than fine gold and silver – righteousness and judgement. And there are material side benefits of being a wise person. Then Wisdom says this in verse 22 –
The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was there. When he set a compass upon the face of the depth. When he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment. When he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth.
At this point we are forced to look again at who this Wisdom is. Possessed from eternity? Brought forth from eternity? There at creation? With God and yet distinct from God? This sounds like John 1.
The word for ‘possessed’ in verse 22 – The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways – is the word that Eve used when she brought forth Cain. “I’ve gotten a man. I’ve possessed him.” How? By giving birth to him. She didn’t buy him. She brought him forth. This I take to be Jesus, to be the eternal Logos, the divine Word.
I would recommend Charles Bridges’ commentary on Proverbs. He has a fantastic section on this. But unfortunately a lot of people are still like, “Well, no. It couldn’t be Jesus.” I think a lot of it is still what you said – “But it’s the Old Testament.” Yes, and right in the heart of this book we find Jesus, which is what we ought to expect.
I think there’s also a desire to make it a one-for-one, where the hills were brought forth so this Wisdom was brought forth, but that indicates that Christ wouldn’t be co-eternal with the Father. “This would be Arianism, Patrick.” I think that argument does actually miss the forest for the trees, but that would be one argument against it.
I also think there is probably reasoning behind the fact that, “But Wisdom is feminine here, and Jesus is the son, so it can’t be that, because poetry doesn’t exist.”
Which is why everybody who studies systematic theology should take at least a year of studying Biblical theology and a year of studying poetry. Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine would be a good place to start.
Let’s step back to “she.” He’s looking for a bride, and in the last chapter he finds her, but let’s just turn the question a little bit differently. Where in this world with flesh and blood do you expect to find Jesus most clearly, outside the Word and sacraments themselves? I would hope every godly man and woman would answer, “Well, in my spouse. With all of his failings and sins, he is the best representative of Christ I’ve ever seen, ever lived with, ever known. That’s why I married him (or her) because he (she) was so godly. I found Jesus there, and she continues to show me Jesus day by day.” And when we get to the end of the book, yes, he marries a godly lady, at least in Solomon’s projection of how things are going to work.
Why she? Because she is over and against Folly. Folly is personified in this foolish woman, so Christ puts himself forward in that feminine dimension because we’re looking her at human relationships. We started with the fear of God, but how does that play itself out in human relationships? 1) Make good godly friends, but 2) even more than that, marry a godly man or woman. If you want to be wise, marry a godly spouse. That’s where this is going.
Having been a teacher now for an awfully long time and seen a lot of my students not marry godly spouses, I’m keenly aware, painfully aware, volatively aware of how this gets ignored. Sometimes it’s because the other person puts on a really good act for a while, but often not.
If you’re serious about this Christianity business, you’re serious about walking with God, you’re serious about knowing Jesus, you’re serious about being wise, then pursue someone along those lines. Forget a lot of the standards of the world, including all the Disney films, as to how you might find such a person. Get rid of your ideas of what romance looks like – “Someday my prince will come” – and start pursuing godly people.
Godly people are not necessarily seminary graduates, but they might be. And if somebody is taking seminary classes not to be full of himself or because he’s a theologian and he knows cool stuff, but because he just really wants to know more about the Lord, that might be a person to pursue. Pursue Christ in your future spouse.
When we get to the end of the book, that’s of course what we find. Everyone knows the excellent woman at the end of the book in Chapter 31.
Just like Wisdom. She is Wisdom at work. She’s constantly busy, constantly taking care of people. In her tongue is the law of kindness. Strength and honor are her clothing. She stretches out her hand to the poor and the needy, and so on. She will be praised in the gates – a woman who fears the Lord – so we come full-circle. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Here is the woman who fears the Lord. This is who you’re supposed to marry.
Now, I have to do this, lest young girls be beaten over the head with the passage. In earth and in this life, this is the woman you want and pray that your wife will grow into. No woman starts out like this, just as no man starts out being Jesus.
And by the same logic, you should not expect that your wife will ever exactly be this, but God again shows us extremes. This is the direction the Christian life should tend.
I point out to girls, “You know, girls, yes, you have this one chapter that tells you what an ideal woman looks like. The guy has 30 chapters telling him what an ideal guy looks like so he’ll be worthy of you.”
Yeah, there’s a lot of repetition. There’s the old saying, “If God says something twice, we better take it very seriously.”
“No, he said it twice because you were stupid and stubborn and weren’t listening the first time.”
But also, yes, you should listen to it again because he means it. He wanted this to really get through to you.
Yeah, your mind might have been drifting the first time, so he has reasons for repeating himself.
This is just an anecdote slightly related. The irony is that I can’t remember what the actual statement was, but I remember reading a book and it was some kind of theology book or devotional or something along those lines, and they said a statement. Then they did a paragraph break and he goes, “Now, Reader, wait. Go back and read that again because Satan doesn’t want you to hear that and he just distracted you from understanding it.” I went back and was like, “Son of a gun, I did. I missed it.”
That’s kind of what God does a lot, especially in Proverbs. It’s like, “Here it is again, slightly differently phrased, in case you misunderstood it the first time.”
And sometimes it’s not even differently phrased, it’s exactly the same words.
It’s just how our minds work. We get easily distracted when it comes to sitting down and looking at what God has said, because we do also have not just a sin nature but an adversary who wants to keep us from learning more about God and being more content in him.
That’s also something else I wanted to bring up earlier. I couldn’t find a good segue into it, but that’s also why it’s really sad and a little bit ironic when people look at Proverbs in this micro-view, where they look at each thing as a list of things to do, to accomplish, because they completely miss the fact.
I would agree with you that Folly is works righteousness, and then they take all this good advice, all of this stuff that points us back to Christ and basing our knowledge in him, and go, “That’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to fulfill all these things so that God blesses us with long life, prosperous finances, and salvation even,” and you’ve just missed the entire point. You missed the point and you’re letting the tail wag the dog instead of the dog wag the tail.
Once we realize what the nature of Proverbs is, and when we understand that it is Christ-centered, what we should see here – just as in Psalms we see Christ singing about the covenant and the law, that is to say his relationship with his Father – here we should see Christ meditating on the Torah, on the way of life. Again, not a list of rules but on the divine revelation that all of scripture gives to us about who God is and what he wants for us, expects from us, and promises us.
So as we read through Proverbs we should be meditating with Christ. We should be thinking, “Oh, this is what Jesus thinks of that. Oh, this is how Jesus is approaching this. Oh, this is what Jesus thinks about such things.” We should see it not so much as an immediate “Do this and live,” but as “Oh, this is what Jesus is like.” And if we’ve learned to love Jesus, then the following step of, “Oh, then I should think this way, too. I should be like this, too” will be the follow-up. But first we need to know who Jesus is and how he thinks about things.
If we have a good friend or an older person we respect or even our moms and dads, we come and say, “Mom, dad, what are your thoughts about this?” or “Pastor, what are your thoughts about this?” and we sit and listen quietly, one hopes. It’s not so much, “Tell me how to think,” but “Let me see how you think.”
I remember one time my first pastor, the man who was my mentor for most of my life, Pastor Powell, was objecting to Federal Vision. This was when it was a new thing and I still did not know a whole lot about it.
It’s still so hard to nail down and keep in my head, because it’s all so slippery.
It is very slippery. David Farschman and I were there visiting him in Colorado and we read a text, something they had written, that sounded really good and I asked him, “What should we be hearing here?” It was not, “Tell us why this is wrong,” or “Tell us what to believe,” but “Tell us how to read this. Tell us what’s going on here.”
His first statement was, “Well, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with that, except everything.”
Yeah. If you read the words in your framework you can make it come out alright, but that’s not what they’re really saying. It takes wisdom and experience to read between the lines, as it were.
My point there is that we did not sit down and say, “Please give us a lecture on Federal Vision.” We just asked, “How are you reading this? What are we not getting? Just talk to us about this,” and sometimes that’s a great question. “I’m struggling with this. Can you just talk to me about this for a while?” and let it become a conversation and do a lot of humble listening.
This is the kind of thing that’s going on here. Jesus is thinking through this out loud for us. Let’s drop in on his thoughts and eavesdrop and hear him process them, and as we do and as that thinking becomes a part of us and begins to shape us, then we can turn around and look at practical things. But to try to make it a one-for-one “Do this and live” or worse “Do this and get rich” is very destructive and leads exactly where it’s not supposed to.
Anyone can look at the world, at historical evidence, at ‘experiments’ so to speak, and figure out how to do things in a way that works, because God’s world works according to God’s nature. It is consistent with itself. It is orderly. Generally speaking, when you do stupid things, stupid things happen, and when you do smart things, good things result. Anyone can do that. You don’t need to be redeemed to know that 2+2 = 4 or to at least do the math on the page, or to figure out, “If I focus for two hours and get my work done, then I get paid.” That is super basic.
It's an entirely different thing to know God and to do those things out of motivation of honoring him, because you can do all the right things. Like the rich young ruler said, “All these things I have kept ever since my youth,” and yet still go away unsatisfied because you don’t get the whole picture. You’re following outward forms without an inward reality. I somewhat shudder to use that particular phrase because it’s over-used and it’s kind of Christian-ese, but it is true.
The thing here then is not to chase you away from Proverbs but to invite you to read Proverbs as keeping company with Jesus for a while. It’s fine to take a proverb here or there, a few verses, to isolate them and meditate on them, as it is with any other part of scripture, but it’s also important to read the chapters as they flow into one another. There were no chapter breaks in the original. Just follow the thoughts of the authors. It's easy to say, “Well, these are just random verses thrown together in random order.” We’re talking about God, so no.
Yeah, it’s not an attribute of God so that’s not the case. Does that mean we automatically know how they were arranged or why they are the way they are? No, it doesn’t. As far as I can see over the centuries, not a lot of work has been done along those lines.
I taught through Proverbs in Bible study years and years ago and it was pretty easy to go through Chapter 8 and 9, and then you begin to hit the solid more proverb-y part. In 10 and 11 it was still pretty easy to see there is a divine order here, but someplace after that I began to lose it because I hadn’t thought enough about it. I haven’t read it enough. I have not meditated enough on it.
People make books and I understand the usefulness, but I also perceive at least some danger where you pick a heading like marital faithfulness or drunkenness or work ethic, and you collect all the relevant proverbs out of Proverbs and put them in these categories. I can see that but I’m also a little wary of it because God put those in the order he did for a reason.
It’s like systematics. We pull verses out of context all the time to put as footnotes in our confessional statements, but the implication there is not “this one verse stands by itself” but “this verse is part of an ongoing argument in its original context. And if you go find this verse and read the argument around it, you will see it does indeed say what we’re saying.”
I’m not sure that with Proverbs that always comes across. “Here’s all the verses on drunkenness.” Okay, yeah, and there’s a time to have them ready at hand. That’s good, but let’s be a little careful here because we are pulling it out of the overall context of everything that led up to it and everything that follows it, and we are far less in Proverbs likely to go back and consider the context.
For instance, there’s that verse that says don’t look at the wine as it sparkles in the glass, and then Jesus later points to a glass of wine and says, “This is my blood.” I feel like Jesus might want us to look at that cup of wine.
Exactly. Of course, this comes to its climax in the two verses that are literally side-by-side.
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.
One reason they’re called proverbs and dark sayings is because you’re supposed to think about them. It’s not all on the surface. They require meditation, putting 2 and 3 together and sometimes getting 7 because that’s the way God did it here.
I really think there is the danger of reducing it to the level of what we conceive Sunday School material should be like – simple words for simple minds. Well, I don’t think it’s the children who have the simple minds in this case. It’s we who are guilty of not really wrestling with finding Christ in Proverbs.
I certainly do not claim that I’ve mastered this by any means. Proverbs is still in many ways a closed book to me because I haven’t taken the time. Maybe when I get older and retire in a few years I can spend more time there, but I do know that since I’ve come to understand better what it’s about, it is far more meaningful than it was when it was just a list of cute sayings that Ben Franklin in principle could have said. So we recommend to y’all reading and studying Proverbs, and not stopping at chapter breaks without a really good reason, like it’s supper time.
Also I think we would all recommend doing so with a commentary at hand. I think Calvin has covered most of the Proverbs, but I could be wrong on that. I know that normally I search a thing and I go, “This verse…Calvin commentary” and something pops up.
I’m going to Google it. That’s disturbing. It knew I was going to ask about Proverbs. Google is watching us. No, it doesn’t look like he did. Normally if there’s a Calvin’s commentary thing on this site it will be like, “Here’s the verse and here’s the associated commentary paragraphs.” Matthew Henry’s commentary is just everything.
Yeah, Matthew Henry is a good source here. Again, in my recommendation later it’s going to be Charles Bridges’ commentary on Proverbs where Christ is brought forward. I’m sure there are modern commentators who are beginning to figure this out, and there are probably some older ones. It’s just so easy on first reading to just see inspired Ben Franklin. If it helps you get away from that, then our work is done here.
I’m going to jump right in with Charles Bridges’ commentary called, oddly enough, Proverbs.
It’s published by Banner of Truth Press, who published a lot of the old Puritan works. It was originally printed in 1846. The most recent printing that I have at least is 1994 so it’s an older style of English from the mid-1800s. It’s not going to be the language of today’s street, but it is careful and scholarly lots of footnotes.
A lot of the discussion goes on in the footnotes, so you have to be able to follow that, but it is absolutely sound. You’re not going to have to question, “Does this guy believe the Bible?” It will be abundantly clear and it will be of great value to you.
I do. My recommendation is taking a vacation and not looking at the clock for any reason. That’s it. It’s self-explanatory.
Okay. I will absolutely second that one, because it is such a wonderful feeling to be like, “I have until I want to go to bed to do whatever.” It’s great.
Nowhere. I think I have a few recommendations. Last year I read a lot of books. Mainly it was audiobooks because that’s what I could really focus on during that year. This year I haven’t listened to as many yet, but I did listen to the audiobook for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is a spy novel by John le Carré. He’s Irish, but that’s his last name.
It’s a spy thriller and it’s very British, if you get my meaning. It’s old British men going around talking to other old British men and vaguely complaining about things like the weather and their old job, which happened to be MI-5. The main plot is is there a mole in MI-5?
I think there’s a fair amount of political satire, since this is about the British spy game and written by an Irishman. I think that’s just inherent in that kind of set-up, because everyone comes out of it looking a little bit incompetent, and that just seems to be a very Irish thing to highlight.
I think you’ve already implied this, but I think we need to say it. This is the furthest remove from James Bond that you’re going to get.
Oh yes, 100%. John le Carré is a fairly prolific spy novel writer, and a lot of it is critical of the spy game, as it were, even though it can be very exciting at times. There are action moments. Things explode and gunfire happens and all this, but it is very critical of the game as it is played.
There’s a quote that I’ve seen and I love it so much because there’s a side character who meets with the spy, and it’s somewhere in the Middle East. The side character is very much like the Egyptian side character in Indiana Jones. He’s like, “Oh yes, let me bring you to my family and we will all have a great meal together and I will treat you like a king because we are friends now!”
But he has this line where he basically goes, “You know, you English have the problem of forgetting, because today was created by yesterday, and if you do not know what yesterday was, you will be blind to today and the future. Ask the Indian where he was when the British did…” – and I forget the atrocity because there’s so many in India – “…in this year, or ask the Irishman where he was in 1912 and he will tell you the color of his shirt, what shoes he was wearing, and exactly who was in his field of vision, because it is still in his mind. And if you ask the Englishman the same question you’ll get, “Forget it! It’s the past. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
John le Carré is actually a very fantastic writer and I think I’ve gone too long giving recommendations and explaining this particular author, so I will leave it at that. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is actually a very compelling book that I enjoyed listening to. I will probably need to listen to it again to really understand everything that happened, because it’s sort of the nature of spy thrillers and mystery. It’s like I’ve heard it but I need to listen to it again to really catch everything. So there we go.
Thank you so much, both of you, for joining me for this conversation. It was lovely having Emily back, and it was good to hear your thoughts, Greg.
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