Category: Proverbs

People of God, it is truly an unfortunate reality today that the Church has become silent on a host of issues. We have certainly addressed this trend before in my sermon on “Marriage and the Public Gospel,” but it needs to be re-iterated that the Church is a spiritual and political institution. Spiritual, in that it is Spirit-led, and political, in that it is led by a King, Jesus Christ.  The Church is not the headquarters for partisan politics, it is the headquarters of political dominion. The Church is not from the left or from the right, she is from above, and she speaks with heavenly authority. She uses the prophetic voice of feeble men to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.[1]

The role of the Church is to bring comfort to those who need, and to declare boldly those actions that God despises.

This is another reason Proverbs is so crucial for the Christian. It provides wisdom as the genesis/source of discernment and success. As Proverbs 3 summarizes, wisdom provides us with favor before God and man. Continue reading “Sermon: Kingly Wisdom, Part III, Proverbs 6:16-19”

Proverbs six is a remarkable description of evil. And evil has a body: eyes, tongues, hands, and feet. Solomon says that these parts function as diabolical agents. The haughty eyes descend to the tongue, and to the hands, and downward. This confirms the theological aspect of the down-wardness of human sin. Satan is a murderer and a liar, so too, those who follow him use their bodies to bring forth his purposes by lying and shedding innocent blood.

We need to consider our sins in light of the seriousness God gives to our sins. Our sins are dreadful in the eyes of God. When we consider the sin of the eyes, the sin of the tongue, and the sin of the hands, consider also that those sins are detestable in the eyes of God, that God curses them with His tongue, and that He does not pour blessings with His hands upon those who dwell in them.

People of God, we are going to spend a few weeks on selected portions of the book of Proverbs. I do this for two reasons:

First, because we live in a very foolish culture. We live in a culture that exalts immaturity. We live in a society that scoffs at wisdom. And the Christian Church has by and large adopted the model of our culture. It is much easier to feed a congregation with milk than to nurture them with a meaty and robust dose of gospel proclamation. As Proverbs imply, to be a Christian means to be wise. And this wisdom is not for the privileged class of the Church. This was the sin of Corinth. Some thought they were wiser than others, and that their status meant that they could exercise their freedom in whatever way they wanted. But wisdom, according to Proverbs, is for everyone. It is for the little ones in our congregation and the older saints. But wisdom is not something that can be exhausted. You cannot say I am done pursuing wisdom, because wisdom is something to always be pursued. As Solomon says: “…and those who seek me (wisdom) diligently find me (Proverbs 8).” Even in the New Heavens and Earth we will continue to grow and mature in our wisdom of who we are and who God is. So, children listen carefully to the instructions of the Proverbs. Those who are seasoned, listen to the instruction of the Proverbs.

The second reason I want to spend a few weeks in Proverbs is because we are in the Season of Pentecost. We have journeyed through all the main seasons of the Church, and we are now in the season where we see the Church being sent out into the world. The Church is a Pentecostal Church. She is fiery, because the Spirit has descended upon her. Fire consumes everything. As a Church, we consume the world by and through wisdom. This is another reason Proverbs is necessary for us.

These are the reasons why studying Proverbs is important, and I encourage you to read through it in the weeks ahead with your family at the dinner table, or simply in your private Bible reading. Continue reading “Sermon: Proverbs 1:1-7, Kingly Wisdom”

Leithart summarizes well:

The Proverbs train us as kings in the basic sense that they teach us how to take mastery of life, rather than merely bumble and stumble through life from one crisis to another.

Mark Horne offers some thoughtful reasons for memorizing Proverbs:

1. Proverbs is God’s Catechism; it is meant to be memorized

OK, This is more the reason I began memorizing Proverbs than something I learned… except I can say I am more convinced that Proverbs was meant for this now, than when I started.

Think of the things that we consider to be ideal catechisms for the Church. I don’t doubt that teaching Christian doctrine, and even giving exact words for Christians to use, is a good idea. But we have to admit that God could have had Paul or someone write such a thing. Instead he had Solomon and others give us Proverbs.

2. God tells us to teach our children “when you are going out.”

So here’s the thing. I can’t grab a pocket Bible, or my Kindle, and look up a verse while I am driving. But I have a captive audience and memorizing Proverbs gave me a chance to exploit the situation.

Many times I hid what I was doing. I’d throw one of the kids a Bible and say, “Can you see how I’m doing?” and let them read and make sure I was reciting everything word-perfect…. and often that worked. (Note: in my experience, the younger you start this, the more productive it will be.)

But if you want a chance to discuss with your teen sons the basic alternative between plunder and production, and the habits that are demanded by making the right choice, Solomon will provide plenty of help.

In any case, my 8-year-old got credit for her school’s public speaking competition for reciting Proverbs 10.1-8. (She would have done more, except for the time limit.) One other advantage about memorizing the Proverbs is that, not only can you repeat them to your children, and talk about them, but you can also be their means of memorizing them for themselves.

3. The only way to map some mazes is to meander through them.

There are many books in the Bible in which a scholar is able to know the general story and look at the text on the page and pick out details that help him make an outline or see and order that wasn’t obvious at first.

In most respects, Proverbs is not one of those books. It seems jumbled, too repetitive, and at times given to insultingly-obvious tautologies. You have a hard time convincing yourself that someone was grabbing from a pile of notes and writing sayings down randomly.

But when you start to actually memorize, the “shape” of Proverbs seems a lot more coherent. I would never have seen this chiasm if I hadn’t been memorizing, to name a small example.

(In fact, the majority of what I wrote in this category comes from the time I was memorizing Proverbs.)

I’m not sure how to demonstrate or explain what I want to say here, so I’ll resort to an analogy. Most times you get directions you don’t have to keep track of that much. You learn to look for a couple of intersections and which way you should turn; that is all you need.

Proverbs is more like a thick forest. There doesn’t seem to be any trail through it. But once you actually start exploring, you begin to pick out landmarks. It becomes familiar. Even though you couldn’t give directions or draw a map that would work with a novice, you find you could easily lead them through it.

One way this pays off is with reading the portions of Proverbs I had not yet memorized. It became easier to comprehend. I wasn’t haunted by the vague sense that I had read that same sentence somewhere else in the book; I knew exactly where I had run into it. The entire book began to seem more familiar even though I had only “taken possession” of three chapters.

4. Your “New Testament” will suddenly double in size.

The Gospels and Letters to the Church after Christ are filled with appeals/allusions to the Proverbs. It is amazing. Without Proverbs I’m not sure what ethics would be left. You feel like every single book in the “New Testament” doubles as a commentary on Solomon.

Sermon Audio

Sermon: People of God, Lady Wisdom teaches us that how we use our bodies determine our future. She also teaches us that our actions and words affect much more than ourselves; it affects our community. It changes people for the good or the bad. This is precisely why as image-bearers of the Triune God our words are so important. Will we develop a culture of immaturity or maturity? This is determined largely by how we use our words. But as we mentioned last week, the wise one never needs to be afraid when he is walking obediently. The fool, on the other hand, thinks more highly of his wisdom and opinion than he does others.[1] The agenda and goal of Lady Wisdom is to bring our bodies into conformity to Jesus Christ, who is the wisdom made flesh.

Our passage this morning provides a chronology of evil and good. The righteous grow up in wisdom, while the fool grows up into evil schemes. They become artists of evil. They design everything with the intention of causing harm. Their words start fires around them. Even their very bodily gestures and movements communicate evil. We see this in verses 10: “Whoever winks the eye causes trouble, but a babbling fool will come to ruin.” He is a trouble-maker and everyone around him knows it. Fathers and mothers keep their kids away from him. The neighborhood knows that if they see a police car driving by, he is probably going to his house. What does he do? He winks his eye. He is not being cute or playful. Proverbs 6 speaks of this individual: “A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, 13 winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, 14 with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord…” He is a son of Belial; a son of evil. His father is the father of all lies. His uncle Screwtape is very proud of him. Literally, he is “compressing the eye.” That is, he is meditating upon his next evil scheme. He is a restless schemer.[2] When he gets home at night he indulges in evil. He doesn’t greet his wife or children; he rushes to his room to plot the next thing. He gives his approval to every societal and cultural evil. You would expect to see some contrast in verse 10 as we have seen earlier, but the writer simply compares the activity of the first line to the second. The author says that “Devious gestures are grievous, but not as ruinous as foolish talk. Both are to be avoided.”[3] The babbling fool; the one who lives to communicate foolishness; he will fall flat on his face; he will come to ruin. There is a corresponding backlash.[4] It boomerangs back to him; his end is destruction. Every evil word they have uttered will come back to them. In verse 11 we are back to the antithetical lines: “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.” In some third world countries you can see what a dried parched land is. You need a desert-like context to see the nature of this passage. Continue reading “Proverbs 10:10-16; Money, Morality, and the Mouth (series on Proverbs 10)”

Bruce Waltke observes that Solomon’s proverb give equal attention to the dangers of wealth and the positive implications of it. Wealth in the wrong hands is deceitful and destructive. On the other hand, poverty connotes the idea of powerlessness (see Prov. 10), which leads to panic. The desire for poverty–as some modern evangelicals long–is not a biblical one. The deprivation of life’s necessities is against God’s purposes for His people.

Liberals are frustrated by the truths of Proverbs. Proverbs pounds the idea of work into the liberal mind. It exalts work and castigates laziness. According to Proverbs, a man’s character is reflected in his attitude toward work. The dominion mandate is saturated with this assumption.