“1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel: 2 for attaining wisdom and discipline; for understanding words of insight; 3 for acquiring a disciplined and prudent life, doing what is right and just and fair; 4 for giving prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young— 5 let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance—6 for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise. 7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
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“What do you do with the mad that you feel, when you feel so mad you could bite? When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right? What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag? Or see how fast you go? It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong and be able to do something else instead and think this song: I can stop when I want to, can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time, and what a good feeling to feel like this and know that the feeling is really mine, know that there’s something deep inside that helps us become what we can for a girl can be someday a woman and a boy can be someday a man.” That’s Mr. Rogers. I loved Mr. Rogers as a kid. I still do. I’ve got a Mr. Rogers mug. If you fill it with hot liquid, his blue jacket vanishes, and you can see his yellow sweater just like he took off his jacket at the beginning of the show.
That song from Mr. Rogers is empowering. It reveals what’s going on inside of you. It talks about what you can do with what’s going inside of you. It reminds you that you are in charge of you. It is an encouraging song because it reminds kids that they are still learning. They are still on their way to what they can be; “a girl can be someday a woman and a boy can be someday a man.”
That’s the book of Proverbs too. It’s an empowering book. It reveals what’s going inside of us. It talks about what we can do with us. It reminds us that we are in charge of ourselves. It reminds us that we are still growing. It tells us in so many ways that, “it’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong and be able to do something else instead.”
Tonight, we study the introduction to this book. This introduction stands over the entirety of Proverbs and so to understand Proverbs well, we must understand these verses. This introduction tells us what the book is for. It tells us how the book must be received. The book of Proverbs is for wisdom and wisdom is received while fearing of the Lord. That’s the claim of this sermon: the book of Proverbs is for wisdom and wisdom is received while fearing of the Lord.
We will study this in three points. First: an overview. Second: what proverbs are for. Second: the starting place. Verse 1 gives us an overview. Verses 2-6 tell us what Proverbs are for. Verse 7 tells us the starting place.
First: the book of Proverbs. In English, a proverb is a short expression of wisdom—“better safe than sorry,” “measure twice, cut once,” “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” The word we have here in verse 1, “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel,” has a wider range of meaning than our English word for proverb. It includes not only short expressions of wisdom but also lengthy descriptions of virtue, such we see in Proverbs 31 with the wife of noble character. It includes chapter long pleas to pursue wisdom. It uses riddles and rhetorical questions. So, there is more to their idea of proverbs than our idea.
Much of this book seems jumbled. There is a proverb about communication and then one about wealth and then one about friendship. Some scholars think that’s because that’s how these issues present themselves in life. Life doesn’t come at you in an orderly way and so neither does Proverbs.
This book, as the first verse makes clear, was developed during the reign of Solomon; “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel.” These were days of sustained peace and prosperity. This, in addition to Solomon’s renown wisdom, led to a culture worthy of passing on to future generations. This book is about passing on wisdom.
This book includes wisdom from other lands. Other cultures worked to understand life too. They passed on this wisdom to the next generation too. There is a lot of common grace in common sense so it shouldn’t surprise us that there is wisdom for living all over the world.
When we lived in Worthington, the family across the street was from Senegal. They were Muslims. They were delightful to spend time with. I learned a lot from them about hospitality and neighborliness because there is a lot of common grace in common sense.
Proverbs focuses on wise living in areas such as money, love, pleasure, pain, neighbors, friends, conflict, youth, and old age. Proverbs speaks of each of these by way of general truths. “Diligence leads to prosperity.” “A gentle answer turns away wrath.” Since they are general truths, there are often exceptions to them. For example, diligence doesn’t always lead to prosperity, but it usually does. A gentle answer doesn’t always turn away wrath, but it usually does.
This means that Proverbs are different from promises. Promises tell you what will happen. Proverbs are general truths about the way life tends to go. For example, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” is not a promise that if you train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it. It is a description of the way life generally goes.
The wisdom we encounter in this book was most likely designed to be passed on within families. You see a sign of that right after our passage, “My son, hear the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the law of your mother.” This shouldn’t surprise us because the family was the primary educational unit in Israel. It always is. We learned wisdom and foolishness from our family of origin and we pass on both to the next generation. The hope is that we pass on more wisdom than foolishness. Proverbs helps us do that. That’s part of why it was written.
So that’s a basic introduction to the book of Proverbs. Now let’s see what it is for. That’s our second point: what proverbs are for. Proverbs is a very practical book. It is a sort of “how to” manual for life. This might be why the Gideons include this book along with their New Testaments. It might be because, as Duane Garrett put it, “by this book, one can learn the principles that determine success or failure in the major arenas of human activity including business, personal relationships, family life, and community life,” and who doesn’t want to be success in business, personal relationships, family life, and community life?
This is a book about how to live wisely, or, as verse 2 puts it, “for attaining wisdom and discipline.” It is “personal internalization or experiencing of wisdom that is in view here,” as Bruce Waltke put it. This book is to be absorbed and applied. You would read the latest Stephen King novel differently from the way you would read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You would cruise through the novel for the story. You would take the self-management book slowly and apply it to your life as you went. Proverbs is the second kind of book. Some people find it helpful to read or listen to a chapter of Proverbs every day. There are often 31 days in a month and there are 31 chapters in the book. When I’ve done that, I’ve found it regularly applicable to whatever I encountered that day.
We are going to try to internalize this book as we go. During these sermons, we are going to pause and reflect. We will answer questions on our sheets to help us internalize these Proverbs. It will be a bit different. We will see how it goes.
So this book helps us internalize wisdom; it is also, as verse 2 continues, “for understanding words of insight.” It takes wisdom to appreciate wisdom. Mark Twain put it this way, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” The joke is that the father hadn’t changed. Twain simply grew wise and so could now appreciate the wisdom his father always had. Proverbs helps us understand the wisdom that is already out there. It gives us ears to hear and eyes to see how life has always worked.
Imagine that you suddenly got a job outside of your area of expertise. Say that you suddenly became the director of a call center. On your first day, the outgoing director sits you down, gives you an overview of the job, and asks you if you have any questions. You probably aren’t going to have too many relevant questions because you don’t know anything about the job yet. However, if you sat down with that same outgoing director a week into the job, you would have all sorts of questions that would be relevant, and you would have different questions in a month, and different questions in a year. Proverbs is that outgoing director. We get a little from the chapter when we first read it. We get far more from it when we read it for the 365th time after trying to apply it for the 365th day. I think that verse 6 is largely the same, “for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise.”
It is a book, “for acquiring a disciplined and prudent life, doing what is right and just and fair,” as verse 3 puts it. Nobody wants to waste their life, but how do you avoid doing so? This book tells you. It tells you where to devote your time. It tells you how to harness the resources that God has given you into something productive rather than destructive or merely ineffective. It tells you how to do the right thing in the right way.
Now only one person has ever done this to his potential. Only one person has always done the right thing in the right way, the just thing in the just way, and the fair thing in the fair way. Jesus is the wisest man who has ever lived. If you want to know what wisdom looks like in action, just watch Jesus. He knew when to push. He knew when to give space. He knew when to let someone suffer the consequences of their actions. He knew how to frame a question. He is simply the most magnificent person ever. Growing in wisdom will help us do more of what Jesus did.
Jesus learned this wisdom. Jesus read the book of Proverbs. He grew in wisdom. We need this more than we think. When we are young, we need it even more so; verse 4, “for giving prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young.”
Everyone is born with the same amount of wisdom, meaning zero. We learn as we go. We don’t and shouldn’t expect a 35-year-old to have the wisdom of a 75-year-old or a 15-year-old to have the wisdom of a 35-year-old. You are still learning, right? So is everyone. None of us have arrived. We need to remember this because we tend to think of ourselves as three-dimensional and others as two-dimensional. That’s natural because we are in our own skin and know our own struggles and foibles and temptations and are still learning what lurks below the surface within us. We need to remember that all of that is going on in other people too.
It’s no problem to be in process and still learning provided that you want to grow. That’s good. The problem comes in when you don’t want to grow. In Proverbs, the simple man is the one who has refused to grow. Proverbs can help him too; “giving prudence to the simple,” as verse 4 puts it.
We can all act foolishly despite suffering consequences repeatedly. At times we all bang our head against brick walls thinking that we might somehow carve a way forward while all the while there is a door we could have just walked through standing five feet away. We all have that foolishness in us, but the man who has no inclination to ever learn from life’s hard knocks is the man in mind here. He would do well to read through Proverbs because it is wisdom calling to him. He would save himself, and others around him, a lot of heartache if he would put this into practice. This book gives prudence to those whom to this point have refused to grow.
Proverbs can help those who are just getting their feet underneath them so to speak, and it is also valuable for those who are already considered wise; verse 5, “let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance.” The message here is that the wise know they never arrive. There is far more to life than any of us will ever understand. The best any of us can hope for is to become just a little less ignorant. The more we know, the more we recognize that we don’t know. This makes humility the proper virtue for studying this book. The more we learn from Proverbs, the humbler we become because we realize how wrong we’ve often been and how very complex life is. It’s humbling and empowering all at the same time.
You see all of this at work in the ministry of Jesus. The people who were humble enough to acknowledge that they could learn from him did learn from him. They became wiser. Those who considered themselves wise in their own eyes thought they had nothing to learn from him. The thought of being discipled by him was repugnant to them because they thought he had nothing to offer. Not only can the wisest learn from Proverbs but those who do listen and learn are wise and become wise.
Pride keeps each of us from growing in different ways and pride lingers so close to each of us. There are uncomfortable truths that each of us would rather not face and so rather than face them we put our attention elsewhere. To receive Proverbs, we need to be willing to humble ourselves. We see that in our final point: the right starting place.
Receiving what Proverbs has to offer has much more to do with attitude than with intellect. The attitude necessary is the fear of the Lord; “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.”
When we are actively fearing the Lord, we acknowledge that He knows better than we do. We acknowledge that we are finite and fallible and that He is neither. We become willing to revisit what we think and how we live in light of what He says because He knows better. We concede that our own understanding is limited and often biased and that His understanding is perfect and pure. We become willing to side with Him against ourselves so to speak.
When I was in high school everyone was a little afraid of Mr. Oostindie. He was fair but he didn’t suffer fools. If you didn’t try your best, you wouldn’t get your best grade. If you got out of line, he would put you back in line. There was a healthy fear of Mr. Oostindie because people knew that he said what he meant and he meant what he said. That’s part of what’s going on here with the fear of the Lord. To grow in wisdom, we need to treat God as if He says what He means and means what He says.
The best way to way to get everything you can out of this our time in Proverbs is to fear the Lord properly because, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” If you want to understand math, you need to know your numbers. If you want to understand an engine, you need to know the components. If you want to understand, Proverbs, you need to fear the Lord.
That responsibility lies on all of us. To get something out of this book, we must treat it as a guide for life that will reward following. We need to see where we can put it into practice and then put it into practice because this is God’s word about God’s world and this is how we enjoy pleasant consequences. As Bruce Waltke put it, borrowing heavily from the language of Proverbs, “The responsibility to respond to instruction lies squarely on the child’s shoulders; he must listen to it, accept it, love it, prize it more highly than money, and not let go of it.”
“It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong and be able to do something else instead and think this song: I can stop when I want to, can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time, and what a good feeling to feel like this and know that the feeling is really mine, know that there’s something deep inside that helps us become what we can for a girl can be someday a woman and a boy can be someday a man.” It’s great to be able to do that so let’s do that. Amen.