Clough Proverbs Lesson 21
Wisdom enables you to remain oriented to life –
Proverbs 2:9-19
We are on the
third major sub section of the first part of the book of Proverbs and again we
recall the basic structure of the book of Proverbs. It is a wisdom book and the first nine
chapters have to do with the basic exhortation to wisdom. And the proverbs proper do not begin until
chapter 10, but the first 9 chapters deal with the exhortation to get with it. The first section, we said, was divided up
into certain sub sections: 1:8-19, this section deals with getting the
attention of the young person. Primarily Proverbs is a book written for young
people. The reason why it’s written for
young people is not because it hasn’t got anything worthwhile for the older people
but simply because that the younger people have and need, at this point in
their lives, for getting a stable platform and it is at this point which they
are developing learned behavior patterns and they are going to develop learned
behavior patterns one way or the other way.
They have a choice of whether they want to go the absolute righteous
way, that is, lining up with the will of God known in His revelation of
Scripture, or they want to have –R learned behavior patterns.
So developing life
in a young person is a very critical point and therefore because the Bible
recognizes this it has a special book dedicated to young people and that book
is the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is far
from dull; it has answers to every major area of life. Proverbs is a book which probably was known
by memory by a fantastic number of people operating under the Old Testament
kingdom, and it’s interesting that this first section hits the major prejudice
that young people have against learning the Word of God. And in spite of all of the different views
that people have, the Bible recognizes that a young person’s major hang-up is
usually his peers, the people he goes around with, the crowd he associates
with. And so this recognizes that to get the attention of a young person we
have to deal with the problem of the wrong crowd.
So Proverbs 1:8-19
deal with separating the young person from the wrong crowd in order to get
their attention, in order that they can take in the Word of God for Solomon
realizes that as long as the young people are wrapped up with the wrong crowd,
as long as they are yielding to peer pressure to go along with all the fads, to
go along with all the gang spirit and so on, whatever it is, Solomon recognizes
that if this isn’t broken off to start with, the young person will never make
it in the Christian life, never! He
can’t go to first base simply because he’s afraid of the implications of living
in the Word; he’s afraid what his girlfriend might think about it or afraid
what her boyfriend might think about it or something else, or afraid of what
the class might think, etc. always some false issue apart from what the Lord
thinks about it. So this is why the
first section deals with the young person and the wrong crowd.
And then we said
the second section was 1:20-33, the last part of chapter 1 and this section
dealt with the pressure of limited time; in other words it’s saying you right
now can be innocently stupid but you can’t stay innocently stupid; you must
come to a point in your life where you are going to be deliberately stupid or
you’re going to be deliberately intelligent but the young person cannot forever
remain innocently stupid. He is going to
have to go one way or the other and so therefore he is going to divide Proverbs
1:20-33 says look, you’ve only got so much time young person so let’s get with
it.
Then the third
section is Proverbs 2 and chapter 2 is the first time in the book of Proverbs
we actually get to something positive.
So far up to this point it’s been negative; it’s don’t do this, don’t
hang with the wrong crowd, don’t waste you time. In chapter 2 the book of Proverbs is solidly
related to what we have called the divine viewpoint framework, that is, that
this book at this point says that unless you base wisdom on God’s divine
viewpoint framework you have no basis for your life. And so therefore, as we have said, divine
viewpoint framework consists of a foundation, that is a foundation in what the
universe looks like, it is created, it operates according to a certain way,
that is, if Genesis is literal… I wish some of you could have heard what I
heard this week where we had one of our people present creationism to the
biology department at Tech and he presented the creationist position over
against the evolutionary position to one of the lab classes at Tech and the
response was tremendous because many of these students had never heard before a
person with his doctorate defend a literal six/seven day creation and answer
the problem of the fossils, the problem of dating, and so on.
And I hope that as
time goes on more people from the academic community that see the pseudo issue…
see, people in the academic community are a bunch of chickens also because they
run with the wrong crowd, except they like to run with the crowd that has PhD’s
after their name but it’s still the wrong crowd. And you would be surprised at
how phony some of the people in high places in academic circles can be. They are afraid of certain ideas because of
what it might to do their professional reputation, and don’t kid yourself, the
PhD and the college professor is no more open-minded than the person in the
street, and most of the time he’s more closed minded because he’s got his
profession that he’s going to be concerned about; he’s got to write so many
papers that must be accepted by the noted journals of his field and he knows
that in order to get his papers written in those journals they have to pass
editorial boards and he also has to know that if he steps out of line with some
sort of an extreme position his papers are not going to get passed by the
editorial board of these journals. It’s
just that simple.
And the graduate
students don’t want to step out because they [blank spot in tape] many
universities in this land we have sort of a very subtle type of operation that
goes on that if a Christian steps too far out of line, suddenly we find the
fellowships dry up; you never can prove it, it’s done very nicely, very neatly,
so no proof is ever left, but you watch what happens. If you take a biology student over at that
university that gets all A’s in his courses and yet at the same time rejects
the general [blank spot] I’ll wage you a bet, that he will not get his degree from
that university. Texas Tech will not
grant a doctorate to any person who accepts the strict creationist position,
and most universities won’t. Do you know
why? Because they’re running with the wrong crowd. The university wants to maintain its (quote)
“reputation,” (end quote) and they just couldn’t stand to have a student
getting his PhD from my department that held to such stupid outmoded ideas,
even if he was an A student.
So this goes on
and this is just a warning to some of you young people that may be unduly
impressed by some loud mouthed teacher.
Don’t be. The scientific
community was permanently discredited about fifteen years ago with the
so-called Velikovsky affair. Immanuel
Velikovsky is probably one of the most radical thinkers of the 20th
century. When Einstein died Einstein was in regular dialogue with Immanuel
Velikovsky. But Velikovsky catastrophism
so thoroughly challenges the uniformitarian religion of the academic
establishment that this is how the open-minded community reacted. We had more
than Atwater, who at one time was the curator of the Hayden Planetarium in New
York City; Mr. Atwater wanted to run a planetarium show in metropolitan New
York on Velikovsky theories and so he had his great projector there under the
dome at the Hayden Planetarium all set up to run this thing and the afternoon
came around and all of a sudden Gordon Atwater was told that you are
fired. Why? Because he dared to have a show that Immanuel
Velikovsky… and the Hayden Planetarium people were running with the wrong
crowd, they just stand the blot on their great reputation.
We have certain of
the great men in science; we had Dr. Shapely at Harvard who was one of the
greatest astronomers in the 20th century, and Dr. Shapely and others
in the wrong crowd managed to pressure McMillan and other textbooks publishers
to destroy Velikovsky’s works and when somebody stopped and said Dr. Shapely,
have you ever read the manuscript of Dr. Velikovsky’s book? Oh no, we just know what it is though. This is how the scientific community reacted
and they have censored Velikovsky. So next time you hear this jazz about the
religion of the Dark Ages and how we had the Inquisition list, let me tell you
something, it’s going on today. It has
more respectable names but every major academic establishment operates on an
orthodoxy; they have their right
group and if you don’t fit in with the right group, on matter how brilliant a
student you may be, it has nothing to do with it; the name of the game in the
academic circles is not how smart you are, the name of the game is how many
brownie points you can earn with your doctoral advisor. It’s all politics and very little
intelligence. And this comes out very
neatly when you have a person with the academic credentials such as Dr. Henry
Morris, when he spoke here, such as out in Davis, University of California at
Davis, when Dr. Gish who has his PhD in biochemistry got up and promoted
literal creationism, and one of the great evolutionists of that campus just
about came unglued and had a three hour ranting and raving session that anybody
with a doctorate couldn’t possibly believe this and he should have been locked
up as non compos mentis or
something.
This is what goes
on and I’m just telling you that this the way it operates. Now we’re not saying that you don’t go to
college and so on; you go to the classroom and get what you can but don’t
worship it. That community isn’t worth
worshiping; it’s filled with wrong crowd, with people who are afraid to step
out, with people who are afraid to entertain any idea that challenges their own
orthodoxy. Now it’s very interesting,
they usually brand the fundamentalist as the closed minded person, we’re the
only people in the world that have an orthodoxy and we won’t tolerate other
views but you know, in dialoging with these people if often find a most amusing
thing. It came out this week, and that
is that we know both sides of the issue but usually the so-called “open-minded”
crowd only knows one side of the issue; they never even study the other side of
the issue.
When I was in
dialogue with one of the faculty members over there he got up and told the
audience listen, don’t listen to people like Clough and so forth, what you have
to do is go and get the mainstream scholarship and if you will train yourself
in college to always read the mainstream scholarship in your field that will
keep you straight. If you read the
mainstream scholarship you would never have read Galileo in his day. If you had read the mainstream scholarship,
probably
So this is why
this Proverbs thing is actually applicable to anyone as well as the young
people running with the wrong crowd. But
when we come to chapter 2 we deal with this problem of the foundation and
showing that this whole chapter we have entitled the reminder of the divine
viewpoint framework behind wisdom.
Proverbs 2 is a reminder of the divine viewpoint framework behind
wisdom. And this is the framework, and
if this framework isn’t there all you have are a bunch of tidbits of good
advice. All you have is a bunch or
pragmatism but you do not have something that is magnificent, something that
will give you unity, purpose, meaning and definition in your life. You don’t have that if this goes; all you
have, if you do not have this framework is a set of little sweet sayings that
you can memorize and say 30 times before breakfast and maybe it might get you
through to lunch, if you can make it. In
other words, you are faced with a system of auto hypnosis but you are not faced
with a system of truth.
If the universe is literally created and if there was a literal fall and if
there was a literal flood, worldwide as the Bible says, then we have certain
things in our foundation on which we can believe. If we do not have this foundation there is no
way we can believe. This is important
and it’s a major theme of mine that I have reiterated over and over and I will
continue to do so because believers have the tendency to pretend they’re
believing. Now you’d better check your
life. Every one of us has this danger as
a believer and that is pretending you’re believing. What do I mean by
pretending you’re believing? I mean that
you’ve got yourself convinced that you’re really believing the promises of God,
that you’ve got yourself convinced that you really believe Christian is it, but
you really don’t have yourself convinced and you can see places in your life
where this crops up. For example, if
you’re talking to an articulate non-Christian, all of a sudden you don’t
discuss Jesus Christ with him. Why? Because you’re chicken, that’s why. You’re afraid that he is going to say
something that’s going to discredit your belief and you don’t want to be
embarrassed. Now isn’t that really the
reason why most people don’t witness? So
that shows you that you have just convinced yourself that you believe when you
really don’t believe. So therefore the
evidences and all this business about foundation is very, very important if
you’re going to believe the way the Bible says belief is.
Another thing
where it shows that we really don’t believe is when we get in a jam. What kind of behavior patterns do you revert
to every time you get in a jam? Do you
revert to panic? Do you revert to worry when God tells us that we can cast all
our care upon Him? If you do, then under
pressure you show how you really operate deep down, and that is unbelief. So you’ve convinced yourself by repeating
Bible verses to yourself and so on that you really believe but actually you
don’t. And so this is the error that
Solomon’s coping with in chapter 2. He’s
saying now look, there are certain things that have to happen and you have to
know this foundation.
Proverbs 2:2-4 we
showed last time Solomon says in order to gain wisdom you have to devote
determination to it. You have to seek
after it. Verse 4 says, “If you seek
her,” that is chakmah or wisdom, “as
silver, and search for her as hid treasures,” this is saying if you spend as
much determination toward your seeking of wisdom biblically, divine viewpoint
wisdom, as you do running your business, as you do trying to make ends meet
next week economically, then you’ll find wisdom but not until. There’s a strong “if” condition and it’s
reiterated in verse 3, although in the King James it doesn’t appear that
way. [3] “Yea, if thou cries,” that’s
not talking about “yea if,” it means only if you do this, only if you are
willing to devote the determination and effort that you would pour into
operation security or something else, only then are you going t find
wisdom. How and why? Because as we have said over and over in the
Proverbs series, under the New Testament era it looks like this. Christ in the heart, now this is what the
wisdom looks like this side of the cross.
In the Old
Testament it looked different than this but this is how it looks on this side
of the cross. It begins with positive
volition and that’s what verses 1-4 are saying; you’ve got to have positive
volition, there’s no way around it. If
you’re not going to take time, for example, to learn the Word and that means
using tapes, that means Bible class, that means talking it over with other
believers, questioning and so forth, discussion, if you’re not willing to take
the time it’s simple; you’re not going to get there. This is not talking about salvation; this is
addressed to believers. Salvation is
easy; salvation is hearing the good news of Christ, Christ died for your sins
and trusting Christ for your salvation, that’s easy. But after you become a
Christian getting wisdom is another matter and this means activity; this means
positive volition as explained in verses 3-4.
And this is why
wisdom is known as the helpmeet. In
other words, there’s an analogy here between the wife and wisdom and it’s built
on the second divine institution. Divine
institution number two goes like this: you have Adam, this is the model given
in Genesis 2. Adam is first given the will of God and this sequence is
necessary to understand marriage. Adam
is given the will of God, not Eve. The
man, not the woman is given the will of God in Genesis 2. God comes to Adam and says I’ve got thus and
such that I want you to do, Adam, period.
Now after Adam ascertains the will of God for his life, after that, then
God provides Eve, although she’s know there as isha, not Eve, she’s not known as Eve until after she sins because
Eve is her gospel name; Eve means that I believe in Jesus Christ. Well, she is known as isha and as isha she is
the help. Now we call it the helpmeet,
actually it means help suited. For
what? Don’t you see, the whole biblical
position of the woman in Scripture is that she is a help suited and she’s
incomplete unless she can find what she is help suited for. I know some men have been wondering what their
wives are suited for for a long time but she is suited for something and the
Bible says she is suited for something, and she has been made by God to be
suited for the man when he is operating in the will of God.
And that little
principle can save you a lot of grief, because most marital problems come right
out of a violation of that principle.
First of all the male usually gets this proud American image of himself,
well I’m a self-made man and I don’t accept grace and I’m not going to receive
anything from God, I’ll do it myself.
And he’s so far out in the tules when it comes to Bible doctrine that
he’s not operating in the will of God.
And then he notices that he begins to have trouble with his wife and
they can’t understand it. Well it’s very
simple, they’ve just simply violated the whole principle of the second divine
institution. If the man was doing his
job he’d see where the wife fit in but when the man is out of line is wife is
going to be out of line, always. And
there’s no way you can solve the problem; the woman is made for this role,
that’s the way she’s built. And if her
man is out of line with the will of God she is going to have a problem; it
always will work that way, always has worked that way. It worked that way from Eve on down through
history. The woman is always having a
problem when her man is out of line.
Now it works the
other way too, if she gets out of line, if she steps out of line, if she’s on
negative volition and she’s not helping the man do the will of God, then he is
seriously hurt in his ministry; she’s a drag and she can easily become
one. Eve was the first drag; Eve was the
one that fouled up the first marriage.
So there you have a situation where it can work either way; the man gets
out of line and that makes the woman have a problem; if the woman gets out of
line then the man can’t do what he’s supposed to do and this is why there’s so
much misery in marriage. The reason is
that it is built on such a foundation that if one partner is out of fellowship
immediately the other one gets hit.
Other social
relationships are easier than this; for example you could be in a business
partnership. Now this is almost as bad
as marriage, being in a business partnership with somebody, and I would never
advise two Christians to go into business with each other. Just don’t go into partnership with anybody,
just do it yourself and you’ll be a lot more relaxed about it and not have
trouble. But if your business associate
is out of line you’re going to feel the effects of it, but not as much as when
your partner is out of line, then you really feel the effects of it. And this is just the way it is. So this is why we have psychiatrists and we
have all these marital and family counseling, and 90% of the counselors don’t
know what they’re going either because they have no understanding of the
institution of marriage. So unless you
have a biblical basis things are pretty bad and gruesome in the second divine
institution.
What happens is
that wisdom becomes the wife. And
throughout Scripture wisdom is called the believer’s helper. Except wisdom never gets out of fellowship;
it’s always the believer that gets out of fellowship. In other words, you have been given a job to
do. God says this is what I want you to
do; I have provided a perfect wife for you and that wife is divine viewpoint
wisdom. In other words, there’s an
analogy with the second divine institution.
Marriage is a type of this relationship between the believer and wisdom. And so wisdom is to be sought, that’s why
it’s called “her” in verse 4, “you seek her,” it’s always female. And this is
very rare because usually in Scripture the believer himself is pictured as the
female, God is the male. Yet here the
role is reversed, the believer is pictured as the male and we’ll see this again
today, and wisdom as the female.
So positive
volition is what Christ looks like in the heart; positive volition is when we
seek out that helpmate. This is the step
toward wisdom in the Christian life. The
Christian says I am on positive volition; I want to do God’s will. Visualize Adam if you want a concrete
illustration. Here’s Adam in the Garden,
all right God, I’m supposed to till the Garden.
Now who’s going to get my supper!
And when I come in from the field I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I want a
cook for one thing, and so God sees that Adam had a need. Now obviously the woman wasn’t just made to
cook, but the point is that this is an illustration so don’t carry it too
far. The wife was used here to provide
help for the man. And so here the
believer on positive volition wants to do God’s will but he needs a helper; the
helper is wisdom.
The second step is
if he does this, then God the Holy Spirit will enlighten him to the truth. And as a result of the enlightening he will
gradually develop the divine viewpoint framework in his soul, and that’s the
subject in Proverbs 2:5-6, “Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD,
and find the knowledge of God. [6] For
God gives wisdom; and out of His mouth comes knowledge and understanding.” The word “mouth” here refers to the canon of
Scripture. The canon of Scripture is the
mouth of God. And so what this verse is
teaching us is that when we are on positive volition to the degree that verse 4
says, if you seek wisdom as you seek money, then these two things occur. So verses 1-4 deal with the first step;
verses 5-6 deal with the second step.
Then we come down
and we start working with the rest of these verses; verses 7-8 that we dealt
with last time, “He keeps the paths of judgment, and preserves the way of His
saints,” and so this refers to the last two parts of Christ in the heart. First you have an experience of the love of
God and then you have fulfillment as a believer. Now that’s what’s the last part of verse 7
and the first part of verse 8 mean; “He keeps the paths of decisions,”
literally. In other words, the believer
has to make decision, decision, decision, decision, decision in his life and he
must have a divine viewpoint framework to make those decisions or he’s going to
revert to emotions. So instead of
reverting to emotions, if he has a solid framework of Scripture, then he is
going to have something on which he can choose and choose on the basis of
evidence, not how he feels. So this
promises that if we’ve gotten up to the divine viewpoint framework then it says
“He will keep the paths of decision,” He will protect our decisions; we will
once again have that rare commodity known as common sense. So we have love, and then we will know more
about God and so on. And “He preserves
the way of His saints,” that means that they will fulfill their role as saints,
they will experience the love of God, that is they will experience the love of
God in their own personal devotional life, they will experience the love of God
with other believers in the body and so forth.
Now we have in our
day a very peculiar phenomenon that’s developing in evangelical circles and
it’s kind of a heresy that’s developed and I want you to look at this chart and
I want to show you what this heresy is because it’s all around you and if you
venture very far in Christian circles sure enough you’re going to run across
this thing. It’s where we all get
together and we want fellowship in the body principle. Well, we all want to get
together and we want to have fellowship, etc. etc. etc. we want to reproduce
that first century love that believers had with one another, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that goal but the
trouble and the heresy is the means. What they want to do is go from here, positive
volition, all the way up to love and they want to cross out the necessity of
slugging it out to get that divine viewpoint framework. Now in this congregation here and there we
are gradually getting this as a local church.
Many of you have it as individuals but I’m talking about certain groups
here; we have this but it’s come about because the people involved have spent
time, and by time I mean years, in the Word of God. And after that time, then this is a reality. This doesn’t come by joining up with the
nearest sensitivity group and holding hands for three hours every Wednesday
night or something. Those are nothing more than satanic counterfeits to the
real thing.
I’m talking about
the thing that comes out of the divine viewpoint framework and requires
time. You see, time is the big thing
because time is a test of your patience.
And a lot of believers are impatient and they want to bypass all this
time. You businessmen, have you ever
heard of a business that could be developed overnight? A lot of people come to you with these fancy
proposals, come join our company and you can be making $10,000 a year pure
profit within six weeks, and you know as well as I do that those things are
just that, just a lot of hot air, and you know how it is to slug it out and how
it takes years to develop your business.
Now your business is part of the first divine institution, whether you
recognize it or not. No matter how hard
you work in your business or how little you work in your business actually your
business is run by the principles of the created order given under the first
divine institution. And so it should
come as no shock to you that there’s an analog here in the believer’s
life. Believer’s growth doesn’t come
overnight either and it’s just like your business. You have to put it in on days when you don’t
feel like it; you have to come to Bible class when you don’t feel like it. You have to stick it out with the Word of God
when you don’t feel like it. And then
you start to see the profit, and after a while, after you’ve experienced red
report after red report suddenly there’s some black ink that shows up
somewhere; sometimes it’s hard to see but somewhere it shows up and finally
you’re going, but you got there over a time interval.
It’s the same way
in the Christian life and don’t let any hotshot evangelist sell you on some
fast approach. He is the same kind of
person as that salesman that drops by your business and wants to push you in on
some hotshot business deal. It’s the
same thing in religion; in the clergy we have our hotshots too, just like you
have in your field. And they will go
around and sell you on some big secret to the Christian life and there is no
secret to the Christian life. What did God
do, have a security office when he set up the Christian life, that we’ve got
all these secrets? Why is it necessary to have all these secrets in the
Christian life? There aren’t any secrets
in the Christian life; they’re all given in the Word of God.
So now we come to
Proverbs 2:9 and following and in this we have a second result of wisdom. Verses 9-19 expand the content of verses
5-8. Verses 5-8 began with “then” or aaz, now verse 9 begins with the same aaz or “then,” translated “then,” and
here we have aaz again, and that is a
particle that is a signal which means that the passage from this point on is
dealing with a result. So verses 5-8 result number one; verses 9-19 is result
number two. Both of these passages deal
with results, but results from what?
Results from satisfying of the conditions of verses 1-4; verse 1-4 is
the backbone to the whole passage.
Now let’s look in
detail at this result. We can summarize
verses 9-19 by saying that wisdom will enable you to remain oriented to
life. Wisdom will cause you to remain
oriented to the plan of God in your life.
Wisdom is functioning as a helpmeet.
We’re going to get two examples of this.
This second result is broken down in two examples; one begins in verse
12 and the other begins in verse 16.
Before we get
there let’s look at Proverbs 2:9-11.
“Then shall thou understand righteousness, and judgment, and equity;
every good path.” Actually it should be
“because wisdom.” Verse 10 is analogous
to verse 6. Verse 5 begins with “then,”
verse 6, “for.” Verse 5 is result, verse
6 is reason. Verse 9 is result; verse 10 is reason, it should be “when,” the
Hebrew particle kiy is a particle
that can be translated either “when” or “for,” because; either way, it’s a
translator’s choice. So it is because
and that fits the parallel with verse 6, “Because wisdom will enter into your
heart, and knowledge will become pleasant unto you soul, [11] Discretion will
preserve you, understanding will keep you.”
All are future tenses in verse 9, 10, and 11. All of these are results. Let’s look at some of these results.
First in verse 9,
“You will understand righteousness, judgment and equity. Those are the same three words, if you turn
to Proverbs 1:3, in the introduction, you recall that wisdom was labeled with
these three nouns: “justice, judgment and equity.” They are the same Hebrew forms, barring a few
minor variants. So what did we say back
in verse 3? That those three verbs
protect the Bible from ancient literature.
In other words, you have the Bible here and you have the Egyptian
literature over here and you have Assyrian literature over here, Babylonian
over here, and so on, and Egypt had wisdom, Babylonian literature had wisdom,
Assyrian literature had wisdom and the Bible has wisdom; now how are you going
to distinguish the Bible’s wisdom from the wisdom of the ancient Near Eastern
cultures? Answer: these three
nouns!
Now the Bible’s
wisdom is structured within a moral framework, the rest of them are not. So divine viewpoint wisdom is +R wisdom and
human viewpoint wisdom is always pragmatic.
Human viewpoint wisdom could be translated by the word “clever,” how to
get out of an exam, how to manipulate somebody, that’s all pragmatic wisdom. You’re having trouble with somebody, well
here’s how you can get around it, here’s a fast trick to use. So all the tricks and the pragmatism and so
on… observing the political process in America you can get a good healthy
illustration of human viewpoint wisdom and how the voters are socked every time
by a lot of promises that don’t mean anything.
And here you have pragmatism operating.
So these three words define what kind of wisdom we’re talking about.
Proverbs 2:9,
“Then thou shalt understand righteousness, and judgment, and equity, and every
good path.” “Every good path” means… it
refers to a wagon track, literally, or a road, a small path and the idea is
that when you come down the end of a road and you have all these possible paths
just kind of evaporate, like some of these farm to market roads, it just kind
of evaporates out here and you wonder which road to take. The imagery behind “every good path” means
there are going to be some good paths and some bad ones. And so if this wisdom is part of your soul
you will be able to discern what are those good paths. So when you come down to the end of the road
and you’ve got to make a choice wisdom will be there because wisdom is your
helper; wisdom is the one that is especially structured so you can move on with
the Lord.
“For wisdom,”
here’s the reason, Proverbs 2:10, “For wisdom will enter into your heart,” now
notice this refers to believers who are already saved. These people have already trusted in Jesus
Christ under the Old Testament economy. They do not know exactly the details of
the cross but they do know that Jehovah will take care of their sins and so by
faith they have believed. They have
believed in the future work of Jehovah as we believe in the past work of
Jehovah. These people are believers but
notice this verse implies that believers are not born spiritually with
wisdom. Notice this; wisdom, future
tense, will enter your heart, meaning that the believer must attain wisdom
after salvation and it is not an automatic possession at the point of
salvation. Now it’s very, very
interesting to watch how exactly reverse this has become in our
generation. In our generation we have
believers running around trying to get hold of what they already have in Christ
and rejecting that which they should be trying to get hold of.
Here’s an
illustration of this: we have some believers that are trying to get hold of
justification; they think that you can lose your salvation, they think that if
you commit some horrible sin then you’re going to lose your salvation and go
straight to hell and so what they’re doing, they’re trying to seek out
justification. But justification has
already been given at the point of salvation; you can’t seek justification out,
that is given to you at one point in time forever. God the Father has hauled you into court and
the law of double jeopardy applies and God the Father can’t haul you into court
again. So justification applies at the point of salvation forever, and it is part
of your position in Christ, and no preacher, no church, no religion, no other
group or anything else can take justification away from you’ it was given to
you at the point of salvation. That is
given to you by way of your position, and you’re to go around harping on your
need to be justified; oh I have such a guilty conscience, well, take care of
it, you know 1 John 1:9. So this is the
position.
Now what
happens? The thing that we need to
acquire by experience and growth, this is precisely the thing that nobody
wants. You mean to tell me it’s going to
take me months of study? Well, I’m too
busy watching Mickey Mouse at 7:00 Sunday nights, I just sit down in my easy
chair and read the paper and then I flip the tube on and there he is, Mickey in
an exciting adventure again. So I want
to sit there and listen to that, I can’t go to sleep without watching
Mickey. So this is what happens; you
can’t expect me to concentrate on the Word of God for more than five
minutes. That’s ridiculous. So we have people excluding the very thing
this verse says must happen after salvation.
“Wisdom will enter
your heart, and knowledge will become pleasant to your soul.” Now look at that one. Do you know what that implies? When you are a baby believer knowledge is not
going to be very pleasant to you. It’s
going to have to become pleasant to you.
Now this should encourage some of you that I know just think the Word of
God is the last thing in the world and all this doctrine business, you just
can’t stand it, and you do a magnificent job holding forth every Sunday morning
for an hour; let me give you the credit you are due. Those of you who cannot stand Bible doctrine,
I don’t understand how you stand it here frankly; you’re very strong willed
people and at least I can give you that credit.
Now that is really… [Tape turns]
… and it means it
is unpleasant to start with. You develop
the taste as you go further in the Word of God.
It is not something that is automatic at the point of salvation. Now do you see why it is foolish to take
somebody who became a Christian yesterday and put him out in the street and say
minister today. They don’t have wisdom;
knowledge is not pleasant to them yet, it will become pleasant but it isn’t
pleasant yet. Now how stupid to take
somebody like that and send them out to ministry, the hustle crowd, got to rah,
rah, rah, got to get them out, got to move for Christ and so forth. And these people aren’t ready to move for
Christ; when a baby is born he stays in the nursery for a while and that’s
where believers should stay, they should stay in the spiritual nursery for a
while and they shouldn’t be exposed to all sorts of things that they are being
exposed to. Pediatric care among
believers is atrocious in our day.
Proverbs 2:11,
“Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shell keep thee.” That is the great promise of wisdom.
Now Proverbs
2:12-15 gives us one illustration and then verse 16-19 gives us another
illustration. Verse 12 begins with “To
deliver,” verse 16 begins with “To deliver,” and that should be a tip off that
these are two sections of Scripture. “To
deliver thee from the way of the evil, from the man that speaks froward
[perverse] things, [13] Who leaves the paths of uprightness, to walk in the
ways of darkness; [14] who rejoice to do evil, and delight in the frowardness
[perverseness] of the wicked; [15] Whose ways are crooked, and they are froward
[perverse] in their paths.” Now aside
from “forward,” whatever that means, we have some other details is this passage
with which to come to grips.
“To deliver thee
from the way of the evil man,” this is an illustration of the result of wisdom;
“the way of the evil man” literally is not “the way of the evil man,” this is “the way to evil.” Now we have to work on the word “evil” here
for a moment. The word “evil” is a word
which is used synonymously in Proverbs with death. So let’s get something down on these two
words; these words will occur over and over again in Proverbs and you have to
understand something about how they are used.
They are used, obviously, in their literal sense for death, that is,
physical death. That is one usage of the word.
However, this is
not the only usage of the word; there is a second usage of the word and this is
the one that is used most often, and that is the effects of sin. In other words, whoever is writing this
section, Solomon or some of the people who studied under him, they’re taking
the word “death” and they’re saying look believers, when you are out of
fellowship it is as though you are dead in that area. As far as the Lord is concerned you are dead
in that area, in the same sense you would be physically dead. Now what happens when you’re physically
dead? Hopefully you’re not breathing; in
other words, you’re not active in that area.
So if we say the circle of your area of faith, here’s the circle of your
faith, whatever it may be this morning, some bigger than others, that is the
sphere over which you can operate by faith.
Everything outside of here that is due to your immaturity, all this
area, the psalmist would say, is death.
In other words, when you step out of here you’re not walking by faith
and you’re not producing anything for the Lord and it’s just all a waste of
time. And when you’re out of here by way
of being out of fellowship it’s the same thing.
So the death and evil have to do with the unproductiveness of the life
lived apart from obedience to the Lord.
So when it says
“deliver thee from the way to evil” it means the path that will lead to
unproductiveness, it’s a picture of a believer.
Say here’s the faith of a believer.
This believer might be three years old in the Lord; he’s been a believer
for three years. Now his problem is if
he doesn’t have wisdom then he’s naïve.
And some sucker is going to come along and sell him something and all of
a sudden this is what happens: that circle starts to get smaller and smaller
and smaller and this believer gets out of it and begins to develop chaos in the
heart and gradually he loses his spiritual life, so to speak, in time—not in
position. This is the way to death. And the point is that a believer who is naïve
is very, very liable to this kind of thing.
This is why sheep are used to illustrate believers. God graciously created a very stupid animal
so that He could have it around and use it as an illustration of
believers. And so believers are always
paired off with the dumbest animal that God can find which is the sheep and
this is why. You think that believers are
compared with sheep because they’re so gentle, and they look so pretty. Huh-un, believers are paired off with the
sheep in Scripture because they’re stupid.
That’s strictly the reason why believers are illustrated by sheep;
they’re dumb, naïve and so forth. So
this is why wisdom is necessary.
“To deliver thee
from the way toward evil, from the man that speaks froward things.” Now the word “froward” is a miserable
translation of a Hebrew word which means to turn over in rebellion; it means
opposite literally. In other words, to
overturn, to do a 180 would be another way of saying it. In other words, things that are exactly
opposite to the truth, and it may mean that this man that speaks froward things
is moral. Now here’s where some of you
have wrong standards. You would identify
verse 12 with any man who comes up to you to solicit you to some immoral act,
thievery or something, or murder. And you think of that as evil but that’s not
what froward means; froward means anything contrary to divine viewpoint.
For example, you
could have somebody come up to you and offer you some sort of a real big
educational opportunity and all you have to do is come to this particular area
and listen to me and you’ll have a great
education when you’re done. And he could be speaking froward things, meaning
that he would teach you human viewpoint by the ton. And all the time very moral, very ethical,
etc. etc. etc. So that’s what froward
means.
Proverbs 2:13,
“Who leave the path of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness.” Notice verse 13 teaches us that the person to
whom the believer is most likely to suffer, with whom or due to, is a person
who himself is an apostate. You see, it
works this way. Believers wouldn’t
listen to a person that didn’t know spiritual truth. In other words, even the dumbest believer
would know there’s something wrong with somebody that was obviously wrong. But the person described in verse 13 is one
who habitually has been on the right track and then who has left it. So he knows the right terminology. He knows the right things to say at the right
time. As Bob Thieme would say, he knows
how to make the proper clucking noises.
In other words, he is acquainted with the community of the believers. That is the person spoken of in verse 13; he
is an apostate, one who has been in the camp and left it.
Proverbs 2:14,
“Who rejoice to do evil, and delights in the perverseness of the wicked; [15]
Whose ways are crooked, and they are perverse in their paths.” This illustration, verses 12-15 deals with
this pressure, generally speaking in society, it’s pictured as a man and then
verses 13-14 is the crowd. This is an
address to the young Jewish teenage boy and so obviously it’s looking at it
from the male side but it’s saying that look, all your business associates,
basically, one of the things involved here, all your fellow students down when
you have class with the priest, all these, all your male associates, or all the
associates in your family, at your great gatherings and so on, the temple, all
of these are the ones who will bring you down. All these people in Solomon’s
generation had a clear presentation of the Word. They had Samuel and they had
Nathan, two great prophets of God and those prophets did a tremendous job of
teaching the Word. So all these people
knew at one time divine viewpoint and they have departed from divine
viewpoint.
I don’t want you
to get the wrong idea when I draw this chart up here about Christ in the heart,
we have positive volition and we have life and we have divine viewpoint
framework and we have love and we have fulfillment, don’t think that that can’t
be destroyed. You can destroy your
Christian maturity; you can start off on negative volition and as a result
begin to experience darkness in the soul and human viewpoint framework and so
on; you can destroy something very wonderful in your life by rebelling against
God’s plan. And eventually God will put
you under His wrath and you’re going to experience some very severe forms of
discipline and the discipline will be almost in direct proportion to the amount
of light that you knew and turned away from.
This is why I am convinced that most people in the insane asylum are
believers. Yes, I mean most people in
the insane asylum are believers.
Why? Because they knew the light
and they turned from it and they are suffering mentally from it. This is why a lot of psychiatrists hate
Christianity; all they see are people who have hang-ups in the religious
areas. Now who does that describe? It describes believers who have gotten out of
line and they’re paying a whale of a price for getting out of line.
Those of you who
have had a clear exposure to the Word of God, I just want you, not to threaten
you, not to browbeat you but I’m just simply warning you about a principle:
don’t think you can come to understand truth and put it away or accept it and
nothing’s going to happen. When you come
to know truth in God’s Word that puts you under judgment for what you do with
it. You have had an opportunity to hear,
now what have you done with it? Have you
buried it? Rejected it? or accepted
it? And this is why some often are more
miserable the more the Word of God is taught and they can’t understand it. They
are more miserable! Why? Because God is
holding them to a higher standard; He is holding them to what they know of Him
to be true and they have developed these patterns of disobedience, and now
they’re paying the price. And this is
often why we have the more the Word of God is taught the more miserable often
people become.
So now we have the
second illustration, the strange woman, Proverbs 2:16-19. “To deliver thee from the strange woman, from
the stranger who flatters with her words; [17] Who forsakes the guide of her
youth, and forgets the covenant of her God.
[18] For her house inclines unto death, and her paths unto the
dead. [19] None that go unto her return
again, neither shall they take hold of the paths of life.” Now who is “the strange woman?” The strange woman, zarah, and the Hebrew word zarah
means unauthorized by the law. It’s a
simple meaning of that word; it means unauthorized. It does not mean the person is immoral,
necessarily. It does not mean the person
has an offensive nature; it merely means that they are unauthorized in the Word
of God. An example would be a man with
two wives; one is a zarah, is
unauthorized, there’s nothing wrong with her personally except the relationship
is wrong with the Word of God, so it’s zarah. And
zarah means a woman who is out of line.
“From the
stranger,” now the second word, “stranger,” means a foreigner, and so this has
occasioned a lot of discussion in commentaries and so forth as to what this
strange woman is. And the evidence would
suggest that the woman here is a literal woman but there’s a sneaky overtone to
it. So let’s look at it first as the foreign
woman. Who is the foreign woman in
Solomon’s time? Well, Solomon knew all
about them, didn’t he? In other words,
they were imports, from Egypt, they were imports from Assyria, Assyria wasn’t
known as Assyria then, from Syria or Aramea, and so forth, Philistia, Samson
had a few down there, and David managed to pick up a few, so you have all these
foreign women and they’re infiltrating the society. Now what is wrong with these import products? It is that they are not, first of all in line
with the Word, but most of all in this context it is that they are loose and
running around and they are busting up the marriages in Solomon’s day. But more than that, these literal women that
are running around loose, so to speak, are also examples of human viewpoint
wisdom and later in Proverbs 1-9 the strange woman is going to actually be a
model. Now I’m not going to say its
personified but she becomes a model or an illustration of human viewpoint
wisdom and remember how I started today, wisdom is a helper. And this means that the strange woman is a
woman who is a helper or a pretended helper, and so you have the believer come
along and he tries to rely on human viewpoint gimmicks to get the job
done. And the strange woman comes and
she professes to be a helper to the man but she’s not a helper, she is zarah, she is an unauthorized
helper. The only authorized help that
God has given the young person who reads this text is the right woman, so to
speak, here which is wisdom, divine viewpoint wisdom. That’s the authorized help and all other help
is unauthorized.
So the zarah isha, the strange woman is a model
of human viewpoint wisdom. That is, she
appears to be a helper when she really is not.
This is why in Proverbs 2:17 “Who forsakes the guide of her youth,” the
word “guide” if you compare it with Jeremiah 3:4, it’s explained in Jeremiah
3:4 as her father. Now this verse is
important because this shows you how the girls got their education; always it’s
the boys that are the emphasis in Scripture yet here it clearly teaches that
the girl also was taught. “The guide of
her youth” means her father or whoever her father designated to clue her in to
the Word of God. So, “the guide of her
youth,” she has rebelled; notice verse 17 is automatically negative volition,
she’s on negative volition to the authority of her parents. This could have been also other Jewish women,
even though the word “foreigner” is used here it could have been other tribes
involved, they were just running around loose and they were the hell-raising
crowd. And the girls raised about as
much hell as the boys did. And this is
the crowd that was coming into Jerusalem in Solomon’s day and Solomon is saying
son, watch out for them, because they’ll come up with this dear, sweet approach
and if you are any normal male you’ll just flip over them and so forth and
you’ll be a sucker for it. But watch
what’s underneath the wrappings because it’s negative volition all the
way. These girls are in rebellion
against authority and they’ve rebelled against “the guide of their youth,” that
is they have rebelled against their parents.
And she “forgets the covenant of her God,” this is the basis of
authority, Proverbs 1:7.
Proverbs 2:18,
“For her house inclines unto death, her paths unto the dead ones.” Now verse 18 is actually a picture of chaos
in the heart. And what Solomon is saying
to the young man, he’s saying look son, you go along with her, because of her
characteristic of verse 17, she confesses to be a helper, oh yeah, you’re going
to have a second Eve on your hands because she comes along and she says oh, I
will help you honey, whatever you want to do.
Sure you will, you’ll help him go negative volition is what she’ll help. And so he starts on negative volition and
immediately what happens? He suffers
darkness of the soul; as a result of suffering darkness of the soul he goes
into these operation defense mechanisms, he goes on emotional revolt, he begins
to get human viewpoint picking up which causes doubt, which tubes his prayer
life, it tubes all use of the faith technique and then he experiences the
hatred of God and finally the wrath of God.
And so this is the death. Remember how we defined death and evil? That is the death, “her house inclines to
death,” literally and also in this sense of spiritually, “and her paths unto
the dead.”
Proverbs 2:19,
“None that go unto her,” the word “go unto” is a Hebrew participle meaning none
who habitually go into her, “unto her shall return again, neither take they
hold of the paths of life.” Why? Because they have identified themselves,
negative volition, and these young men historically did just this, they did not
pay attention to verses 16-19 and in the year 930 there was a disaster in the
nation because thousands and thousands of young Jewish boys had heard this
teaching and they just ignored it and they defied the covenant of their God and
the guide of their youth. And so we have
a civil war in the nation Israel erupting within several years of the writing
of this passage. And this is what happened
because people failed to take it in.
Now finally,
Proverbs 2:20-22, the end product; it begins with “so that,” “so that” is the
final purpose, and “so that” refers back to verses 1-4 and teaches us once
again that there is no way to arrive at blessing in the Christian life after
salvation apart from the kind of attitude of verses 1-4; the determination that
it’s the Word of God over everything, the Word of God over parties; somebody
goes to Bible class or has been coming to Bible class and company just happens
to drop in… well, I have to stay for my company. Baloney!
If they were unannounced they risked what you were doing when they
dropped in. Now it’s different, of
course, if they were polite enough to arrange it beforehand but if they just
dropped in out of the clear blue you’re not under any social obligation to stay
there and entertain them. If they are
polite people they will call before they visit and they will make arrangements
with you before they visit [can’t understand words] busting in on somebody and
then expect everybody to drop something.
That’s nonsense; if they busted in that’s their problem, you’re going to
Bible class and they can come with you or they can go some place else. And that’s the way it. Now that’s what I mean by putting the Word of
God first. Sure you might lose a lot of
friends, but they’re worth losing if that’s their attitude toward it fine, let
the chips fall.
Proverbs 2:20,
“That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths of the
righteous.” This is the final purpose;
this purpose cannot be attained unless the conditions of verses 1-4 are
balanced.
[21] “For the
upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it. [22] But the wicked shall be cut off from the
earth, and the transgressors shall be rooted out of it.” Now this refers in a nutshell to the covenant
operations under Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. I’ll just briefly cover these in conclusion
and then apply this to the Christian life.
We have to understand what this meant to the Old Testament saint.
These two
chapters, Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, show the choice that the nation
had. The nation could choose positive
volition toward God corporately; if they would choose then they would be ruled
over by the Lord; the Lord would be their king.
That would be the first thing. In
their domestic policy they would have economic and agricultural and prosperity
in every area; they would have a tremendous education system going and it would
be plus, plus, plus, plus all the way, in every area of their domestic
life. They would enjoy climatic
conditions, a lot of abundant rainfall and business would prosper. And also in the international realm if they
were on positive volition toward God then nationally Israel would reign over
the nations. Those were the great
promises of blessing upon the nation for positive volition and you can study
them yourself in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.
However, if they
went on negative volition then God would put another king over them and the
king would be their enemy. Please
notice, God takes His elect nation and there’s a principle here for you as a
believer. God will allow you to be ruled
over by your enemies, and that means satanic oppression. The enemies of the believer, by Ephesians 6,
are satanic, principalities and powers of the air, that we can be ruled by
them, just as Israel in disobedience was ruled by her enemies and she was still
elect.
And secondly, on
the domestic front the nation would suffer economic disaster. There would be no rain, the crops would fail,
and you would have all sorts of disasters economically in the domestic
realm. Internationally she would
experience defeat in her foreign policy and all sorts of areas of cursing. So that is the either/or and so when it says
in verse 21, “the upright shall dwell in the land,” it means that they are
going to be able to be safe and stay in the domain of Palestine, but if they go
on negative volition then God is going to give them five chances; Leviticus 26 spells
out the five degrees of discipline. One,
God is going to spank them with disease and other things; two, if you do not
accept that spanking, that discipline then God says I’ll spank you seven times
more and if you don’t accept that then I’ll spank you again and Leviticus 26
gives us the five spankings of God. And
if by the fifth spanking they have not come around to positive volition then
they are booted out of the land and one of the signs they are booted out of the
land is they will lose the right of ownership and furthermore, they will eat
their own children. And this
historically happened, it happened once when Samaria fell in 721; it happened
again in 586 when Jerusalem fell and it happened again when Jerusalem fell to
Titus in 70 AD, and all three times the famine became so great that the Jewish
mothers had to eat their own children, and this was a historic sign that God
was cursing the nation and it is all predicted in Leviticus 26 and you can read
it for yourself.
So that’s what
happened to Israel. What happens to us
as believers? The same thing. Here we
are in Christ, we can have blessing, we can have peace, we can have power and
so on, and we can have this great thing called Christ in the heart, the
maturity that is ours as believers. If, however,
we go on negative volition then God can spank and the spanking is described in
Hebrews 12 and the analogy to verse 22 would be the disobedient believer will
be cut off from his blessings in Christ.
He will be a miserable person and there is no one more miserable than a
believer and you know why? Because the
believer is a person who has once failed what real blessing is and now he’s
twice as miserable because he remembers what he could have.
With our heads
bowed….