Clough Proverbs
Lesson 16
Introduction to Proverbs – Proverbs 20:2-4
This morning we
begin the section on Proverbs, and this series judging from the length of the
book and the content of the material will probably last for many months. Proverbs is part of a group of literature
that is known as the wisdom literature.
Proverbs is a book, therefore, that has to do with the concept in the
Hebrew known as chakmah, and this is the word that refers to skill, primarily,
fundamental word, and we are going to study this and the application to the
Christian’s life throughout this series.
But today we want to introduce the book and we want to set Proverbs into
its historic position and into its context.
Because Proverbs
is wisdom literature, this means that it is part of a vast corpus of literature
found in
And here it
doesn’t work because here we have now available to us, and you can refer to
these in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern
Text; a vast corpus of wisdom literature and it comes to us from
Mesopotamia, and it comes to us from Egypt, and lo and behold, it comes to us
before the year 2000 BC. So therefore,
can it be now that the liberal claim that Proverbs had to have been written
late because wisdom didn’t develop until a late date. All of that has been shot
down by the archeological evidence; the evidence is that wisdom was known in
the ancient world from the beginning of time.
From the beginning of records wisdom was available. And so therefore it’s simply not true, as the
higher critics allege, that Proverbs was written very, very late. If you would like to do further study on this
I refer you to Kenneth Kitchen’s book, Ancient Orient and Old Testament; I
refer you to books on Old Testament introduction, like Gleason Archer’s book
and R. K. Harrison. There’s a whole
discussion there if you’ve run across this problem in your studies.
What we want to do
this morning is to go to Proverbs by reason of going to other comparable books
in history. We want to start with the
Old Testament, then we’re going to move outward from
Let’s start first
with the wisdom literature in the nation
A second division
is called the Law, and that’s the first five books of your Bible, Genesis to
the end of Deuteronomy. That’s another
division in the Hebrew Bible. A third
division in the Hebrew Bible, I say Hebrew Bible, not English Bible, because
the Hebrew has these divisions and they order the books differently than your
English Bible because the English Bible is taken off a Greek translation, not
the Hebrew, the order of the books that is.
So the order of the books in your English Bible in the Old Testament is
different than the order of the books in the ancient Hebrew Bible. The books are the same, they’re just ordered
differently.
And then finally
the third division is called the Prophets.
And the Prophets would include in the Hebrew eight books: Joshua,
Judges, Samuel (we have 1 and 2 Samuel, they only had one book), Kings (we have
two Kings, they had one), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and then a section they
called The Twelve. The Twelve referred
to the Minor Prophets; we have them divided, the Minor Prophets being Haggai
and a few others.
So we’ve got these
three sections of the Hebrew Bible. The
primary section is the Law, the secondary section is the Prophets, and the
third section is the Writings, if you want their order of priority as they
would be treated in the Old Testament days, the days of the ancient
Hebrew. Now here’s why this is important
to know so you’ll understand what you’re getting into when you get into the
book of Proverbs. This book, the first
five, is called Torah, that’s the Hebrew name for them and the Torah were all
written by Moses or under Moses’ supervision.
This is the grand foundation of the Old Testament, the five, the
Torah. And this is considered among the
rabbis of ancient
So therefore
Torah, the first five books, constitutes the original basis of the canon. This means that the Torah constitutes the
norm for all future revelation. Whenever
a prophet, such as Isaiah or Jeremiah would reveal something about God’s will,
Jeremiah or Isaiah would be accepted or rejected on one basis, not whether they
could do miracles or not, that is not an issue.
Satan can do miracles. So just because
a man does miracles would not constitute him an authoritative prophet in the
nation. In fact, if you did miracles you
could be stoned to death under certain conditions. So therefore, miracle-doing did no prove a
thing. What proved something was whether
or not it adhered to the doctrine of the Torah.
The Torah had to be first and the Torah had to be respected under every
condition.
This is why, if
you recall, Jesus had all the fights He had, with the people saying Jesus, you
broke the Sabbath, and so on, and Jesus entered into great dialogue with people
who were claiming that Jesus was breaking the Torah. Why did Jesus bother to
answer His critics? Because Jesus to
show that indeed He did not break the Torah. So the Torah, then, is very important. The Torah is the norm of all revelation in
the Bible.
The second group,
the Prophets, or in the Hebrew, the Nabiim, the Nabiim are a group of writers
who add to the Torah. For example, if
you turn to 1 Chronicles 29:29 you’ll read there, and if you have a new
Scofield Bible there’s a very important note on page 492, [The O.T. points to a
very extensive literature among the Hebrew people which has not been
preserved. Among the uninspired books
are the two mentioned here: The Book of Nathan the Prophet (also in 2
Chronicles
1 Chronicles 29:29
tells us how these prophets wrote. It
gives us a little insight in how we got part of our Bibles. We read: “Now the acts of David, the king,
first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel, the seer, and
in the book of Nathan, the prophet, and in the of Gad, the seer,” so included
in verse 29 are three books. We do not
have any of those books; The Book of Samuel, the seer, is not our present book
of Samuel. So whatever those three books are that you read in verse 29, those
were the original diaries of the prophets.
So it appears that one of the sources, then, for the prophets, the
section that’s called the Prophets, were diaries that were kept by these
prophets. In other words, in their
ministries and in their life they would write down things that God had told
them, and they would write down how men responded to what they taught and out
of these diaries later, through other men, we have the rise of the prophet’s
prophetic books. 1 Samuel probably was
written by a lot of Samuel’s seminary students; Samuel had his own theological
seminary and undoubtedly his students compiled their master’s diaries into what
we call the book of Samuel. This is to
no way infringe on the inspiration of Scripture or the inerrancy of
Scripture. The Bible has no errors in
the original [can’t understand word].
But what it is to say is this is the historical message that God the
Holy Spirit used. So that’s the second
section.
Why do we need the
Prophets? This is important because
later we’re going to ask why do we need the Writings. So I hope you see why we need the Torah; the
Torah defines the will of God for the nation; the Torah would be analogous to
our Constitution; the Torah is the constitution of the kingdom, but since God
is not a static God, but a personal God, it means that He would update His
knowledge, so the prophets, therefore, are the way in which God kept his nation
up to date. The Prophets added to, but
notice, and this is very, very important, the Prophets could not contradict the
Torah. They could add to it but their
additions could never conflict with the Torah.
That handles the
problem of the Torah and the Prophets.
Now we come to the section that Proverbs is in and here we’ve got a
little more difficult problem. If we
diagram what is going on, maybe we could make up a triangle; God at the top,
man here on the left, and over here would be nature. Let’s see if we can diagram these three books
of the Bible and see how they tie together.
The Torah and the Prophets describe the relationship between God and
man; God, being personal, knows man; man being personal knows God. That is the relationship described in Torah
and the Prophets, and that’s very nice, but unfortunately man also lives in
nature and he’s got to know something about it.
And the Prophets, generally, nor the Torah, tell very much about nature;
they only tell the God-man relationship.
So therefore the emphasis is between God and man in both Torah and
Prophet.
Now we come to the
Writings, in the Hebrew it looks like this, the Kethubim; The Kethubim have a
problem. Now when I asked you to hold
your hand there at 1 Chronicles and then I asked you to hold your hand at the
beginning of Isaiah, did you notice what was in that section? You have Chronicles, that’s a history book;
so can we say, maybe, that all of the third section of the Bible, the Writings,
The Kethubim could be united by saying those are history writers. And you might say okay, let’s look at that
little section and look through it; are all the writings that you’ve held in
your hand just history writings? No; you
have poetry, Psalms, so that doesn’t fit.
So we can’t call the third section of the Bible mere history writing;
that category doesn’t fit. What else can
we say? Can we say that maybe the third
section deals with prophecy because remember I said one of the books in the
third section is Daniel. But that
doesn’t fit because Chronicles isn’t prophecy, it’s history.
So therefore we can’t say that the Kethubim
deals with prophecy as such; we can’t say it deals with history as such; what
is the one thing that unifies. Robert
Gordis, one of the prominent Jewish scholars today said this: “When the full scope of Hebrew wisdom is
taken into account, it becomes clear that the third section in the Bible, the
Kethubim, is not a simple miscellaneous collection, but on the contrary,
possesses an underlying unity and that unity is wisdom.” So the third section of the Bible, the
Kethubim, deals with wisdom, all of it.
Psalms are wisdom literature; Proverbs are wisdom literature; Chronicles
is wisdom literature; Daniel is wisdom literature. And from that you should begin to see what
wisdom is like. Wisdom, in terms of our
chart, deals with this relationship; wisdom deals with man knowing nature,
knowing the creation, and that’s what distinguishes it from the Torah and the
Prophets. The Torah and the Prophets
concentrated on man’s relationship to God; the Kethubim concentrates on man’s
life in the middle of everyday circumstances.
The wisdom literature is the base for all philosophy and science. All art, every one of those disciplines,
comes from [can’t understand words] wisdom.
But to bring it
down to home, the wisdom literature is important to you because it’s the wisdom
literature that deals with the everyday events in your life. The Law and the Prophets deal with the exciting
things, the miracles, but in the wisdom literature very rarely do you deal with
miracles. In the wisdom literature it’s
the everyday thing, daily routine, how you get up, how you go to bed, it deals
with the job, deals with the home, all of the roles and all of the activities
in your everyday life; that is what wisdom literature deals with. So Psalms deals with every one of the
circumstances of life; Proverbs deals with all the details of life.
Now when we come
to this we notice that if that is the case, this puts man in his position as
the creature-king. Man in the Bible is
the king of creation because he is the Lord of it. In Genesis 1 man is commanded to subdue the
creation. Man is commanded to be the
Lord of it. For example, if you’ll turn
to Genesis 2:19, when God had set Adam forth in the Garden He told him to do a
funny thing. When you first read the Bible, you get to Genesis 2:19 it doesn’t
seem like much, but after you think about it I hope you get a lot more serious
about what Adam did in Genesis 2:19. God
told Adam, in verse 19, “Out of the ground God,” literally “had formed every
beast of the field,” the order in Genesis 2 does not conflict with the order in
Genesis 1, “and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
Now some people
read verse 19 as some sort of cute little Sunday School story, Adam sat in the
Garden and the animals traipsed by and he just tacked labels on them, oh, that’s
a dog, that’s a cat, that’s a deer, that’s a lion and so on, and all he did was
tack labels on. I want to show you that
Adam was not involved in tacking labels on to animals, just that, because at
the end in verse 20 the conclusion is, Adam could not find “a help suited for
him.” So the mere naming of the animals
in the Garden of Eden wasn’t just tacking labels on. The naming of the animals in the Garden of
Eden was that Adam was conducting the first scientific investigation of
nature. He was trying to understand
nature around him, and because he was trying to understand that he was trying
to come to conclusions.
Therefore, this is
the relationship that the Prophets and the Law leave unexposed. This is the relationship that the wisdom
literature begins to deal with. Now in
the nation Israel we have various men that were specialist in each of these
fields. If you turn to Jeremiah 18:18
you’ll see these three classes of people.
Here we face the three classes of specialists; be careful, as I go through
these three classes of specialists in the nation, it doesn’t mean that these
men were isolated in three different compartments and the compartments didn’t
overlap. That’s not true. But they specialized, and so in verse 18,
“Then they said, Come, and let us devise devices against Jeremiah; for the law
shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from
the prophet.”
So you have here
the three divisions in the history of Israel.
First is the priest, what is it that is associated with the priest? The Law; what is the Law? The Law is the first section of God’s Word,
Torah. So therefore the Torah or the Law
is associated with the priest. Let’s
skip the wise man and turn to the prophet. What is it that is connected with the
prophet? It is the word of revelation
and so therefore we have the additions that God is making in history. And what was associated with the wise man? The wise men were the counselors; the wise
men were the men that gave advice. Think
of the wise men in Jesus’ day that came to Herod. What did Herod do? Did Herod
say oh, you stupid people, you come to hear from Messiah, go find him. What did
Herod do when the wise men came to him?
Herod recognized they were wise men, and what did Herod do? He asked for advice and he said where is
Messiah to be born? He wasn’t asking for
new revelation from God, notice that, there was no new revelation from God that
Herod got, it was old revelation that was brought into the situation at
hand.
So the wisdom
literature, or the concept of wisdom, or the wise men would answer in our time
to the counselor. They were able to take
Bible doctrine and apply to the situation.
That is wisdom. Do you think now
wisdom might possibly have some application in your life? Taking the Bible doctrine and applying it to
the details of life; that is what wisdom is.
Let’s see three
prominent of wise men who were believers in the Bible. The first one is Joseph in Genesis
41:39. Let’s look at this. You recall the incident is the time when
Pharaoh had his dreams, he dreamed in two sevens, and there was something about
his dreams that caught Pharaoh’s imagination, and there was also something
about his dreams that cause Pharaoh to go first to his magicians, or we would
call them the wise men of Egypt. But
when Pharaoh went to the wise men of Egypt he tested them. Since he had kind of an inkling that this was
from God, he didn’t just tell the dream to his wise men. Here’s the test that Pharaoh proposed to his
wise men. He said you men, you come
here; I had a dream last night and I want you to give me the interpretation of
it. And the wise men said fine, give us
the dream and we’ll give you the interpretation. Pharaoh said huh-un; I want you to give me
both the dream and the interpretation.
And of course no wise man in Egypt could do that. Joseph, however, was called. Joseph came in to Pharaoh; it says he shaved
himself [41:14] from head to toe, this was a reflection of the Egyptian culture
at the time, you could not walk into Pharaoh’s presence unclean, and therefore
he walked into Pharaoh’s presence; Pharaoh was the incarnate god Horus in
Egyptian culture; Pharaoh becomes the antichrist at the Exodus.
So Pharaoh stands
in his person to be the incarnation of Horus.
Joseph walked into his presence; now you’ve got to catch the background
of what this verse is saying. Remember
who Pharaoh claims himself to be; he claims to be Horus incarnate. He claims to be Horus incarnate, but he wants
to seek an answer to both the interpretation of the dream and the dream
itself. So now when Joseph is able to
produce the dream and he is able to produce an interpretation of the dream,
here is what Pharaoh says, verse 39, “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch
as God has shown thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou
art.” Now this has a little history
behind it because if you look back in verse 15, when first saw Joseph he said
this: “I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it: and I
have heard say of thee, that you can understand a dream to interpret it.” Now you see in verse 15 Pharaoh thinks in
terms of human viewpoint, he thinks here is a man who is more powerful than the
other men. Notice how quick Joseph is,
in verse 16 to level it down and say no, Pharaoh, you’re wrong, I am not better
than the other men, “It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of
peace.” So Joseph bears testimony.
Now whether Joseph
actually won Pharaoh to Christ at this point is not known; however we do know
that certain things recorded in Egyptian history that whatever happened in this
strange exchange between Joseph and Pharaoh, it had repercussions all down
through Egyptian history. There’s a
strange school of wisdom that begins to develop in Egypt and I myself think
very much that it came forth from this confrontation. But notice that in verse 39 that Pharaoh, who
claimed to be god incarnate, talks back to Joseph and says yes, God has shown
you. In other words, Pharaoh gives up
his claim at this point, in effect he’s giving up his claim to be Horus
incarnate and he accords the wisdom totally into the hands of the God of
Joseph.
Remember, wisdom,
here the wisdom wasn’t so much the revelation; the wisdom was the skill because
you see the dream was an enigma. Still,
if you knew the dream, you couldn’t understand it. What did wisdom do? Wisdom saw the dream and understood it; it
applied the dream to the situation. It
was able to penetrate through the riddle, through the puzzle and get to the
answer.
A similar thing; 1
Kings 3, Solomon, who the Bible says is the wisest man who ever lived, in
secular history the only man that came close to Solomon would be Marcus
Aurelius, Leonardo DaVinci, men of that sort, Frederic the Great, men who
wrote, were great literary people and
yet were also great statesman. 1
Kings 3:16; here is a classic example of wisdom. I’m giving you these so you get a feel for
wisdom before we even start into Proverbs. We’re not talking about law; we’re
not talking about revelation; we’re not talking that God is announcing
something new. We’re talking about application of the Word of God to life.
Look at 1 Kings
3:16, “There came two women that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before
him. [17] “And the one woman said, O my
lord, I and this woman dwell in one house, and I was delivered of a child with
her in the house. [18] And it came to
pass the third say after I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also,
and we were together. There was no
stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.” That’s very important, notice that little
detail. The lady tells the king there
were no other witnesses in the house, so therefore Solomon cannot use the
Torah. See, if there were other
witnesses to decide the question Solomon is going to be asked to decide he
could call forth the witnesses and use jurisprudence under the Torah but this
verse, verse 18, cuts off any use of the Law or the Torah here.
[19] “And this
woman’s child died in the night, because she lay on it. [20] And she arose at midnight and took my
son from beside me, while your handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and
laid her dead child in my bosom. [21]
And when I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, it was dead; but when
I had looked at it in the morning, behold, it was not my son which I did
bear.” Now remember, the babies are only
three days old. [22] “And the other
woman said, No; but the living is my son, and the dead is your son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son,
and the living is my son. Thus they
spoke before the king.”
The king is
Solomon and this is one of the classic illustrations of how Solomon solves the
problem. And he solves it without the
use of the Torah; why? Because here you
have chakmah, here Solomon is able to
penetrate as to how a mother thinks.
Solomon is wise in the ways a real mother thinks. Solomon is going to use his knowledge of the
creation, that is, motherly instincts, and he’s going to turn his knowledge of
motherly instinct into a way of solving this argument. Here’s how he does it.
Verse 23, “Then
said the king, The one says, This is my son that lives, and thy son is dead;
and the other said, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the
living. [24] And the king said, Bring me
a sword. And they brought a sword before
the king. [25] And the king said, Divide
the living child in two, give half to the one, and half to the other.” And it sounds cruel but he has a method in
his motive. [26] “Then spoke the woman
whose the living child it was unto the king, for her heart yearned over her
son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay
it. But the other said, Let it be
neither mine nor thine, but divide it.
[27] Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and by
no means slay it; she is the mother of it.”
There is a classic
illustration of the use of wisdom. He is
able to penetrate into the nature of how people think and what people are like
and thereby solve the problem. Would say
that in America today we need a little more wisdom? The book of Proverbs is written for this
generation.
But first, to
appreciate what we’ve got in the book of Proverbs we want to take you on a
little tour of the world and for that I’ve prepared a little insert in the
bulletin; you should find on that insert three proverbs. You should find one proverb from Egypt; one
proverb from Mesopotamia, one proverb from Sinai. First, before we go to these countries we go
to Greece and we go to a man by the name of Plato because Plato, in one of his
writings, pictured the problem of wisdom.
This may all sound dry for you but I want you to listen carefully
because Plato’s puzzle can’t be solved except if the Bible is true.
Plato proposed a
test to find out… or Socrates, one or the other, posed a test and this test
cannot be answered, and there’s not one of you sitting here that can answer
this riddle unless the Bible is true.
Here’s the riddle that he proposed, it’s found in Charmides, between Critias and Socrates; Critias has come up with a
definition that is biblical, that wisdom is the doing of good actions; it’s a
little incomplete but it’s very close to the Bible; it is the doing of good
actions. Socrates counters with this riddle, and this riddle forever destroys
the definition and destroys all wisdom unless the Bible is true. Here’s the example Socrates gave; he says: O,
is wisdom really the doing of good works; then let me propose a question. Suppose we have a medical doctor, a
physician; suppose we say that the medical doctor wants to be wise.” And
remember the word wisdom? Skill, so
we’re talking about skill in the medical profession. “If skill and wisdom is doing a good action
then,” Socrates says, “wouldn’t you agree that a wise physician would be a
physician that heals people and does some good.
Wouldn’t you agree to this? Yes,
we agree to this, that a wise doctor, a wise physician would be one who heals
his patients, who does good to the people that come to him. Socrates says, Fine, now does a doctor always
know before the person is healed that he has done good or evil to the
patient. And the answer is he
doesn’t. In other words, the doctor
doesn’t always know whether what he is doing is going to benefit the patient or
not going to benefit the patient.
Socrates says then, therefore, how can the doctor be wise?
It’s a very simple
illustration but absolutely devastating, there’s no way around it, there’s
absolutely no way to solve that puzzle unless the Bible is true and this is why
I’m trying to show you, the doctor, because he is limited, can never tell
whether what he is doing is going to ultimately benefit his patient. He would like to, he tries to, but even the
best of his efforts someday are going to hurt somebody. And other times, what he thought was an
accident is going to turn out for good.
In other words, his knowledge of the situation is always incomplete and
he can never, knowledgeably be wise.
Let me give you
another illustration, this isn’t from Plato, this is from a modern man who
wrote the book, Situation Ethics. And that is, that “you don’t need moral
standards; all you need is the concept of love, doing good to others. And so forget your moral standards and just
figure out, in the situation, what would be the best thing for all
concerned.” That’s very nice, that’s a
very good definition, but can you do it.
In what situation would you know enough to know whether you’re doing
good to someone in the long run or doing evil to someone in the long run. Do
you have enough information to judge any situation or not. You don’t, and so therefore all these
definitions are very nice, very sweet, but they all fall apart as Socrates saw
many centuries ago. Socrates’ attack on
wisdom in Charmides is an attack that
has never been answered… never been
answered except in the pages of God’s Word.
No human philosophy has an answer to Plato’s riddles.
Now let’s see this
and I will prove it to you. All of the
great nations of the world have some concept of wisdom. First we go to Egypt; in Egypt, from which
Moses came, by the way Moses’ name is an Egyptian name, it’s not a Hebrew name,
and Moses spoke Egyptian, he was well-schooled in Egyptian. In fact, much of the Bible, in the first five
books, has Egyptian [can’t understand a couple of words] in it. So out of Egypt came forth wisdom. The Egyptians were polytheists; they thought
a lot about the different gods; but here’s a strange concept that also arose. They had gods and something else, and this something else is what we want to look
at. It’s called m-a-a-t, it’s called maat; that is the Egyptian word, usually
written in hieroglyphics, but that is the Egyptian word which means
wisdom. It means the cosmic order and it
means that the gods, even though there be many, those gods themselves must move
according to defined structure and rule of reality, that the gods themselves
work according to some sort of structure, the Egyptians believed and they
called this structure maat.
Professor
Frankfurt, one of the great Egyptologists at the University of Chicago [tape
turns] The Religion of the Ancient
Egyptians, Egyptian religion, maat
puts a premium on whatever exists with the semblance of permanence. Now think back, when I mention the word
Egypt, what springs into your head, usually?
The pyramids, the sphinx, those monuments of permanence. Do you know why they’re there? Because the Egyptians worshiped
permanence. Maat could be shown by anything that endured. They could point to anything that endured as
that which was ultimately maat, the
wise. And so therefore, the Egyptians
built their pyramids and the Egyptians built their pyramids and the Egyptians
built their sphinx, and if one of those Pharaohs was resurrected today and he
walked through the Nile he would say yes, we know those pyramids are still
here, they show maat, they show that
we were operating in conformity with maat.
So therefore the
issue in Egyptian wisdom can be defined this way. In Egypt to be wise you conformed to maat, you conformed to permanence. If you were wise then what you did
endured. Do you see now the connection
to the pyramids? If you were wise you
built something that endured. And so Frankfurt
continues: “It excludes the ideals of progress,” there was no progress in
Egypt, “It excludes the ideals of utopias of any kind, revolutions or any other
radical change in existing conditions.”
I might point out, Egypt existed for two thousand years without one
revolution. How do you explain
that? Because the people had perfect
security and their perfect dictators.
Dr. Frankfurt continues, “Maat enhances
the significance of established authority.
The Egyptians viewed as misdeeds, not as sins but as aberrant
aberrations, they would bring him unhappiness because they disturbed the
harmonious integration with the existing world.” So therefore in the Egyptian concept you have
maat, and whether you sin or not is
not the issue, the issue is whether you go along with maat or not. That’s the
ultimate issue for the Egyptian’s every day life.
Now, how could you
tell maat; remember, what did Plato say?
How could the physician tell in advance whether he’s doing something
good or something evil? How can he tell;
Plato’s riddle. Look at this quote: this
is an instruction; an instruction to the sons of one of the Pharaoh’s and
here's what it reads. And this quote
will show you that they could not get hold of maat, that in the final analogy Egyptians had to acquiesce to
Plato’s riddle; they couldn’t solve the riddle.
And here it is: “A god is always in his success whereas man is in his
failure; [can’t understand words] are the words which men say, another is that
which the god does.” You see that,
that’s not analogous to Isaiah, where “My ways are higher than your ways,”
because notice the contrast, the words which men say and the things the god
does. What does this mean? It means that men can never really understand
what the gods were doing. Man can never
really understand this, and this is an admission that they too, Egyptian wisdom
falls under Plato’s riddle.
Let’s go to
Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia the wisdom
was a little different. In Mesopotamia
we have such civilizations as the Assyrian, the Sumerian, and later on the
Babylonian. These are the civilizations
of the Mesopotamian valley and they had a concept of wisdom that wasn’t like maat, their concept of wisdom was a
joint counsel; they believed in a counsel of the gods and the gods would sit
down and they would agree on a course of action. And so therefore wisdom was conformity with a
joint counsel of the gods. And you
conformed your life with how the gods had arranged. For example, the gods might get together and
say the city of Ur will now be the prominent in the Mesopotamian plain. This is how they would explain Ur’s
prosperity. Then Ur would fall under the
feet of a great invader and what would they say; the gods have gotten together
and decreed that perhaps another city would be in ascendancy over the
Mesopotamian plain. So what had happened?
The council of the gods had shifted.
So you see the Mesopotamian concept of wisdom was more fluid than the
Egyptian. It was constantly shifting.
But this
introduces the same problem and so if you’ll notice this quotation from a hymn
that was sung to one of the lords of wisdom, Marduk, and here’s the hymn: “What is good to one’s self may be offense to
one’s god. What in one’s god own heart
seems despicable may be proper to one’s god.
Who can know the will of the gods in heaven? Who can understand the
plans of the underworld gods? Where have
humans learned the way of a god?” See,
Mesopotamian wisdom falls under the riddle of Plato. They cannot solve the problem, it goes back
to the same thing, how can the physician ahead of time know whether what he is
doing is really going to benefit somebody or not.
Now we come
finally to China and certainly one of the great sages of the East would be
Confucius, and yet it’s characteristic of Confucius’ [can’t understand word]
that though he would talk about culture and manners, when it came to the ways
of God is expressed in the ancient Chinese by the word “heaven,” it appears
they had monotheism to a very late date in China, you have this quote, by one
of his disciples: “A master’s views
concerning culture and the outward manifestations of goodness we are permitted
to hear but about man’s basic nature and the ways of heaven he will not tell us
anything at all.” And [can’t understand
words] admitted he didn’t know them. So
here you have the great samples, the wisdom of the world but none of them can
penetrate back to the absolute; none of them can get back behind the problem
that Plato proposed.
Now we turn to
Proverbs 30 and we’ll see precisely the same question raised in the book of
Proverbs. We don’t know who Agur was but
we do know that the 30th chapter of the book of Proverbs is a
philosophic answer to the problem of wisdom in the ancient world. And here and here alone we find an answer to
Plato’s riddle. Proverbs 30:2, “Surely I
am more brutish [stupid] than any man, and have not the understanding of a man.” The first four verses of Proverbs 30 are an
introduction to what follows. It’s a
statement of the problem; the rest of it is the solution to the problem. “Surely I am more brutish than any man, and
have not the understanding of a man. [3]
I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the Holy.” By the way, notice how wisdom is attached to
a knowledge of what they called the gods.
It’s sure whether Agur even was an Israelite. [3] “I neither learned wisdom, nor have the
knowledge of the Holy. [4] Who has
ascended up into heaven, or descended?
Who has gathered the wind in his fists?
Who has bound the waters in a garment?
Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and
what is his son’s name, if you can tell?”
This question has
to be answered or Plato’s riddles kills.
And in this course we’re going to answer it, but the point that I want
you to notice is verse 4. In verse 4 you
have phrased, as you will see over and over again in the book of Proverbs, this
problem, that you can’t solve any basis for wisdom, see wisdom is grounded on
absolute knowledge, that’s what Plato’s riddle shows. But, can you have wisdom if you don’t have
absolutes, and a way of getting to the absolutes? So therefore these questions that you read in
verse 4 are simple old-fashioned Hebrew ways of asking this question? “Who has ascended up into heaven?” Think of that which you just read, think of
that last phase on the Mesopotamian proverb that said: “Where have humans
learned the way of a god?” And think of
verse 4, the first phrase, “Who has ascended up into heaven, or
descended?” In other words, it’s asking
who has gone into heaven to find out what the gods are doing. That’s what this verse is saying: who has
gone up into heaven to find out what’s happening up there.
“Who has gathered
the wind in his fists” would refer to the fact that whoever would go up into
heaven vertically to find out what the gods are doing must also have knowledge
horizontally that encompasses all physical phenomenon; all physical phenomenon
must be tied together. “Who has bound
the waters in a garment? Who has
established all the ends of the earth?”
Let’s diagram what’s happening in these four verses by this triangle
again. Here’s God, here’s man, here’s
nature. Again, the relationship between
God and man is a two-relationship because each one is a person; God can know
man, man can know God. The problem is,
though, how does man know nature?
Now if you are not
a Christian here this morning, or if you are a Christian and you have not yet
gained a divine viewpoint understanding in these areas, to you this is your
problem; you are here, your world is outside of you, the world of nature, and
you have no way, I repeat, I don’t care who you are, if you are not a Christian
operating in the framework of God’s Word you have no way you can be sure that
you really know the world; that means how people think, that means you have no
way of plugging into this world, you cannot go from this point to this point;
you cannot go from X to Y.
The Bible is going
to solve that problem and to see the solution in a very dramatic way let’s look
at two passages. Read again verse 4 so
you’ll remember the vocabulary, so you’ll recognize the answer when you see it. “Who has ascended up into heaven, or
descended? Who has gathered the wind in
his fist? Who has bound the waters in a
garment?” That’s the question, how can I know the world around me? How can I understand my situation here this
is not just for philosophy class; verse 4 is talking about personal every day
life. How can I understand what’s going
on now, here in front of my eyes, in my personal life, in my business, in my
home, in my marriage; what is going on?
How can I understand this, that’s the question?
Turn to
Deuteronomy 30:11-14, this is the Bible’s answer. “For this commandment which I command thee
this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is I far off. [12] It is not in heaven, that you should
say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it down unto us, that we may
hear it, and do it? [13] Neither is it
beyond the sea, that you should say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and
bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? [14] But the word is very near unto you, in
your mouth, and in your heart, that you may do it.” What’s that referring to? The Word of God, the Bible, revelation. In other words, if the Bible is what it
claims to be, we have an answer to the dilemma of Plato’s riddle. We have an answer to that because now, though
the physician himself may not know all the results of his acts, he does know
the One who does know. And therefore,
there is wisdom, though it doesn’t depend totally on the physician. We now have wisdom somewhere; it may not be
in the physician’s mind but there is wisdom in somebody’s mind about what is
going on; there is total knowledge somewhere.
Now let’s look at
one other title of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament and then we’ll come
forward and see how Christ picked up the same theme that we’re talking about.
Turn to Isaiah 9:6, the titles of Messiah begin with one here, “…and the
government shall be upon his shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful,
Counselor, the Mighty God, The Everlasting God, the Prince of Peace.” Do you see that phrase, “Wonderful,
counselor?” Wonderful, Counselor means
that Jesus Christ is wisdom. That means
that He is the wonderful Counselor, and the word “wonderful” means miraculous,
and a counselor that is miraculous is able to have supernatural penetration
into the present event; He has perfect knowledge of the present event. Why is Christ going to be called Wonderful
Counselor? Because Jesus Christ is
wisdom and Jesus Christ has the ability to penetrate inside the event that is
going on at the present moment. He is omniscient as God.
Turn to John 3:11,
the Nicodemus discourse and you’ll see Jesus the same vocabulary because it’s
the same theme. “Truly, truly, I say
unto thee, We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have
seen; and you receive not our witness.
[12] If I have told you earthly things, and you believe not, how shall
you believe, if I tell you heavenly things?”
There are the two parts of knowledge.
The things that you can observe, the everyday things, and then the
heavenly things, the things that are coming.
Notice verse 13, “And no man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came
down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” This is the nature of Christ. Notice the last phrase of verse 13; where is
Christ? He is “in heaven,” He said, but
where is He? He’s in front of Nicodemus
talking to him.
Therefore, Jesus
Christ as God-man is wisdom. This means,
therefore, that in all of the details of life you as a believer, when you
become a Christian, you are put into union with Christ. You have a right as a believer that you may
not be aware of. You may not be aware of
the fact that you have the right to call on Christ’s wisdom. There’s a promise given to you and I hope
you’ll be more conscious of this promise in your daily life from now on as we
work into the details of Proverbs, James 1:5, “If any of you lack wisdom, let
him ask of God, and it shall be given unto you.” You have a right as a believer, if you are a
believer this morning, to call upon wisdom from the One who is wisdom, the
perfect Counselor. And you know how He’s going to mediate His wisdom to
you? The New Testament already tells
us. Remember one of the titles of the
Holy Spirit; He is called another Counselor, a Counselor of the same kind, the
Spirit of Wisdom. And this means that
Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit will open your eyes to the Word and you
will be able to apply it to the situation.
I know some of you
are frustrated, tremendously frustrated believers. I know there’s a lot of frustrated believers
and you have the idea that living the Christian life is memorizing a few verses
and trying to madly and desperately connect them. That is not true; living the Christian life
is a personal relationship with Christ and this means daily you can acquire
wisdom. You can acquire wisdom in every
detail of life, from how you run your business to how you run your home, to how
you run your dorm life, to how you run to anything else that’s bothering you.
All of these things are areas of wisdom and you have the right as a believer to
cash in. Let’s hope that those of you
who are believers will begin cashing in as we go through Proverbs and those of
you who are not believers yet will meet the One who is wisdom.
With our heads
bowed….