This week as we move into the Proverbs, we're going to be talking about this collection of sayings from Solomon. These pithy, short statements have advice about everything like family and friendship. It has metaphors about how women can be like a gold ring in a pig's snout, and it tells us when to eat meat and when to eat vegetables.
Before we dive in, let's start with a prayer. Gracious and loving God, we pray that your spirit would be with us, that it would fill us up, would open our hearts to hear what it is that you have for us, and would send us out to serve you. We pray this in your name, Amen.
You would think that Proverbs would be the most popular book among Americans. We love words of wisdom; we love the idea of bettering ourselves. The self-help industry in the United States accounts for $11 billion. That's huge - that $11 billion, and it grows 5% every year. People spent more than $2 billion dollars last year on self-help books. There is a book for every topic - for bettering your love life, and about how to lose weight, and how to get promoted, and how to make friends. These are essentially just new versions of Proverbs.
Now think about how often we repeat Proverbs to one another. We repeat things that are modern proverbs like "If you live in a glass house, you shouldn't throw stones." Or "haste makes waste." We say things like two wrongs don't make a right." Or there's "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst." Others are, "There's no such thing as a free lunch," or "Don't bite the hand that feeds you," or "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." I've probably said two of those this week, and I doubt I'm the only one. So we love wisdom. Obviously, there is something deeply embedded in us that is this desire for wisdom.
So today we're going to talk about what Solomon said about wisdom, about what it is, and how we get it. I'd love for you to open your Bibles with me and follow along. We're in Proverbs 1:2. Solomon writes that this collection of proverbs is "for learning about wisdom and instruction for understanding words of insight."
The word learning is interesting here. It's the Hebrew Yada, and that means to know. When we think about knowing something in our culture, we think about knowing cold hard facts. We know multiplication tables, we know facts about dinosaurs, we know what the effect the weather patterns will have on our earth. But in the Hebrew culture, this idea of knowing is something so much more intimate. In Scripture, it says that "Adam knew Eve and she bore a son." It's this idea that we are intimately acquainted with knowledge. And it's more than just about knowing cold hard facts. To know wisdom and instruction is about more than learning rules. It's about taking these rules and ingesting them and making them a part of our lives and living them out every single day.
I had a friend in high school that was exceptionally smart. She succeeded in every class she took; she took a lot of advanced classes when we were in high school. She also did well on tests. But outside of the classroom, it was a totally different story. She was sort of the opposite of smart. She would make silly mistakes. And we would always say, "She's book smart but not street smart." There's a real difference between having this knowledge that makes you book smart and being able to apply the knowledge in the world, which makes you street smart. This is what Proverbs is trying to avoid. It's trying to prevent us from just being fact finders and take all of what we have learned from God and apply it every single day in our lives.
Let's go on to verse 3, where Solomon writes: "For gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity." (Solomon 1:3). The Message version of Scripture translates this idea of gaining instruction as "a manual for daily living." I think we can all use "a manual for daily living." One of the complaints I get as a pastor more than a lot of other things is when people come to me, and they say, "I'm struggling to make this decision. I have these choices ahead of me, and I looked in the Bible, and there's just no black and white answer. There's nothing in Scripture that addresses my very specific issue. My very specific need."
We all face decisions that are truly inconsequential. This idea of wondering, "What lipstick do I wear with this dress?" Or we ask, "Where shall I eat lunch today?" And there's not really a right or a wrong answer.
Then we have decisions that are really consequential, but we know the right answer. These are questions that ask, "Should I have an affair with my co-worker?" Then there's a whole category of decisions that are put before us all the time that are life-altering, truly consequential, and there is no right answer. It's hard to see the clear-cut, black and white answer. Things like "Where should I send my child to school?" Or "Should we move across the country?"
This is where the Proverbs are helpful. This is why Proverbs was written - to address these kinds of decisions. These things are important but don't have clear-cut answers.
Ellen Davis, who is an Old Testament scholar, wrote, "The Proverbs are spiritual guides for ordinary people on ordinary days when water does not pour forth from rocks and angels do not come to lunch."
That sounds like most of our days. So, to be able to navigate these things, we need to have wisdom. And in Scripture, it talks about wisdom as skill. The Hebrew word that is used there really translates as skill. The idea of having a skill like what a musician would have or the type of skill that an artisan would have. We need to be skilled in moral living.
That's the idea of what wisdom is, but then there's the question of who it's for. Let's look at verse 4, where it says, "to teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young..." Simple here is not a commentary on intelligence. It's more like open. So this idea of open-mindedness - someone who is still young enough to be open-minded, who is still being formed.
Whitney and I talk all the time that we have no idea what Mary Holland is going to be like when she grows up. We know there are certain things that we can do that might influence her; we can hope that she ends up on a certain path because we have given her different opportunities and instruction in her life. But I am sure that you all know folks, maybe sets of siblings who are raised in the same household, and in the same environment and the same circumstances, and they turn out totally different. In the same way, Solomon is talking about young folks who are still on this early path. We don't know if they're going to choose the path of wisdom or if they're going to choose the path of folly. Solomon is giving them these instructions so that they will hopefully choose the path of wisdom in their lives.
But it's not just for young people. In the next verse, Solomon writes, "Let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill," (Proverbs 1:5) because old dogs can learn new tricks.
Many of you are probably familiar with Humans of New York. It's a photography project that was started probably about ten years ago by a young man named Brandon, who lived in New York City. He goes around, and he takes pictures of folks that he meets on the street, and he documents their stories. They're compelling. There was one interview that he did a few weeks ago about an older woman he ran into. She was sitting on a bench in a park and here's what she had to say: "I'm really proud that I am still interested. Not interesting; that's a different thing. I mean that I am interested. I'm still interested in the world. Interested feeds me. Quite frankly, this year has been a delight. I have been using a lot of Zoom, and I'm Zooming everywhere. To places and topics, I would never have discovered pre-pandemic. At 3 p.m. today, the Natural History Museum is Zooming a lecture on spies, and it's on my calendar. There's another one tonight about the TWA terminal at LaGuardia Airport. I'm actually missing one right now about cassowaries, and I really wanted to see that one, but the weather was so nice. So, I came to the park with an exquisite book about London during the English Civil War."
She is the epitome of verse 5 - someone who is still gaining in her learning, adding to her learning. She knows that acquiring wisdom never ends, no matter how old you are.
So this introduction, these first six verses really tell what wisdom is and who it's for. But now we get to the big question. How do we get it? How do we actually achieve this wisdom that Solomon has started building up and telling us is for all of us? In verse seven, he says, "We become wise by fearing the Lord." That's an odd turn of phrase and could be possibly three of the most understood words in Scripture. For us, fear generally only has one dimension. Fear means that we're scared of something. We're scared of hurricanes, and medical diagnoses, and crimes, and car accidents. And fear has its place - there's such a thing as healthy fear. If you go stand on the edge of a skyscraper and you're looking over the precipice, and you're not feeling any fear, then I have to wonder if there is something going on with your frontal lobe.
When I was a kid, one of the things that my sister feared the most was meeting my dad's eyes in our rear-view mirror whenever we'd been acting up. He could reprimand us with one look in the car. And we didn't fear it because we were scared of him since we knew he wasn't going to hurt us. But our fear was healthy since it was based on him as the rule maker, as someone whose guidelines we wanted to follow. And when we had disappointed him, we were fearful of that disappointment.
So, when we hear this phrase "Fear of the Lord," we aren't meant to think, "Should I be scared of God? Is God going to smite me? Does God have it out for me?" It's sort of like this fear of my dad that it's a reverential and awe-inspired fear. The fear of the Lord means that we have a healthy respect and awe of God. It's the acknowledgment that God is God, and we are not God. That God who is the creator of the universe, the author and sustainer of our lives, is bigger than we are - and mightier and more powerful. And we are not God. The one who forms us in our mother's womb, who numbers our days, the God who takes care of us all of the time. These things that we can't do ourselves. It's when we recognize that we develop this awe that puts us in the right place with God. God's power and might are terrifyingly huge. But they are not on their own terrifying. God is not terrifying.
C.S. Lewis's novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is part of the Chronicles of Narnia series, and I'm sure many of you have read it. In the story, four children go through the wardrobe into this land of Narnia, and they find out that the kingdom has been taken hostage by the White Witch. So as they're making their way around, they run into Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who tell them all about the king - Aslan. And the kids say they want to meet the king, and Mrs. Beaver surprises them. This is what she says when she tells them that Aslan is not a man but a lion. She says, "'Oh,' said Susan, 'I thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I should feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.' 'That you will, dearie, and no mistake,' said Mrs. Beaver. 'If there is anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they are either braver than most or just silly.' 'Then he isn't safe?' asked Lucy. 'Safe?' said Mr. Beaver, 'who said anything about safe. Of course, he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you.'"
We are right to fear God because the type of wisdom that God gives us isn't safe wisdom. It isn't the wisdom of the world; it's not the wisdom that just goes along with our culture. It's unsafe wisdom that calls for the turning upside down of the kingdom. When we live in accordance with God when we live in this awe, this place of deferential respect to God, we recognize that God's wisdom is going to lead us in totally new and different directions than what we would have come up with on our own.
Here's what Solomon is trying to say when he tells us to practice the "fear of the Lord" - wisdom comes when we are humble enough to recognize that we are not God. It's only then that we are able to take ourselves out of the center of the universe. When we put God at the center of our universe instead of ourselves, everything else starts to be shaped by God. It's the lens through which we see everything. We build our lives around God, and it grants us a kind of wisdom that doesn't put ourselves first, that doesn't choose our own selfish desires, the things that naturally come to us.
When we see everything through our own lenses instead of through God's lens, we get stuck on those life-altering decisions. The decisions that are really consequential but without a clear-cut answer. Instead, when we humble ourselves before God and when we say that we want to have the wisdom of God and we practice that by recognizing that we are not God, that God is God, and we turn to God to gain all of our wisdom and insight and discernment about what comes next. We are blessed because God will take us by the hand and lead us every single step of the way.
Let's pray together. God, thank you so much for being our wisdom, for saving us from trying to lead ourselves down the path of destruction. For turning us back to you. God, we pray that we would be able to humble ourselves before you, that we wouldn't try to do everything on our own or manage all of our life situations or our problems and all we struggle with - that we would be able to take a step back to bow before you and to ask you to lead us by the hand. God, we love you, and we offer this prayer in your name, Amen.
