Clough Proverbs Lesson 17
Introduction (continued) – Proverbs 1:1-7
We want to
remember that Proverbs is part of the wisdom section of the Old Testament. The Old Testament in the original language
had three parts, the Torah or the Law, the first five books; the second part
was the Prophets, the Nabiim, that was the second part, and the third part was
the wisdom, the Kethubim, or the Writings.
And the Writings have as their common theme either promulgating wisdom
or they themselves are examples of wisdom.
And so Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible is the part, the last part it is a
wisdom book. And we found in our
introduction that wisdom always presupposes that there can be knowledge. This means that if you aren’t sure that God
can be known then you cannot have wisdom.
Plato propounded
the dilemma and he used the illustration of a physician and he said that if
wisdom is the doing of good works then how do you explain the fact that a
physician can never be sure when he’s treating a patient that he is doing that
patient really good, and he is not contributing to worsening the patient’s
condition. Now he hopes he is doing the
patient good; he wants to do the patient good but he can never be sure that he
has done the patient good. So therefore,
as Plato remarked, on this basis there can be no such thing as wisdom. That is
Plato’s dilemma and as we have seen in the past, not one of the schools of
ancient wisdom in the
We said God’s Word
provides the basis in revelation. This
is why, for example, Paul says in Ephesians 1:17, he prays that every believer
might have “the spirit of wisdom and revelation.” It’s no accident that Paul used those two
exact words, because he realized that until we know the absolutes by revelation
we can never have wisdom. So therefore
we can discount every contribution to wisdom, in its basis, except that of
Now we come to Proverbs
itself and we want to outline the book to give you an overview of how this book
proceeds. There’s an introduction for
the first 7 verses. The first 7 verses
of this book describe the purpose of the book and describe how you can use this
book in your life. Then there is a large
section made up of two parts. The first
section of the book starts in Proverbs 1:8 and continues through
The second section
of the book begins in Genesis
So we have the
three sections of Proverbs. Today we
begin the first section, the introduction and we’ve already stated the
introduction gives us two purposes for the book of Proverbs. And in good Hebrew style it gives you the
general purpose first and the secondary purpose second. Hebrew is always this way; you always go from
the general to the specific. This is
what still, even some professors have not learned with they come out with an
asinine remark that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two contradictory creation accounts. Any time you hear someone say that you are
listening to someone who has never studied ancient literature because you
cannot have two contradictory accounts. That’s not the style; this is a
misunderstanding of ancient oriental literature. Ancient oriental literature always has the
general account first and then a specific account so there’s no conflict
between Genesis 1 and 2.
In the
introduction you see the same theme, and the theme is first, the ultimate basic
purpose of Proverbs, and second, the secondary purpose. Let’s look at Proverbs 1:1, “The proverbs of
Solomon, the son of David, king of
Proverbs 1:1, the
word “proverb.” The word “proverb” in
the Hebrew is mashal and this word
has reference to the form for the whole entire rest of the book, the mashal or the mashala, and basically this word means model. In other words, this book is going to teach
us by giving us models. In other words,
this book is going to teach us by giving us models, concrete examples of things
and it’s up to us to extend these and apply them. There are three points to understand about a mashal, or a proverb. The first one is that it is always taken from
real history, so you’ll have a concrete example. There’ll never be an abstract; there will
always be a concrete example of the truth that’s involved. This means that when you see something in the
book of Proverbs it’s not something that doesn’t have application to your
personal life. This cuts that little
excuse out. Well that doesn’t apply to
me. Well, you can’t make that when you
deal with a mashala because the mashala comes from real life and it does
apply to you.
The second point
to understand about a mashal is that it is to be open, that is, it is open to
your insights. That is, that you can
extend it, it is one example and you are to provide the brain power to find
other analogies. In other words, the mashala will give you one illustration
in life and if you are to understand truly what is being said in this book, you
are going to think where else are there other illustrations in life that
parallel this. In other words, it is
open to extension, both ways, and this is how you are to understand a proverb. You do not think just as a concrete example
that you see in the text. You ask
yourself, how many forty or fifty other illustrations of this same principle
can I find. That is how you understand
the proverb. The basis for this kind of
teaching is the Bible’s philosophy of knowledge. And it could be pictured like this: God, man
and nature. The Bible says that because
God makes nature and when God made nature, according to Genesis 1 he thought
before He made it. God thought in His
head, I will make this kind of creation and then God did it. But Genesis 1 says that God was able to speak
in language about what He made.
Therefore, all of
creation, every part of it, from the subatomic particles on up to the galaxies,
has a structure that is able to be described in language because God thought in
language before God made it. Therefore, the entire universe can be described in
language. Now this may seem like a small
point to you but if you’ve ever studied science you should immediately
understand something here. If this is
not truth, science is dead. And this is why
we need people in the scientific world today. We were talking about
mathematical models of this and mathematical models of that and really they’re
just playing with a lot of mathematics, and they have absolutely no assurance
that they’re really learning anything. And that’s because they’ve lost the
Christian base to science. The Christian
base to science is that God thought linguistically, and that means
mathematically too, of the nature and since He thought that we can think a
little bit after His thoughts, and therefore the whole scientific enterprise is
grounded on the simple fact that God thought and then created, and then we
understand creation, we’re trying to recapture some of the thoughts that went
through God’s mind when He made. That
basically is science, from the Christian point of view.
Now, God also made
man and He thought about man but when He made man He made man different from
nature in that man has language too. And
since man had language, and since God thought in language about nature, man can
now know nature and can learn through mathematics and other forms of rational
thinking. So therefore this being so,
now we understand a proverb because what a proverb is, it says look, in nature
see this little illustration, it might be the illustration as we’re going to
see, a weed growing in a garden; that’s something that’s in nature. But proverbs, the second point under understanding
a proverb says that you can take that illustration of weeds growing in a garden
and you can find other analogies in nature to this problem.
And you will find,
for example in Proverbs, it takes this one thing out of nature and says look,
you see those weeds that grow on the lawn, you see those weeds that grow in the
garden, they illustrate something, that it constantly requires effort to keep
them from corruption in a fallen world, and therefore you can see the truth
concretely in the weeds and you can apply it in the Christian life, and you can
see time after time after time that the weeds automatically grow. Weeds never have trouble growing; ever notice
that? You don’t have to fertilize them,
they grow by themselves. And so
similarly the way the creation is structured, since the same Creator made all
the parts, you can see analogies to the same principle all over the board. You can see in your own Christian life there
are weeds, sin, that don’t require any nourishment, they just grow by
themselves. And they have to constantly require
effort at dealing with them or they come up and they take over your whole
life.
Now why do we have
a right to make an analogy between the weeds in the garden and sinful habits in
the life? It’s simple, because there’s a
similarity of design in all parts of the creation. This is why the evolutionist
is wrong when he argues that because there are certain similarities between the
monkey and the man, therefore man must have had to have come from the
monkey. Now look, Ford cars have four
wheels and Chevrolet cars have four wheels; do Chevrolet’s come from
Fords? It just means that the engineers
have a good design and they repeated it.
And so similarly, God had a good design, eyes, four legs and so on, and
He repeats it. So just because God
repeats His design in this point and this point and this point of the creation,
does that give you the right to say therefore this came from this? It’s a fallacious argument.
This is the basis
for the second point of understanding a mashala. We can understand by way of analogy; the
Hebrew understanding is truth is always analogous. I know what love means in my life therefore I
know what love means in God’s life. I
know what weeds are in the garden; therefore I can see the same principle
operate in my life. There is analogy. So
the whole second point under mashala,
the first point being it is the concrete single illustration, the second point
it is to be open and you are to extend it by analogy. So whenever you meet a proverb think;
analogy, where do I find analogies. You
have the right to do this because God made all parts of the creation and He
repeated features of His design.
The third thing
about proverbs is that it is an excellent teaching tool because you can’t find
the answer until you think. Proverbs
leaves you incomplete. You’ll never
learn anything from this book unless you exercise your brain and expand
out. So the very way Proverbs is written
forces you to think, and therefore this was the way the fathers taught their
sons in the family. The father would sit
down and he’s give his son a proverb, and he’d say all right, son, I want you
to think about in the next seven days. And so for seven days the son would have
to think of analogies of this proverb until he understood what his father had
told him. So the third thing about it is,
it is an excellent teaching device because it forces you to think.
Those are three
things about the mashala, “The
proverbs of Solomon, the son of David.”
Now we come to the word “Solomon.”
Solomon was the king of Israel at its golden era. When Solomon became
king it was called the golden era because the golden era was the time when
Israel began to develop culturally. It
was also the time when it began to develop tremendous apostasy. If you turn to 1 Kings 4 you you’ll see the
tremendous genius of Solomon. Now
Solomon was not a born genius. Solomon,
in fact, when he obtained the throne was just an average man and he realized as
an average man he couldn’t run the nation. A man who is the leader of a nation
has to have a fantastic amount of wisdom because he is daily required to make
decisions. Now Solomon understood
something that a lot of modern politicians never seem to get straight, and if
he is going to do a good job in a public office, he must first ask God for
wisdom, a special amount of wisdom. And
God was so pleased that Solomon came to Him and asked Him for wisdom that God
gave him not only wisdom but He gave him everything else a king could desire.
And in 1 Kings
4:29 these are some of his accomplishments.” And God gave Solomon wisdom and
exceeding much understanding, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is
on the seashore,” that’s the Hebrew expression for infinity, though obviously
he’s not saying that Solomon is infinitely wise, it’s just the idea he’s a
tremendously wise man. Verse 30, “And
Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country,”
the Mesopotamian valley was noted for the great…the wise men, for example, came
to Bethlehem and so on; you remember that, there were wise men of the east,
Solomon is wiser than they were, “and all the wisdom of Egypt. [31] For he was wiser than all men….” Verse
32, “And he spoke three thousand proverbs,” now I dare say if Solomon spoke
3,000 proverbs he wouldn’t have much trouble collecting the proverbs for the book
of Proverbs but liberals seem to think that Proverbs could only have come very,
very late, when finally the Greeks had made great philosophic breakthroughs and
so on. That’s nonsense because wisdom
literature existed for centuries and even thousands of years before the
Greeks. “He spoke three thousand
proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.” What does that show
you? The man was a creative genius. Now in verse 33 there’s a little expression
there that you can read over and never even notice what’s said but what is said
in verse 33 is actually more important than verse 32.
Verse 33, “And he
spoke of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop
that springs out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of fowl, and of
creeping things, and of fish.” Now that
means that he spoke of them like Adam spoke of them. When Adam named the
animals in the Garden of Eden he didn’t tack a label onto each one; he sat
there in the trail and a deer would come by and oh yeah, I’ve got a label on
it, stick a label on it and so on. That
wasn’t Adam’s job. Adam’s job was to
find a help suited for him which meant that he had to understand the nature of
the animals. So when the Bible says that
Adam named the animals it’s really saying, in our vernacular, Adam made the first
biological investigation of reality. Now
here in verse 33 it’s saying the same thing that Solomon engaged in the studies
of botany and zoology, that he engaged in these areas of study. So wisdom also shows here it’s the forerunner
of science. Wisdom in the Bible is the
closest thing we have to modern science.
He engaged in botany and zoology.
In verse 34, “And
there came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all kings of
the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.”
So Solomon was a very commanding figure; if you want modern day
analogies probably the best analogy to Solomon we have in our own civilization
would be Leonardo DaVinci, a genius in mathematics, a genius in art, and a
genius in philosophy, but he was not a man who was the head of anything, he
never was the king of any country, though he did engage in some politics in
Italy. But Leonardo DaVinci comes the
closest in our times to a man who would be like Solomon.
Turn back to
Proverbs 1, he is “the son of David,” “The proverbs of Solomon, the son of
David,” the “son of David” means that he is in covenant relationship with God;
this is the covenant title; “son of David means that he is the beneficiary of
the Davidic Covenant of 2 Samuel 7 which guarantees that he is in the center of
God’s elect will.
Proverbs 1:2, here
we have in verse 3 the two purposes of the book. “To know wisdom and instruction;” is one
purpose; “to perceive the words of understanding,” the secondary purpose. Let’s look at the primary purpose, “To know
wisdom and instruction.” The word to
know is yadah; yadah in the Hebrew is
a word that means experiential knowledge, not just intellectual knowledge. It means to know on an experiential basis; to
experientially know “wisdom and instruction.”
Now the word wisdom is chakmah, and this is how the Hebrew word for
wisdom is pronounced. Wisdom means, as a
definition, the skillful use of truth for God’s glory. That’s how wisdom is used here: the skillful
use of truth for God’s glory. You can
see obvious application, any skill, whether it’s carpentry, whether it’s metal
working, whether it’s the engineer, whether it’s the scientist, whether it’s
the artist, would fall under wisdom, the skillful use of truth for God’s
glory. The other word, instruction, musar, is a word that means severe
training and it comes second because musar
is the means to chakmah; chakmah is
the goal, musar is the means to the
goal. Chakmah is the end; musar
is the means to the end. So wisdom is
the end product and musar is the way
of getting there.
Now let me give
you an example of musar so that you
will understand what it means in the Bible when it talks about
instruction. Turn to Proverbs 23:13,
“Withhold not correction from the child; for if thou beat him with the rod, he
shall not die.” Now this is dedicated to
all you people who have heard these modern child-rearing series. I don’t know what they teach at Tech but
somebody came to me with a book the other day saying that what you do if your
little brat comes up to you and spits in your face you say, why I see Johnnie
that you must have a problem, let’s sit down and talk about it, or something
like this. Now you may talk about it but in the final analysis at my house
there’d be an application of the hand you know where, after we got through
talking about it. But this is dedicated
to those people who do not believe in corporeal punishment and throughout the
book of Proverbs you will see this. Now
this is not an excuse for brutality… this is NOT brutality! This is calculated punishment, and this is musar, this is what is meant in the
Hebrew by musar, this kind of
training, tough training. And it means
using corporeal punishment if that is necessary. God used this, the forty year wilderness
wanderings of Israel; Deuteronomy 8:5. God gave them very strong corporeal punishment
throughout the forty years.
So musar means training of the severe kind
and obviously goes back to what we had prepared for in this Proverbs series,
and that is how does man differ from other creatures? He faces a situation in life and he must
respond to that situation, but man, unlike the animal, does not have IDP,
instinctive behavior patterns. He has
instead LBP, learned behavior patterns.
So whereas animals have an instinct that tells them what to do in the
various situations, man does not. Man
doesn’t have an instinct to drink water right.
Animals will never over drink; men will.
Men are the only animal, if you will, that will not drink when they’re
dehydrated; all the other animals will drink, not men. So man has a very, very poor set of
instinctive behavior patterns and as we said earlier, God designed you this way
so that everything from drinking a glass of water on up would have to be
learned and every time you learned you encounter God’s truth, so here’s
wisdom.
Man must know
wisdom to live and we are built that way and I don’t care who you are,
Christian or non-Christian, if you are a human being, alive and breathing this
morning, you have had to learn lessons in order to live. Some of you have learned lessons well; others
of you have not and the book of Proverbs is written to straighten you out
because those of you who have not learned your lessons well will be sad-sacks
for the rest of your life. You will
always be griping about what somebody else does, you will not be able to cope
with life’s situations and probably will wind up seeing a psychiatrist for the
rest of your life because you can’t stand adversity. Now all of that comes because you have failed
to learn lessons; either because your parents have failed to teach you or
because you have failed to submit to their authority but somewhere along the
line you’ve lost out and the book of Proverbs is geared for just your
case.
In the book of
Proverbs we have this musar so verse
2, the first part, “to experientially encounter wisdom and get it by tough
training.” Now the second part of verse
2 is the means, here’s the secondary purpose of the book of Proverbs. “To perceive the words of understanding;”
“words of understanding” is a synonym for proverb, in other words the second
part of verse 2 means you are to understand the Word of God. So the first part of verse 2, 2a, deals with
the ultimate goal, wisdom, by means of severe training; 2b, the second part of
verse 2 deals with how do you get it, you first have to get it by going to the
Word of God. Why the Word of God? Why can’t you get it from the Boy Scout
Handbook or something? Well, you can get some wisdom from the Boy Scout
Handbook but the Boy Scout was not written by God and since it wasn’t,
therefore it cannot give you wisdom that applies to the deepest depths of your
heart. You are made in the image of God,
therefore you have to get instructions on how to operate from the guy who made
you, and therefore you come to the Word of God. And so the second purpose is to
get so you understand the Word.
The word
“perceive” is a Hebrew verb and it comes from a preposition, biyn, it means between, and this word
“perceive” is a verb in the Hebrew that means to see the difference between
truthfulness and falsehood, between wisdom and folly, between right and
wrong. “Perceive” them means to see the
difference, fundamental law of logic, A and not A; that is implied in the
Hebrew verb to understand or perceive.
Now Proverbs 1:3-4
amplify the first part of verse 2; verse 6 amplifies the second part of verse
2. So get your two parts in mind; the
first part of verse 2, primary purpose of the book, learn wisdom. Verses 3-4 are going to amplify that. So we’ll put 2a + 3, + 4; those are the
verses that deal with the primary purpose of the book. Secondary purpose of the book: 2b + 6. Verse 5 is an exhortation and verse 7 is the
basis of all wisdom.
So Proverbs 1:3-4,
“To receive the instruction of wisdom,” this means to take the musar, the training, and this means you
learn it and it doesn’t come easily. All
of a sudden in the Christian life you’ll trust the Lord and things are doing
real well, and then suddenly you come across something in your life and it’s
very, very difficult for you to learn, and you sometimes hit the panic button
and wonder why am I having such difficulty in the Christian life learning this
particular point. Well, because number one, you don’t like to submit to
authority and number two, our sin nature has other ways of opposing the
truth. It’s just that we learn hard
because we’re in rebellion against the Creator; what you’re doing and what
you’re saying is that I’m a sinful person and it’s hard to straighten out the
flesh, and this is exactly right. This
is why there is resistance to learning doctrine and resistance to applying it
in the life; always will be. And the
very word “to receive instruction” means that it comes difficult, it comes in a
difficult way.
“To receive the
instruction of…,” now four words are listed: “wisdom, justice, judgment and
equity.” The order of these words is
very, very important because if you don’t understand this you miss the whole
point of the Bible’s concept of wisdom versus the world’s concept of
wisdom. There are two kinds of wisdom,
human viewpoint wisdom, divine viewpoint wisdom. Divine viewpoint wisdom means skillful use of
the truth to God’s glory. Human
viewpoint wisdom means skillful use of the truth for my glory. And those are the two ways you can use… both
are wise, but both are two kinds of wisdom.
You can master a principle and learn it to be very effective in a
selfish way. The more wise you are the
more effective you can be in your selfishness; or the more wise you are the
more effective you can be for the Lord.
But remember, when you’re talking about learning wisdom you’re putting
tools in your hands that can be used against the Lord as well as for the
Lord.
For example, if
after studying the book of Proverbs you know more about how people think and
how people to react to a situation, for example, say something in your home
with your husband, with your wife, with your children, with your parents, and
you can see and get insight as to how they think from the book of Proverbs, you
can turn that around and use it for your own selfishness; now you are greater
able to manipulate people than you ever were before because now you know how
they think and it makes you more effective in manipulating them for your own
end. So wisdom by itself is not a
blessing; it is wisdom that is of a divine viewpoint source that is the
blessing.
Wisdom is
dangerous in one sense; it will enable you to do far more damage than you’ve
ever done before, you will be more skillful in the use of evil that you were
before. So wisdom can go both ways and the key example of that was
Solomon. Solomon was the wisest man who
ever lived, yet when Solomon went down the drain it completely blew the whole
nation apart; the nation was never the same after Solomon. Solomon destroyed
the nation; Solomon was a man who could have built a nation tremendously with
his great wisdom, but because he was a great wise man he also, when the flesh
got hold and when he was out of fellowship he could be a disaster, and he was a
disaster. So here we have the two ways.
Now “wisdom,” the
word here is not chakmah, it means to
receive the instruction, and then there are a series of nouns: effectiveness
and this has to do with a thing that could be applied to both human viewpoint
wisdom and divine viewpoint wisdom. “To
receive the instruction of effectiveness,” this means you will be effective in
personal relationships, effective in personal day to day living. Now after that, it is amplified by three
words to show you which side of the fence we’re talking about; we’re not
talking about human viewpoint wisdom, we’re talking about divine viewpoint
wisdom and so therefore three words are given: “justice, judgment and
equity.” The first word, “justice” or
“righteousness” in God’s standard; “judgment” means the ability to decide by
the righteous standard; and “equity” means to be honest,” it means not hiding
things underneath kind of thing. So
those are three nouns in verse 3 that amplify the kind of wisdom.
If you look on the
back of the bulletin you’ll see an example of wisdom that is effective and that
is human viewpoint wisdom. This was
written, and I took this from an Egyptian wisdom text, The Instruction of King Marikari [sp?], it is the instruction that
a Pharaoh gave his son. This is still
wisdom because it teaches him how to be effective. Now it is cruel and it is immoral but it is
still wisdom and here’s what the old man told King Marikari. “If you find a man whose adherents are many
in total and he is gracious in the eyes of his partisans, remove him, kill him,
wipe out his name, his faction, banish the memory of him and of his adherents
that love him.” Now that’s the way to
being an effective Pharaoh, kill the opposition, destroy it, and you will be
very effective. Now can anyone deny this
would be effective; of course it would be, so this is wisdom but it is not the
kind of wisdom described in verse 3 that is just, that has judgment and that is
equity. I show you that by way of
contrast; in the Bible you have wisdom of the first three types, not
pragmatism. That is the difference
between Jewish wisdom in literature and all other wisdom literature. All other wisdom literature that has ever
been written is of the kind that is on the back of your bulletin this
morning. It is pragmatism and we are not
talking about pragmatism, we are talking about godly wisdom.
Now why make this
point? Because the tendency in some of
you still is, even after the hours and hours and hours and hours of Bible
teaching some of you have had, I still hear from the lips of somebody every
once in a while, well, that’s what the Bible says but to be practical… such and
such. Now you don’t realize what a
heresy you’ve just said. You are saying
that the God of the universe who created the universe can’t and won’t tell you
how to run the machine. He can’t and
won’t tell you how to be practical. But
doesn’t it stand to follow that if our God, who spoke these words, is the same
God who created us, is the same God who created the material physical universe
around us, won’t His words be practical?
Of course they will. If you think
there’s a tension between the teachings of the Bible band being practical, you
are either screwed up on your concept of what the Bible teaches or you’re
engaged in a very, very deep heresy.
Let me show you an
illustration of this problem. Turn to
Proverbs 10:22; notice how the author of Proverbs sees it practical; why does
he see it practical? Because he sees
that since the God that is the Creator made the universe works this way, so
verse 22, “The blessing of the LORD, it makes rich, and He adds no sorrow with
it.” In other words, God actively
intervenes and if things are done His way there will always be blessing and no
sorrow with it; this is the ungodly type of sorrow of course but the point is
it will be practical; it will fit what is there. To add another illustration, remember in the
psychology of the soul business, one of the things I mentioned was the Bible’s
moral statement; the Bible condemns immorality in certain areas, it condemns
homosexuality, it condemns promiscuity, and remember I said that if the same
God spoke the morals, made the earth, then shouldn’t what He says over here in
the area of morals fit in the way we’re made.
And sure enough, I quoted you some medical papers that showed the
results of homosexuality and that it destroys the hormone makeup in the
person. And the degree of influence on
the male and female hormones is in direct proportion to the amount of homosexual
activity. So what is this saying but exactly
what Romans 1 is saying; in the area of promiscuity, in the area of marriage we
find exactly the same thing. If we have
great promiscuity we find, for example, the immunity to virus and other things
within the two partners begins to decrease and decrease and decrease.
So here we have
the link between the moral commands of God and the way our bodies are
made. Now should that surprise you? Of course not, if the same God made us, spoke
the moral commands, shouldn’t they fit together; why should we be surprised if
they fit together. And so Proverbs is
practical; it’s nonsense to say the Bible is not practical. If the Bible isn’t practical, trash it, just
trash it and be honest about it but don’t go around saying well, that’s a sweet
thought but to be practical…. We’re not
talking about any difference, the Bible is practical.
Proverbs 1:4, “To
give subtilty [prudence] to the simple, to the young man knowledge and
discretion.” “To give subtilty to the
simple,” put in another way, means to give shrewdness or the ability to respond
to life’s situations to the simple one and that is the word for young
people. You’ve heard of the word
“simpleton,” well, it’s not so that young people are simpletons. But what it is saying is, however, the
untutored young person has no standards in and of himself and he must be
authoritatively taught those standards, whether he happens to like it or
not. And so here we have the problem of
the untutored, that means the untaught; “the simple one” is the one who has an open
mind, literally, open to both good and evil.
And he has no standards to discriminate and those standards have to be
put in.
So verse 4 says
here’s one of the goals, here’s what wisdom is, particularly for the young
person. He must have within himself an
ability to respond to life’s situations.
For example, situation one, situation two, situation three; if a young
person has not been trained to handle himself ahead of time he encounters
situation one and he doesn’t know how to react to it and all he can do is call
upon what wisdom he has, he has got very little wisdom, and he can’t respond to
the situation correctly and so what happens?
He responds wrongly to the situation.
It could be to somebody that somebody comes up and offers him drugs;
somebody in the area of sex, it could be in the area of business, it could be
in the area of cheating in school, whatever it is, he may be faced with some
situation, it may be group pressure like we’re going to see next week, it may
be the kind of tremendous gang pressure that can be exerted on a young
person. All of these things are
described in Proverbs and so what happens?
He has no wisdom, he doesn’t know how to handle himself, so he meets the
situation, he can’t handle it, he tries to invent his own thing and what has he
got started now? -R learned behavior
patterns. And he comes to a second
situation, he still doesn’t know how to handle it, still haven’t been given any
standards, still doesn’t know what the score is and so what does he do? He repeats that which works. So now we have the habit being built up. And he meets a third decision, he doesn’t
know how to handle it either but he knows at least he was able to jam his way
out of the other two doing this so he does it again. And so what has he got started in him? He has got started a –R learned behavior
pattern and later on these produce all sorts of psychological reactions and so
on, and cause breakdown in the mind, breakdown in the body.
Now that’s what
Proverbs is talking about, the untutored or the simpleton; it’s not a term of
derision, it is a term of description about how young people think, and that
is, in verse 4, they have to be given discretion. And yet what do we find? We have young people determining what they’re
going to learn and what they’re not going to learn. The reason why that’s happened is because the
older people have so little wisdom; or the older people who do have the wisdom
are chickens and afraid to exercise their authority. That usually is the problem; I’ve had a lot
of young people come to me and ask me why is it that my parents won’t exercise
authority. Why is it that some of the men in this church won’t exercise their
authority? I have had that asked me on
the part of the young people. They want
authority, just authority but exercised.
And so here it is, “to give subtilty or discretion,” the ability to meet
the situations in life, “to the simple one, to the young man knowledge and
resourcefulness” literally.
Resourcefulness means the ability to cope. [Tape turns]
When we come to
the Word of God the Word of God just doesn’t sit there and say now believers,
you just sit and look at me and come to your own conclusion. That’s not the way the Word of God is. You come to the Word of God and it says you
do it, period! Now that’s directed
counseling; it tells you what to do. So
we have directive authoritative counseling.
So this is it, verse 5 it says if you’re wise you’re going to learn some
more; if you’re stupid and foolish, forget it.
Now Proverbs 1:6
is an amplification of the second part of verse 2 and that is, remember the
means to get the chakmah is to come
to the Word of God. So verse 6 means
that by reading the book of Proverbs we will have our mind exercise so that
after we are done we should have a greater skill at understanding the
Word. “To understand the proverb and the
interpretation, the words of the wise and their dark saying.” The word “To
understand the proverb” is again our Hebrew habin,
habin comes from the preposition bin and bin means between, so every time
you see that particular verb in the Hebrew, habin,
long “i,” habin, every time you see
that, that verb means to see the difference between what is true and what is
false, what is right and what is wrong.
The Bible always comes down hard on the side of rationality. One of the Tech faculty members said to
someone in our congregation, yeah, those kids from Lubbock Bible Church, yes,
they are thinkers, I only have one problem that I disagree with them on, they
seem to think that religion can be rationally discussed. And of course, the dear professor got the
point, that’s exactly what we’re saying, and the opposite of that is nonsense;
if religion cannot be rationally discussed it cannot be discussed. How can you discuss something irrationally
would you please tell me? You don’t
discuss irrationally, you discuss only rationally, so what we’re saying is that
religion can be discussed. Of course it
can be, that’s what’s being done here.
If religion couldn’t be discussed why would Jesus Christ have ever come
and taught, why do we have teachings if religion can’t be rationally
discussed.
So verse 6 is to
describe how to interact with the teachings, “to understand,” or habin, “a proverb.” Now habin
a proverb means that you go back to the mashala
and you have a concrete example in life.
When you understand the proverb it means that you are able to expand
that proverb by analogy into other areas of life. The first thing it means, you understand the
concrete illustration. For example, when
you come to the illustration of weeds in the garden you understand it’s not
talking about how to handle your flowers better. It’s true, it’s describing that but this is
not a horticulture course; this is talking about an illustration in creation
that will be helpful for you in the rest of your life. So the first thing it means is you understand
the original mashala, the model, and
the second thing it means that you will develop skill by way of analogy to
extend it lawfully, not illogically. “To
understand” habin “a proverb and the
interpretation,” the allusion, that refers to all the analogies. Here you’ve got the model, here are the
analogies. In the weed illustration you
have the weed growing in the garden and you have the analogies in your own Christian
life, so that means the illusion or the interpretation.
“…the words of the
wise and their dark sayings,” the wise and the dark sayings means riddles, it’s
the word riddle. Why do they phrase
proverbs in riddles? Because proverbs…
remember the third point under mashala,
the first one is that it is a concrete example, the second one you learn by
analogy, the third one is it is a teaching tool. And so it is deliberately given in
problematic forms to force you to think.
So, the “dark sayings” doesn’t mean that the wise men are trying to keep
you from truth; it means they deliberately phrase it in such a way that you
have to think your way through it and thinking your way through it makes you
exercise your mind.
Finally, Proverbs
1:7, this is the basis of authority in teaching. Remember verse 5 was an exhortation; verse 7
is the basis for authority. “The fear of
the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” “The fear of the LORD” is an
expression for his authority. You cannot
learn except by submitting to an authority.
Did you ever stop and think of that? When a scientist goes out to check
his experiential data he must submit to the authority of the data. When we
learn in school, you may disagree with the professor or the teacher but while
you’re in the course you have to submit to their authority. While you are in the home you will submit to
the authority of your parents. Now
that’s just the way it is and you can’t learn unless you do submit to
authority. And so here in verse 7 is the
ultimate authority and it’s given because in verse 8, which we’ll begin next
time, deals with the family situation and the parents teaching the children,
but the parents can’t have authority over their children unless verse 7 is
correct. If the parent’s just say well,
I’m the parent, I have authority, now that by itself doesn’t stand and it’s not
going to hold water. True, you may be
physically bigger and you can beat up your kids and that doesn’t solve
anything. But if parents are to exercise
their authority the authority has to be built on something that is the authority, and the authority is the Lord and His Word.
So verse 7 is
placed in here to provide the basis for authority in teaching and it is going
to be used next week when we get to verse 8 for the parents. So let’s look at verse 7. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of
wisdom.” Now this means that it is not
only the starting point of wisdom, because obviously wisdom doesn’t begin until
you have revelation and you don’t accept revelation until you accept the
authority of the One who reveals Himself.
And it also means by the word “beginning,” not just chronological
beginning but it means the basic principle, always for the rest of your life on
earth, your wisdom will always come out of your respect for the authority of
the Lord.
Now this is what
is wrong in our country. We have had
false authorities, people have recognized the falseness of their authority and
now we have no authority. Why don’t we
have any authority? We have no base for
authority. Here in the Word of God we
have a base for authority and it shows up. When Proverbs is talking about
giving “subtilty to the simple and to the young man knowledge and discretion,”
it’s talking about the fact that a man has to have knowledge. Who’s writing
this? Solomon is writing this. Solomon knew experientially he had to have
wisdom to rule. And he had to get this
by a higher authority but when he once got it and he begins to teach in verse
8, his son, he expects his son to submit to his authority.
And yet you look
at the wonderful class of people we have running for high offices in the United
States today; very, very few of them have any concept of authority and
wisdom. We have somebody that, when they
make a decision they have to run off and see the nearest psychiatrist. We have
other people that are already under treatment.
What kind of goings on is this; these are supposed to be men that
lead. Not every time they make a
decision to fall back on the funny farm and it shows a tremendous weakness… a
tremendous weakness in key leaders.
We’re not talking just about their political philosophy, we’re not
discussing the content of their decisions, we’re just talking about the
inability to make a decision period. Why
is it that when a President makes a decision to invade Cambodia he has to go
for psychiatric treatment? Why is it
when a man runs for office he has to have somebody on the ticket that has been
to the funny farm for shock treatments?
Why is this? Because we have a
group of losers is high places, and that goes for the entire generation.
We have people who
have consistently neglected the Word of God for fifty years and it’s showing up
all over the board. Vietnam is a key
point where nobody was able to make any kind of a decision and then the poor
soldier that’s flying his phantom aircraft over Hanoi, he’s the one that’s left
with a decision and whatever he does he’s criticized. The platoon leader out in the field, he walks
into a village and he’s getting shot at by South Vietnamese and Viet Cong women
and he has to train his guns on the village and what happens? He gets chewed out, because he’s never been
given an authoritative policy from anywhere.
So what happens; we’ve sold out a lot of young people.
Vietnam is a
beautiful illustration of the fact that the older generation has never been
able to make an authoritative decision at all with the result that young people
by the thousands and thousands and thousands have died needlessly, because no
one made any kind of a decision; everybody is afraid of making a decision. And we see the results. And if you thought Vietnam was bad, you wait
until what’s coming, when we have the caliber, the lousy caliber of leader that
we have available to select from, men who cannot make a decision without going
on the lunatic fringe, who cannot be stable enough to be sure that they are
choosing what is right from what is wrong, the habin, the ability to decide, that’s what gives peace. The very fact that when make decisions they
have to go for psychiatric care indicates that the decision was never made with
conscience. It indicates a principle
that these decisions are made on a pragmatic basis and they are not made on the
basis of conscience.
Contrast this with
men like Cromwell in England, where he would get down and pray for weeks before
he made a decision and when he made a decision hell could come up in front of
him, it wouldn’t bother him. When Oliver
Cromwell made a decision to do something he did it and he didn’t care if a
thousand people rioted against him, he’d just kill them. Cromwell took over the throne of England that
way. Why? We’re not arguing that every decision Cromwell made was right but
I’ll tell you one thing, he was a man who could lead and the reason he could
lead was because he prayed about his decision, he had the habin, the ability to decide what was right and what was wrong and
he did it, and he had peace about it and that peace gave him the stability to
withstand later criticism.
What you ought to
do, some of you, just go to the library and get a biography of somebody like
Cromwell, somebody like Robert E. Lee who applied these same principles in the
situation, and many times in Lee’s campaigns, when he was on the verge of
defeat, if it had been some of our people they’d have lost the whole army; what
did Lee do? He took the armies back, he
conserved his men, and even in the face of defeat Robert E. Lee didn’t go trot
off to the nearest psychiatrist, and he experienced disaster after disaster
after disaster, but all through it Robert E. Lee was a bastion of
stability. Why? Because he was a man who could lead and he
had chakmah. Now that is what we’re talking about. You just ought to do it as an exercise this
election year; read a biography of a man like that; just read somebody that was
in a crux of history that had this chakmah concept: Robert E. Lee, Cromwell,
Luther, Calvin, think of those men, John Knox, read their biographies and then
compare what we’ve got today and ask yourself, it’s because the older
generation that is now in leadership positions for 50 years has taken the
concept, well, that’s a sweet thought but that’s not practical and now look
what happens. When faced with the practical they don’t even have thought, leave
alone sweet ones. Now that is the result
of fifty years of neglect of Bible doctrine.
And unfortunately we are going to suffer for it. Our currency is being devaluated in direct
violation of Isaiah 1 and the Mosaic Law, the whole economic picture of this
country is a result of the same thing.
So wherever you go, we’re going to face it. Those of you who are in
business, you’re going to get clobbered with this economic thing and that means
all the rest of us are going to follow suit.
So Proverbs is
very appropriate. We can’t do anything about
the people in high places now; it’s too late, we’ll have to go through, if the
Lord tarries, ten, fifteen or twenty years more of this stuff before we’ll come
out at the other end, if we come out.
But at least we can build for the next generation and we can move on
with the Word and start from the basement where we should have started fifty
years ago and start with the Word because “The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of knowledge,” and remember the last injunction, fools are the ones
that despise it.
With our heads
bowed….