"Wisdom's War" Proverbs 2 Sunday Evening Worship Service

I'm gonna read Proverbs uh chapter two.

I'm gonna read the entirety of it.

Uh you should know that as I read it, this is all one sentence in Hebrew.

It's a poem, it's uh split into four stanzas, it's split in half.

The first 12 verses or 11 verses are one half, and the second half is another half.

And uh yeah, it's there's in the Hebrew, it's you know Hebrew's kind of loose in the punctuation anyway, but in the uh this poetic structure, there's no periods in it, it just runs the whole the whole gauntlet.

So if you're having a hard time keeping up, I'll give you an outline later.

Uh but just know as you're taking it in.

This is this is you want to be wise, you've got to be able to diagram a long sentence.

My son, if you receive my words and treasure my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understand, yes.

If you call out for insight and raise your voice to understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for his hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of Yahweh and the knowledge of God.

For Yahweh gives wisdom from his mouth, uh Yahweh gives wisdom, and from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding.

He stores up sound wisdom for the upright, he shields those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over by the way of his saints.

Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity and every good path, for wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.

Discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you, delivering you from the way of evil, from men of perverted speech, who forsake the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness, who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perverseness of evil, men whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways.

So you will be delivered from the forbidden woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words, who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God.

For her house sinks down to death, and her paths to the departed.

None who go to her come back, nor do they regain the paths of life.

So you will walk in the way of the good, and keep the paths of the righteous, for the upright will inhabit the land, and those with integrity will remain in it, but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it.

This is the word of God, and it calls us to study it so that we would know wisdom.

In contrast to the majestic, uh intricate structure of Proverbs chapter two, I have a different poem to share with you.

It's got a much more simple structure.

As a child, this was one of my more favorite poems.

It's called Falling Up by Shell Silverstein.

I tripped on my shoelace and I fell up.

Up to the rooftops, up past the treetops, up over the mountains, up where the colors blend into the sounds.

But it got me so dizzy when I looked around, I got sticked to my stomach and I threw down.

This poem has a mesmerizing effect on children because it turns the world literally upside down.

You understand that things that fall go down, and yeah, in this poem, you're falling up.

The idea of a world being turned upside down does have a way of captivating the imagination.

When I was in elementary school and even high school, we would do opposite days.

I don't know if your school had that, and you were allowed to not be in your uniform, and you could do things oppositely.

It was never a real opposite day, though.

Uh you still had to follow all the rules.

Things didn't get turned that upside down.

You know, you they served dessert for lunch and the cafeteria, that kind of thing.

What would a real opposite day at a school look like, I wonder?

The students could give the teachers detentions, uh, email Christian school would beat Trinity, things like that.

And be upside down.

And that's what's behind this poem.

There's this idea that things could be turned upside down.

It intersects with the Word of God, of course, because you understand that things, when they're left as they are, tend down.

Obviously, an object at rest stays at rest, and that's true, and gravity is keeping it there and pulling it down.

You understand that in our closed system, nothing is ever truly at rest with the force of gravity at play.

And the same is true in the spiritual world.

Nothing is truly ever at rest in the spiritual world.

In the spiritual world, things tend down.

The gravitational force of sin pulls things downward.

A mind left at rest will sin.

People left to their own devices will sin.

Things fall down.

Nobody falls up in our world.

Nobody accidentally discovers godliness.

Nobody in a happenstantial manner gets godlier as the year goes by.

The calendars turn and the pages, the daily calendars, you rip the pages off, the months give way to another.

But you don't accidentally grow in godliness.

Left to yourself, you fall down.

And that's because falling down is natural.

That's the way the world works.

Sin enters the world and pulls things downward.

People, meanwhile, are naturally opposed to God's word.

People don't want God's word to pull them up.

You're uncomfortable about it.

You're uncomfortable.

Even kids, you know, sometimes kids don't want to go on vacation.

They don't want to go somewhere nice because they they like their house and they like their mud, is what C.S.

Lewis calls it, which is such a powerful illustration, right?

When C.S.

Lewis describes the kid who doesn't want to go on the cruise because he wants to stay in the side of his house and make mud pies.

He can't even fathom.

He doesn't have the brainwindth to fathom what a Mediterranean cruise is like.

He's happy with his mud, thank you very much.

He'll kick and scream all the way to the airport.

He doesn't want to go to Disney World, rah.

But then he gets there, of course, and he enjoys it.

This is the way our hearts are.

We don't want to grow in godliness.

We're content where we are, thank you very much.

We're happy in the mud, and God's word is trying to pull us up and make us more like Jesus Christ, but we don't want to be more like Christ.

We're actually kind of happy with where we are right now.

People are naturally opposed to spiritual growth.

Cats meow, dogs bark, and sinners sin.

That's the way the world works.

And if you drop something, it falls down, and the human heart, if left alone, will decline.

If you let lying things lie, they lie, they don't fly.

And if you do nothing to promote godliness in your life, you will not grow in godliness because your heart is inclined towards sin.

You can't change your orbit.

Something in orbit, it can't change its orbit.

There was an exception to that, of course.

There is a top secret military space shuttle, highly guarded, although I recognize using this illustration in this context here at Emanuel Lab Research in Washington, D.C., half of you probably work on it, so whatever.

The military space shuttle X-37B, highly classified top secret, and so forth.

It was discovered by a team of amateur astronomers in Arizona as they were tracking what they thought was a satellite and discovered that it was able to change orbit.

Nothing in orbit had ever changed orbit before.

And so they deduced that this must be some top secret shuttle.

They tracked it, it stayed in orbit for years.

And they when it finally landed, it was outed as military space shuttle X-37B.

It is a good reminder for you that things stand out when they change their orbit.

Everything orbits naturally, everything declines down.

But God gives us the capacity in our own hearts to change our orbit.

He gives us our capacity to not incline down like the world, but to be pulled up, to go towards the Lord.

And that's what Proverbs 2 is doing here in the book of Proverbs.

First of all, as I mentioned earlier, Proverbs 2 is one really long sentence.

It is a very complicated poem.

There have been so many PhD dissertations written on outlining this chapter, on describing the poetry of this chapter.

I wouldn't say I read several of them this week, but I did flip through several of them this week.

I scrolled through many of them this week.

There's 22 couplets in this chapter.

22 couplets, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

In that sense, it's like an acrostic.

That's a common form of Hebrew poetry.

You can think of other acrostics like Psalm 119 is has an acrostic to it, parts of Lamentations.

There are other examples in the Bible of acrostics where there's 22 stanzas and they go through the alphabet, but this isn't exactly like one of those.

It's structured like one, it's got the 22 stanzas.

However, the first half, the first 11 verses, all start with the same letter, Aleph.

Instead of going A B C, they all just stay at A.

The second half, verses 12 to the end, you start with Lamed, which is the middle letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

It's obviously very intentional.

It's going to be hard to write a poem that way.

It's going to be very difficult.

A's and L's.

There you go.

Start every line with that.

22 of them.

And so most commentators agree that this poem is structured in a way to show you cause and effect.

That the first half is hammering home the certain cause, the second half hammering home a certain effect.

There's all kinds of diagrams made about this in this chapter where it's, you know, cross lines where you find things in the first half that correspond to things in the second half, but the second half is upside down.

Everything in the second half is about sin and depravity and declining downward.

Where everything in the first half is about escaping the trajectory of godliness and pursuing wisdom.

The idea is that there is a structure between cause and effect.

Second, what's happening in Proverbs 2, if you remember Proverbs 1, is the beginning of wisdom, is the fear of the Lord.

That's the heading of Proverbs 1.

You can know wisdom through righteousness and justice and equity.

Those are the three words at the beginning of Proverbs 1.

And then the rest of Proverbs 1 was the call from a father and a mother to a child to listen to wisdom.

Remember the child that we were talking about, a 12-year-old, is kind of where this is seems to be aimed at.

The 12-year-old's at the top of the street and about to start off on his life.

And his parents are saying, walk in wisdom, don't walk like the world.

And the parents make the appeal to the teenager, soon-to-be teenager, would you follow the Lord?

Be wise, do righteous things.

And then, of course, the person's life goes on, and where does their life go?

It falls down, it trends downward.

And so now you have the voice of wisdom calling out from the top of the street, acting like a door, calling to everybody who's on the street.

So the parents are pleading with their child, but then you have the voice of wisdom pleading with everybody in the world.

Pay attention to me.

If you close your heart to me, you will die.

So it's a dual warning in Proverbs chapter 1.

Proverbs 1 · chapter mention

You have the parents pleading with the child, and you have wisdom pleading.

Wisdom saying, listen, don't throw your life away.

Please walk on the narrow path.

Listen to me.

And remember, wisdom says if you reject me, bad things will happen to you.

You reject me, you go to hell.

You reject me, trials come.

You'll be swallowed by Sheol, Proverbs 1 says.

Wisdom here is personified as the Lord.

Wisdom here is saying that when you have a right relationship with wisdom, you are following the Lord.

And when you reject wisdom, you're on your way to hell.

And so wisdom is really going to stand in through all the first part of Proverbs here, as the Lord Himself.

He's the only one that can say that.

If you have a right relationship with Jesus Christ, you have a right relationship with God.

If you reject him, you're on your way to hell.

And that's how Proverbs 1 ends.

The call of wisdom.

Be made right with God.

Now in Proverbs 2, we're back to the parent speech.

My son, it begins.

And this starts our complicated outline.

As I went through Proverbs 2, this is the way I decided to.

I didn't decide not to go with the diagram.

I was thinking about wheeling a whiteboard out here, but you can't read my handwriting anyway.

This is what I got for you.

And I hope it helps you remember Proverbs 2.

Three ifs, two thens, and one reward.

If, then reward.

There's three ifs, two thens, and one reward in this chapter.

That doesn't correspond exactly to all the English letters, but it does correspond to the Hebrew uses of these words.

I'm gonna pull these out for you.

The beginning of the poem here starts with the three ifs, and I'll give them to you one at a time.

First, if you value wisdom.

And you see this at the beginning of Proverbs 2, verse 1.

Proverbs 2:1

My son, if you receive my words.

Now receive can be a passive sense.

There's no value in reception, but it is a more active sense here because you have to desire it.

You have to put a price on it, a premium on it.

Wisdom is being given by parents, but they can't make you take it.

Parents can't make you take wisdom.

You know the expression, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

You probably can.

You can lead a horse to water, and you probably could make a drink if you were strong enough.

But you can't make the horse like it.

You can't make the horse delight in the water, and such it is with wisdom.

Parents can make their children listen to wisdom, they can make wisdom hit their ears, but they cannot make them appreciate it.

They cannot make them hear wisdom and go, hmm, that's good wisdom right there.

You can't do that.

And that's what this concept of receive is implying.

It's the parent saying, I want you to receive my wisdom.

I'm not just saying I want you to write it down in a journal.

I'm not just saying I want you to have a sign about wisdom on your wall.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom written on your wall.

That's not going to do it.

It's got to get from the wall into the heart.

It's got to get inside you.

And the only way for it to matter inside you is if you say, if the child says, or the teenager here says, Yes, I want wisdom.

I delight in wisdom.

I like it.

I receive the wisdom.

Give me more wisdom.

What do you want for Christmas?

I want wisdom.

That's reception.

Now, who would ask for wisdom for Christmas?

The wise person would, firstly.

Solomon did, remember?

God said, I'll give you whatever you want.

Well, Solomon's like, wisdom, souls.

There's more choices.

I don't need more choices.

Wisdom.

The wise person chooses wisdom because he delights in it, he values it, he puts a premium on it, he wants it.

That's the start of this.

If you receive my words.

Now you know why the child's receiving the words in the second part of verse 1, because he's treasuring.

In Hebrew, this is a same conditional phrase.

If you receive and treasure, receive and treasure are linked together here.

This is the father saying, I'm giving you my commandments.

And this father fears the Lord in Proverbs here.

He's teaching his kids the fear of the Lord.

And so he's conflating here the commandments of God with his own commandments.

You're treasuring up.

He's not talking about what time your bedtime is, or brushing your teeth before you go to bed, or doing your homework before Sunday night.

He's not talking about those kind of commandments here.

He's talking about the commandments of Scripture.

He's teaching his kids how to walk in the fear of the Lord.

And so he's saying, I want you to treasure these.

You've got to receive it.

And you've got to treasure it.

Notice that wisdom here is external to the kid.

This high school student.

Wisdom's outside of him.

He's got to receive something from outside of him to make him wise.

He does not have the capacity for wisdom on his own.

He's got to receive it from outside of himself to become wise.

And he's only going to receive it if he treasures it.

If he retains it, treasuring it as a kind of a retention word that you are looking after it.

And you do this, verse 2 is continuing the same conditional phrase.

You receive it, you treasure it, by making your ear attentive to it.

In other words, you're paying attention to it.

It's important to you.

So you're listening to it.

And you incline your heart to understand it.

So there's a little prep work here.

There's a little uh sowing the ground here, turning over the soil to get wisdom to plant in.

The teenager here has got to turn his ear towards the parent's voice, turn his heart towards the parent's voice to treasure what his parents say and hear them in his head.

And they go from the head, the ear there in verse 2, down to the heart.

We talked about that this morning at the end of the Sermon on the Mountain, didn't we?

Where Jesus says that everybody hears the words, but only those who do it.

It's got to go from the ears to the head to the heart to the hands.

That's what Solomon is saying here.

You want to listen with your ear in verse 2, because your heart is tuned into it.

That's the first conditional phrase.

If you value wisdom.

That leads to the second conditional phrase.

If you pray for wisdom.

Look at verse 3.

If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding.

So here, I don't think the father is asking the teenager here to appeal to him.

I think he's asking the teenager to appeal to the Lord.

You're going to call out to the Lord.

So the parent here is acting like the guy who's not parking the plane, but showing the guy where to park the plane.

That's what the parent here is acting like.

He's not saying, I want to drive the plane for you.

He's pointing.

He's saying, I want you to call out to God.

I want you to point to the Lord.

So, child, son, daughter, listen to me.

I'm trying to give you wisdom, tune your ear to what I say, tune your heart to what I say.

As a result of you tuned in with what I'm saying and my commandments that I'm giving you, I want you, commandment here, number one, to call to the Lord.

Ask him for wisdom.

You know this from James.

If you lack wisdom, ask.

Pray to God, and God will give it to you.

God loves that prayer.

God loves the prayer for wisdom because go back to Matthew 5, the Beatitudes, because when you're praying for wisdom, you're confessing your own bankruptcy, you're confessing your hunger.

You're knocking out like four of the beatitudes just by asking God for wisdom.

Like, I don't have it, I want it, I'm low, I'm hungry for it.

God help, and that's the kind of prayer God loves to answer.

We read earlier in Psalm 34 the eyes of the Lord are looking for the humble.

The person who prays to God and asks for wisdom, God hears that prayer.

The idea behind this, don't lose this, is that wisdom is a gift from the Lord.

God's the one who gives wisdom.

You don't ask Santa Claus for wisdom, he doesn't give you wisdom.

Don't ask your neighbor for wisdom, he doesn't give you wisdom.

And you can ask your parents for wisdom, that's the point of this.

You should ask your parents for wisdom, but guess what?

Your parents, a godly parent, is going to direct you to the Lord.

So, yes, call out for insight.

Raise your voice for understanding.

And this should be a playoff in your mind of how Proverbs 1 ended.

Proverbs 1 was wisdom calling out.

Wisdom, like, hello, look for me.

Now, Proverbs 2, the parent is saying, hey, you try that back, you echo back.

Wisdom calls for you, you call for her.

Let your voices cross, let your voices meet.

Cry out for wisdom.

How encouraging would it be as a parent to hear your son or daughter praying for wisdom?

I'm asking the Lord for wisdom.

Because that is the very thing that teenagers are not often prone to do, isn't it?

They're not often prone to look for help outside of themselves.

But here, this wise teenager is being instructed to turn their voice of prayers to the Lord.

So the first conditional cause is valuism.

The second is to pray for wisdom, to call out, to raise your voice.

The third conditional causes in verse 4 to seek it.

If you seek it like silver and search for it as hidden treasures.

This is a treasure hunt.

You're seeking and searching.

We won't go over to Job 28 right now.

I won't have you turn there.

But Job 28 is the centerpiece of the book of Job.

Job is in Hebrew wisdom literature as well.

In our minds, we often separate Job from Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.

But it is also one of the wisdom books.

And the middle of Job, the center of Job is the main story.

And we often in our minds understand that Job 1 and 2 is the introduction, and the very end of Job is the conclusion.

They parallel each other, but the way Hebrew poetry works is that points you to the middle, and the middle of Job is the main point of the book of Job.

And the middle of Job takes a break from Job's story, if you remember this in Job 28, and tells a story about a mine.

They dig a hole in the ground.

People are swaying on cables over the over the ground.

They go so deep into the ground to look for jewels.

They got cables and harnesses and the whole thing down there as they're pulling jewels out of the mountain.

Think about how much work you would go to to pull diamonds out of the ground.

Where do you go for wisdom?

Job 28 asks.

How much work will you put in for wisdom?

People will build whole cities around the mouth of a mine to find a diamond.

What kind of work would you put in for wisdom?

Well, this is setting you up for Proverbs chapter 2.

Proverbs 2 · chapter mention

Do you value wisdom?

Do you seek it?

It says in verse 4, like silver, do you go after it?

Do you search for it like a hidden treasure?

The backyard of my house is Indian Run Creek that goes by it.

This was the southern border of Union controlled territory during the Civil War.

And the Union troops, of course, would march down uh Braddock Road, which goes by here, and they camped out all over Linconia, so I'm told by people that study this kind of thing, namely Steve Hawley.

And we would have treasure seekers in our backyard, metal detectors.

And we have found somebody like we found.

Found forks, first of all, uh from the Civil War era and cannons and buckshot, and we use them all to uh to filter our drain.

We put them on the drains in our backyard to keep the leaves out of the drain.

I'm sure there's probably a better function for Civil War ammunition than that, but that's the best we've come up with.

It's amazing to me that people will search for that kind of stuff.

Oh, here's a fork for 150 years old.

Yay for the fork.

How much work would you put in for something that has value that actually benefits your life?

That's his third condition.

Would you actually seek it?

Would you search for this out?

Well, listen, before we even get to the two then's here, you need to ask yourself, are you signed up for this?

Before you go to the thens, you can't get to the then's until you go through the ifs.

If you search for wisdom, if you value wisdom, if you pray for wisdom, that's the question.

Does wisdom mean enough to you to motivate you in that direction?

Do you actually want to be a wise person as you're growing up?

Do you want to be the kind of person who's marked by a life of wisdom?

Because listen, it will not happen naturally.

It just won't.

You can go to school, you can lead your life, you can get your college degree, your master's degree, you can get married and have kids and have a good job and provide a happy family for yourself and all that, and you will not automatically grow in wisdom.

It won't happen unless you search it out.

And where do you search for it?

In the word of God, of course, man doesn't live on bread alone.

You find the wisdom to live by in God's word.

And you search God's word, you attack God's word, you scavenge God's word, you plead with God in his word.

You're like Jacob wrestling the angel.

You say, I'm not gonna close your book until I learn wisdom from it.

Teach me.

That's how you approach wisdom.

So many people want to be wise, but they don't want to put in the work for wisdom.

You know, so many players play high school soccer and they go off to college and then they come back and say, you know, I could have played college soccer, but I just didn't want to.

The practices were early and it's a lot of work to go to the gym and all that, so I could have played, but I just I just I couldn't make it to practice and all that.

Well, no, that's what it means to play.

Like that's what it means to be good enough to play.

That's like 90% of it is the ability to actually go put in the work for it.

It's like saying, I want to be wise, I could be wise, I have the capacity to be wise, but I just don't have time to read the Bible.

Well, no, that's what it means to want to be wise.

That's it.

That's it right there.

To read the word and search for wisdom in the word of God.

So those are the three if clauses.

We're doing great on time right now.

Ha ha.

There's two then clauses here.

The first then, then you gain.

If you do those three things, here's the condition, you do those three things, the result, then you gain the fear of Yahweh.

This is verse five.

Then, here's the first then in the sentence.

Verse five.

Then you will understand the fear of Yahweh.

Parallel to that is you will find the knowledge of God.

If you search for wisdom, what you're going to find in your search for wisdom is fear of the Lord.

A trembling before the Lord, a humbling of yourself before the Lord, an acknowledgement that he is the Lord and you are his slave.

You are underneath him, he's the master, you're the servant here, you're the slave.

There's obedience wrapped into this expression.

You will obey what the Lord commands because you fear him.

It's not the kind of fear that results in a reluctant obedience, it's the kind of fear that motivates a holy obedience.

Where you actually want to obey the Lord because you fear him.

That's connected to your love of him, you cherish him.

You want to be like him.

You want to be like the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's the fear of the Lord.

And this requires understanding.

There's no fear of the Lord apart from the understanding of the Lord.

Just like we understand in marriage, the more you know your wife, the more you you love her.

When you only know her little, your love is kind of maxed out.

The longer you're married, the more you grow in the knowledge of your spouse, the more you grow in the love of your spouse.

The same category of truth there is true about God.

The more you know the Lord, the more you fear the Lord.

If you know the Lord little, you can fear him little, or your fear is misplaced.

You know that John says perfect love drives out fear.

That's because, in an ultimate sense, you're gonna be you're reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

But in a more immediate sense, it's the fear of the Lord that sanctifies you, purifies you, and is a motivator towards obedience.

You're not mature right now as a believer, you're immature, and so you see the Lord dimly, but through a glass, and so there remains a fear, but it's a holy fear that motivates you to know him more and serve him more and seek for him more.

That's why it's paired at the end of verse 5 with the knowledge of God.

The fear of the Lord manifests itself here in a personal relationship with the Lord.

The more you know him, the knowledge of God transforms your life.

You are in a relationship with him, you're reading his word, you're praying to him, as you saw in verse 3, you're calling out to him, that's the relationship.

You call out to him with your prayers, he responds to you through the word.

You read the word, you internalize it, you pray back to him.

That's the relationship.

This is 1 Peter 3, verse 18.

1 Peter 3:18

The Son of God came to die for sins in order to bring us to God.

Jesus dies for you for sins to pay your penalty for sin, to make you in a right relationship with him, to bring you to God.

The knowledge of God there, verse 6, is equated to wisdom.

The fear of Yahweh gives wisdom.

That's why it's so important to understand that wisdom here is the Lord.

The Lord is wisdom, the Lord Jesus Christ is wisdom, the fear of God is wisdom.

When you grow in the knowledge of God, he gives you wisdom.

You can't know the Father except through the Son.

And the more you know the Son, the more you know wisdom is the point of verse 6.

Yahweh gives wisdom.

From his mouth, verse 6 says, comes knowledge and understanding.

Well, what comes from God's mouth?

His son.

The word of God comes from his mouth.

The word of God here is equated to knowledge and understanding.

This is why Jesus can say at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, if you hear my words and you do them, you are wise.

Yahweh, his wisdom is the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's knowledge and understanding, and it compels obedience.

It compels obedience.

This then leads, the fear of Yahweh leads to the second then.

Then you have wise living.

Wise living in verse 9.

Then, this is the second reward here, then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity in every good path.

And so these two things are paired.

If you remember in Proverbs chapter 1, verse 3, it said that wisdom is the same three words.

Proverbs 1:3

Do you remember that from Proverbs 1, 3?

The beginning of Proverbs.

Wisdom is seen in righteousness, justice, and equity.

The first sermon in our study in Proverbs looked at those three words.

Righteousness is the moral category that God has, it's what God possesses, and he makes you righteous through faith in Christ.

Justice is the ability to make good decisions.

We talked about how it was muscle repetition, it was putting yourself in different situations over and over and over again, knowing how to respond quickly.

That's what the word justice means here.

It's to be able to render a good verdict.

It's translated in English justice, which is fine because it has a legal connotation to it.

But more than that is this idea that you can put in be put in complicated situations and you know what to do.

You're good at making decisions.

That's the word for justice.

And then integrity.

Remember the word for integrity?

It was the word that's sometimes used of wine that tastes like it smells, it goes down like it looks on the outside.

That's translated integrity.

It means there's a correspondence there between what something looks like and what it tastes like.

Integrity is a great word for that.

Wisdom gives you those three things.

It gives you a righteousness that comes from God through Christ, it gives you good decision making, projecting into the future, and it gives you integrity so that your life looks on the outside like it is on the inside.

That's the reward.

That's the sorry, that's the result.

Those are the then phrases that you get when you're conditioned.

You do this and you do that and you do the other thing.

The result is the fear of Yahweh and wise living.

The fear of Yahweh and wise living.

And the wise living, you can't do this on your own.

Notice you need God's help.

You see God's help in verse 7, where God will be a shield to you.

In verse 8, he will guard you.

In verse 8 again, he will watch over your path.

He'll pay attention to you.

In verse 11, he'll watch over you again.

In verse 11 again, he'll guard you.

So notice that this is not self- you know, generated yourself.

You have the fear of the Lord.

That's not giving you uh that's not giving you the ability to be righteous on your own.

The fear of the Lord is giving you the righteousness that comes from wisdom from the Lord Jesus Christ.

And then God watches over you and guards you.

So you're sinful, you're inclining down, you cry out to God for wisdom, you confess your sins, he makes you righteous, he teaches you through wisdom to make good decisions, he gives you integrity, but that doesn't set you off on a life of your own.

Of course not.

You still are fueled by grace, you're still protected by the Lord.

I was just talking with somebody this week of how in Catholicism, what baptism accomplishes in Catholicism, it washes away Adam's sin.

This is basically the bottom idea.

It's more complicated than that, but bottom idea in Catholicism.

The infant is baptized and that washes away Adam's sin and it starts them off with their own life.

I mean, a fat lot of good, that's gonna do anyone.

I mean, Adam's sin is not my biggest problem, believe me.

Would it were so?

Now I know that my sin is connected to Adam's sin, but that's the idea.

Taking away Adam's sin isn't help me.

So if your wisdom was like I call to God for help, I call to him for wisdom, and all of this is everything, all the conditions are true.

Great, I've done that.

Now I have the fear of the Lord, and now I'm gonna be able to walk rightly, and now God leaves me on my own.

Okay, here's the fear, and now walk rightly.

Good luck out there, Jesse.

Not helpful.

I need more help than that.

I need the Holy Spirit to guard me, to convict me of sin.

Guard is in verse 8.

I need the Holy Spirit to be a shield around me, verse 7.

I need him to watch over me in verse 8.

I need him to watch over me again in verse 11.

I need him to guard me again in verse 11.

I need help.

And the help I need is all after my salvation.

But my salvation is here.

Look at verse 10.

Wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.

This is the conversion of the kid.

This is where this kid is converted.

Yes, he's raised in a family that fears the Lord.

Of course, that's the context of Proverbs.

He's being raised in a family that fears the Lord.

But here's the 12, 13, 14, 15-year-old, whatever age you want to tag on this.

This is what conversion looks like in one of those kids.

And I do fear that too often we lower conversion to a much younger age.

We say they believe in Jesus, they believe the Bible is true, they believe in Jesus, they said the prayer, I led them into prayer, and they believe in Jesus, they're saved now, and we put that at such a young age.

This is what conversion looks like here.

Where the person says, Here's wisdom, it's calling me.

Here's my parents telling me to go to wisdom, and now I'm gonna look at this and hear the voice of the world, that whole street in Proverbs 1.

There's the voice of the world, here's the voice of my parents telling me to go have wisdom, but the parents can't save this kid.

Then there's the voice of wisdom saying, Follow me, value me.

And the kid says, That's the road I'm gonna take.

I want biblical wisdom.

I want the fear of the Lord, I want to pursue God through Jesus Christ, I want the wisdom of God to come into my heart.

That's verse 10.

We often say, you know, there's no New Testament passage that says you should invite Jesus into your heart, and that's true, there isn't one.

That's not that's not a verse.

The closest verse to that in the Bible is looking at you right here.

At this teenager kind of person is standing at the threshold of life and says, I want wisdom in my heart.

That's conversion.

This is the word of God getting planted in your soul.

James 121.

The word of God is implanted and is able to save your soul, James says.

And when that happens, this teenager is gonna look up and say, Knowledge, huh, knowledge of God, that's a blessing to me.

That is pleasant to my soul.

That is pleasant to my soul.

Well, those are the conditions, the three ifs.

Here's the then's that you have the fear of Yahweh, and you have wise living, the capacity for wise living.

And when I say capacity for wise living, remember it's fueled by the Holy Spirit, it's protected by God.

You are not off on your own there.

The Holy Spirit is indwelling you, sealed you, and empowering you, planted inside of your heart, for goodness' sake, and then guarding you in your life.

That's the first half of this chapter.

And that is more than the first half of our time, but that is okay.

That leads to the one reward.

The second part of the outline is easier.

There's only one reward described here.

The reward is that you defeat sin's gravity.

You finally can escape the gravitational pull of sin that pulls you down.

You can escape that orbit of sin, and you are launched into a life of obedience and good works.

The positive word here that's used, the first sign of the reward is in verse 12.

Delivering you from the way of evil.

Way of evil here, that's the normal path, that's the wide road.

That's where everybody else is.

Everybody else is orbiting the sun the same way all the time.

Evil after evil after evil.

They just rotate the sun that way.

You can escape, you can be delivered from that, is the word that's used.

You can be cut free from the power of sin and death.

Now, first, before we get to the freedom, Solomon's gonna describe, or the father here is gonna describe to the teenager what that deliverance looks like.

What does the way of evil actually look like?

And so you get a bit of description.

These descriptions will be expanded later on in the book of Proverbs.

You're gonna get way more about this in Proverbs 5, 7, and so forth.

There's gonna be a lot more about the adulterous woman, for example, but for now we're just getting a broad picture, a description of the way of evil.

The way of evil has men of perverted speech.

Interesting in Hebrew, it's singular, it's the man of perverted speech.

It's evil, it's showing you the cascading effect of sin.

It starts with one person.

You got one kid who's a bad influence, one friend who is a bad influence.

That's how it starts.

But it doesn't stop there.

Don't be silly.

Come on now.

It starts with one friend who has perverted speech, and then that snowballs.

That goes to two friends, that goes to a gaggle of friends.

And you're gonna see the singular turn plural and then a whole swath of people here.

That person with perverted speech, he forsakes the path of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness.

Now in verse 14, the men, the word turns to plural.

So the guy earlier is one guy with perverted speech who's doing sins at night, and he wants to be your friend and cause you to do sins at night.

They're hiding it, is the idea.

They're hiding their sins in verse 13.

It's the ways of darkness.

So it's one friend appealing to your son or appealing to your daughter to go out and do sin in the darkness, but it grows.

By verse 14, they are they, plural, are rejoicing in evil.

They're delighting it.

They were hiding it a second ago.

Now they're delighting in it.

Verse 13, plural now.

Men whose paths are crooked, they're devious in all their ways.

The way of the Lord was straight, remember?

These guys, their paths are crooked and go every which way.

That's what happened.

That's the gravitational pull of sin.

When I say sin pulls you down, remember, littler kids don't really have an appreciation for this.

You know, they reset when they come home at night, so to speak.

When you're starting a teenager, 14, 15, you're starting to see the cumulative effect, the gravitational pull of sin in your life.

Where that one friend grows, the influence grows, and it just can cascade, it can snowball.

So verses 12 through 16 are pulling you down.

And then finally in verse 16, we get the reward.

So you will be delivered from the forbidden woman.

That's the so.

The first so in the in Proverbs 2, the first real reward that's listed there, it's the word delivered.

We saw the word delivered in verse 12, but didn't have the word so in front of it.

Now you got your deliverance in verse 16.

You will be delivered from the forbidden woman.

From the adulteress with her smooth words.

Well, this is the kid, this kid's not married at this point, right?

This is the father projecting out what his life will be like.

If you want to reject wisdom, you're gonna meet the adulterous woman and your life will tank.

This is long before this kid is married.

It's the father saying, You want to be faithful in your marriage.

It starts with the one friend, you're not gonna have an affair with your friend.

It starts with your one friend with perverted speech, but it ends a decade from then with you being unfaithful in your marriage.

Their past are crooked, they're adulterers or adulteresses, they have smooth words, they forsake the companion of her youth.

Remember, this whole thing is addressed to the youth.

So the father's projecting his speech forward in verse 17.

Ten years from now, you'll be married, and if you have not chosen wisdom, you're gonna find a woman who's forsaking her own husband, or a man who's forsaking his own wife.

Why would they do that?

They forget the covenant with God, verse 17 says.

Yeah, they would say they know God, they don't care.

They forgot about their relationship with the Lord.

Yeah, they were they were both raised Christians.

You can have an affair with someone who's raised as a Christian, whatever.

You forget the covenant you've made with God.

Now, I think this this woman here is standing here for the whole, it's obviously a warning about more than adultery.

This woman here is standing in for the whole, you know, Ten Commandments.

She's standing in for all of the sin that you can rebel against God with.

There's a little bit of a sense of works here that we're all doomed.

We're gonna stand on our works.

We're all in a relationship with God where if you sin, you deserve hell and you deserve judgment.

But people forget God and they live for themselves, that heaps up judgment for themselves.

Here, that relationship with God is described as a covenant.

You're in a relationship with God where God knows you and calls you to a life of obedience, and when you reject that life of obedience, you inherit God's judgment.

And when you deserve God's judgment, verse 18 describes what happens.

Your house sinks to death.

Your paths go to the departed.

That line was in chapter one, called Sheol in chapter one.

No one who goes there comes back.

You can't escape Sheol, that was chapter one.

You fall into Sheol, what's gonna happen to you there?

You're stuck there forever and ever and ever.

You go to death, you don't return to your life.

The contrast here between death and life in verse 19, you can't find your way back on the path of life.

You dynamite your life, you dynamite your marriage, you dynamite your family, then what?

Now that is all what the person, listen, the 14-year-old doesn't have a grid for that kind of stuff.

They can't, they can barely plot out what's gonna happen at school tomorrow.

So it is asking a lot to say, like these life choices, when you are 24 or 34 or 44, are gonna look like this.

That's asking a lot.

But that's wisdom.

And so the father here lays it out.

You walk with that friend, it becomes that gaggle, you walk with that gaggle, and in 10 to 20 years, you walk away from your family.

Where do you walk away from your family to?

To death.

To hell, to judgment, apostasy, forgetting God.

That's where the road goes.

So just laying it out for you there, kids.

That's the fork in the road.

Wisdom looks at that and says, I want to do the three ifs at the beginning.

Can I go back to that?

I don't want to go to hell.

I don't want to walk away from my family.

I don't want to dynamite my house.

I don't want those things.

Well, good.

Go back to 14-year-old self here.

You got the fork in the road in front of you.

Choose wisdom.

Choose wisdom.

When the word of God implants inside you, it takes you away.

You escape the gravitational pull of sin.

Here's the final reward here.

It's said a different way.

You're delivered from sin.

You're not delivered to neutrality.

It's not just washing away Adam's sin.

You're not delivered to neutrality.

It's not like God's wisdom rescues you from adultery and then just leaves you there.

Oh no! Remember, idle hands, bad news.

You're rescued, delivered from the way of the unrighteous, and placed in a path of obedience.

You go from the narrow path to the wide path.

You don't go from the narrow path to neutral, or the wide path to neutral.

You don't go from the wide path to neutral, you go from the wide path to the narrow path.

You will now be able to walk, verse 20 says, in the way of the good and the way of the righteous.

So that's one reward.

You defeat sin's gravity.

That means you escape the adulterous woman, you escape the covenant of works, so to speak, and you escape.

You escape.

The way of the unrighteous in hell.

What you get instead is you walk in the way of the good, you keep the paths of the righteous.

Now here's the contrast.

You want to sum up the whole chapter?

You got a long chapter of complicated poetry, all these stanzas, half acrostics, and alefs and llans, every which way.

Cut through all that.

The final two verses, lay out the contrast.

The upright, win.

You want wisdom?

You get the land.

That's a covenantal kind of language again as Israel has entered the land.

Follow the word of the Lord.

It's the fifth commandment in particular.

Honor your father and your mother.

It's the only commandment with a promise.

Obey it and you get the land.

And if you have integrity, there's that word again, you get to stay there.

The wicked, not so.

The wicked forfeit their covenant with God, they forfeit the lands, they will be exiled from the land, they will be kicked out, and the treacherous will be dug out of it, rooted, a shovel will dig them out, and they are kicked out of the land.

So that's a pretty stark contrast.

Speaking of Israel here, it's talking about Israel.

They get the land in a covenant with God, have wisdom, follow God, and stay there and love it.

Or rebel against God and get uprooted out of it like a weed.

Your call.

This is the end of Proverbs chapter 2.

Proverbs 2 · chapter mention

The bottom line of this: if you aim for nothing, you will hit it every time, right?

If you just sit back in life, you will not grow in godliness.

But if you exert yourself to grow in godliness, you will grow in godliness with the help of the Lord, which he promises you.

And when the Lord helps you, he helps you by giving you grace, energizing your hearts, giving you the fear of the Lord.

As you value wisdom and treasure wisdom, you put your eyes on Christ, you grow like him, and you're rewarded by him.

New Testament says it this way, 1 Timothy 6, 6.

There is great gain in godliness with contentment.

But you and I both know it has to be sought and it has to be fought for.

Lord, we're grateful for the great gain in godliness.

There's much to be forfeited in this world through sin, but there is much to be gained through obeying your commands.

The voice of wisdom does go out into the world, it goes to our ears, into our hearts, and it motivates us to lead a life of obedience.

Lord, we want to be found good stewards of what you've given us.

We want to be found as wise, as people that know your word, love your word, and follow your word.

Not because we earn our salvation, of course not, but because we see the uh the fires of hell, the open mouth of Sheol of the grave, and we hear the voice of wisdom calling us away from it.

Help us project out our choices into the future.

We want to be found as wise people.

And give us through your spirit the ability to do that.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.