Proverbs: Fatherly Wisdom & The Fear of the Lord (1:7)

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Wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity, to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth.

Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance.

To understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent.

Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice.

At the head of the noisy streets she cries out, at the entrance of the city gates, she speaks.

How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?

If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you.

I will make my words known to you.

For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.

But whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease without the dread of disaster.

The word of the Lord.

Two questions by way of introduction, I want us to ask this morning.

You've probably noticed we're diving into the book of Proverbs.

Two questions I want us to ask this morning.

Number one, what is the book of Proverbs?

What is this thing?

Number two, what is the book of Proverbs trying to accomplish?

Let's take the first question and get a sense of this book that we're going to be studying heading into this fall.

This is my first time preaching Proverbs.

I've been preaching for the better part of a decade now.

This is my first time preaching Proverbs as my primary text.

I've quoted it dozens and dozens of times in various sermons, but I've never actually cracked this thing open to give a sermon, which, you know, kind of surprised me when I was flipping through the database that I keep of the sermons that I keep.

But uh I was talking to some uh good buddies of mine.

Um we've got a bit of a kind of a it four pastors, including myself, we encourage each other, support each other, help, you know, share wisdom where we can.

Although one uh one one clergy spouse, uh a group member's spouse, named us the Dummies Club, which says a lot about maybe what we're about.

Uh I think that's fair.

But we do our best to offer words of wisdom when we can.

And uh I was sharing with them, you know, this is our plan for the fall at New Song.

We're gonna be traveling through the book of Proverbs together.

And, you know, one after the other said, you know, I've never preached on Proverbs.

This is that's a new one for me.

Because it's a tricky book.

It's a bit of a it's a bit of a different read.

If you've been reading scripture faithfully or regularly, you know, you're probably familiar with Old Testament narratives, and you're probably familiar with the biography of Jesus we see in the gospel, and we're probably very familiar with the way that Paul kind of lays out his teaching, you know, point one, point two, point three conclusion kind of thing, right?

Proverbs reads very differently.

We're gonna find that very, very quickly.

In fact, that's why our study through the book of Proverbs is kind of gonna be grabbing units and sections and a couple verses at a time and assemble them together for the text of our sermons rather than kind of going unit for unit like we did, say, through Galatians.

Because Proverbs is meant to be read differently.

Proverbs is a collection of seven collections of time-tested wisdom concerning real life and how it's lived.

It's a collection of seven collections from chapter one to chapter 31.

It begins with something of an image of a father taking his son under his wing and saying, Son, let me tell you about the importance of wisdom.

And he spends the first nine chapters basically singing wisdom's praise.

The first nine chapters are all about the praise of wisdom.

From chapters 10 to 31, we it kind of shifts into more principles of wisdom.

Here are, you know, kind of quick, punchy, straight to the point bits of wisdom that are meant to be something like something like signs along the roadside or guideposts pointing us in the right direction towards wisdom and where it can be found.

And then the book concludes with this amazing symmetry.

A father sort of takes his son under his wing in chapter one, and it concludes with a with a mother, as it were, taking her son under his w under her wing and saying, Son, let me tell you about the kind of person who puts all the wisdom we've been discussing into practice.

It is a book that's uh, you know, treats its audience as though it's addressing sons.

That's because the book of Proverbs was originally meant to be used to train uh officials' sons in the royal courts.

So if you were royalty or related to royalty, or you served in Israel's uh royal court, then you know your son would be inclined to get an education, and the kind of education he'd get is the book of Proverbs, basically, the way it gets assembled.

But its wisdom is not just meant for the sons of royalty in Israel.

It is wisdom that has universal application and instruction.

God's people are called to be wise people.

Therefore, the wisdom we find here is meant for all of us.

And in fact, I think it's going to lead us deeper into where the source of wisdom can be found.

Okay, so that's a bit of the design of Proverbs here, but one of the things we need to engage with, one of the things that makes Proverbs kind of a unique read, is we're not so much dealing with promises, we're dealing with principles.

When we read scripture, often we go looking for promises, right?

I will never leave you nor forsake you.

That's a promise that we cling to.

And because God does not go back on his promises because he does not lie, because he is not dishonest, we can hold to that promise with confidence, knowing that God will not leave us or forsake us.

Generally speaking, with Proverbs, we're dealing with principles, not exactly promises.

Here's what I mean.

Let's take an example.

Proverbs 16, verse 7.

Proverbs 16:7

When a man's ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.

Let me say that again.

When a man's ways please the Lord, he even makes the Lord makes his enemies to be at peace with him.

Is there truth to that?

I should think there's truth to that, right?

If we are abiding by the kind of character that God calls us to, that conforms to his word, probably we're more inclined towards peace with our enemies than, you know, hostility towards our enemies.

But is that absolutely true?

Are there Christians who do conform themselves to God's word who yet still experience the hostility of their enemies?

Yeah, for sure there are.

So the idea here is we're dealing with general principles that point us in the right direction.

If we cling to them like promises, we may end up misapplying the book of Proverbs, overapplying the book of Proverbs, and not using it in the way that God's intended.

It's meant to be a meditation for us.

It's meant to be general truths that have been time-tested that point us in the right direction.

The book of Proverbs is principally ascribed to Solomon.

You probably noticed that in the first verse, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.

Solomon is basically synonymous.

If you're an ancient Israel, he is synonymous with wisdom and the implications of wisdom.

1 Kings chapter 4, God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all people of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt, which itself is known for its wisdom.

1 Kings 4 · chapter mention

And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon and from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.

In the mind of ancient Israel, Solomon is wisdom.

He is the wise king par excellence.

And so most of what we're going to find in the book of Proverbs either is collected by Solomon from other sources, or it's truth that Solomon himself would have written down as he's reflecting.

But as we zoom the lens out and as we journey through the book of Proverbs, we're going to discover that Solomon is not the only author of the book of Proverbs, that there's also sayings contributed by the men of Hezekiah, who would have been servants, officials, scholars in King Hezekiah's royal court.

There's also King Egar, King Lemuel, and probably the final shape was given by an unnamed editor of this book.

It's a book that has taken shape over time.

You can kind of feel the sense of the sands settling down into something really solid.

That's what we get here in the book of Proverbs.

It's wisdom that crosses time and crosses geography and comes to us ultimately from its divine source.

That's what the book of Proverbs is.

It's a collection of seven collections of time-tested wisdom concerning real life.

And I like that it concerns real life, by the way.

Sometimes, Christians, we get this reputation of being too heavenly-minded that we're no earthly good.

Have you heard of that before?

Proverbs, I think, has to explode that myth.

Proverbs is so ruthlessly interested in life and how it's lived.

It has to prompt us to have our feet on the ground, to be living the wisest and best life that we can to the glory of God and towards our flourishing.

Proverbs is so interested in real life.

And I think you're going to find that over the course of this series.

We're going to take things topically, one thing at a time, and talk about the Bible's wisdom for these real aspects of real life.

Alright, that's question one.

Question two.

What is the book of Proverbs trying to accomplish?

We've already touched on it.

The book of Proverbs is trying to cultivate wisdom.

Hokmah is the Hebrew word, which is just a great way to kind of clear your throat and get things going, so feel free at any time.

It's a great word.

And it's a word that has a big scope to it.

One of the things about wisdom is it prompts us to see things maybe in three dimensions and not just two.

Do you find it's just easier to see things in two dimensions?

I find that.

Right and wrong, left and right, you name it.

There's just give me the divide there.

Wisdom suggests there's a third dimension that requires some investigation, that requires some meditation, that requires that requires a community to have conversation together.

We're cultivating wisdom.

What is wisdom?

One biblical commentator says this wisdom, in you know, the Proverbs sense is a totalizing concept that seeks to bring all of life's activities into harmony with God's created order.

At its core, wisdom's core, is the belief that God made the world in, with, and by wisdom.

The wise, therefore, seek to orient their being and actions to conform to this wisdom.

Do you see how that works?

Wisdom is belongs to God, and it's with wisdom that God brings forth the created order in which we live.

Real wisdom looks like us saying, well, maybe I need to investigate this created order a little bit.

Try and understand its mechanics so that I can live in the grain of God's design and not constantly be butting my head up against it.

Does that make sense?

This is biblical wisdom.

It's investigation, it's meditation.

Here's a much pithier uh definition that I really like.

This is a uh Dutch Reform scholar named Gerhard von Rad, which is just a great name, I think.

Wisdom is becoming competent with regards to the realities of life.

Wisdom is becoming competent with regard to the realities of life.

And friends, I just gotta think the wisdom that we deal with here, wisdom that is time-tested, wisdom that comes to us through the ages, I gotta think that gets more and more important over time and not less and less important.

Would you agree?

Let me ask you this.

Would you agree with me that there is a serious deficit of wisdom in our moment?

Oh my goodness, I did not expect that response.

Thank you.

I think we all see it, don't we?

We all see it when a common pursuit of truth seems to constantly get fall into one gutter or the other of a oppressive uh power or struggle or something like that.

We see it when we see it when political debates on the world stage sound more like children bickering with one another.

Here's let me share this.

We are living objectively, 2024 in the West, here in Canada, in the most prosperous, luxurious, wealthy moment in all of history.

Objectively.

And yet, survey after survey after survey unanimously highlights that anxiety and loneliness and desperation and poor mental health are only increasing over time, especially amongst our youngest generation.

What's that about?

If all wisdom is, is, you know, synonymous with success and wealth, shouldn't we be the wisest people around?

Should we be struggling with anxiety, loneliness, etc.?

There's something in our math that's off here, isn't it?

Maybe there's something we've forgotten that we need to recover.

Maybe there's something that comes to us from a divine source through the ages that can point us in the right direction here.

I think it's more important than ever before.

Wisdom enables us to live better by God's design.

Wisdom enables us to live better by God's design.

It is the competency towards the realities of life that allow us to live better.

That is a lengthy introduction.

So I'm gonna cut two of my points and give you a third.

You can have the director's cut of my sermon afterwards if you'd like.

Here we have a father to a son taking us under his wing and telling us, here's what's so important about wisdom.

Don't miss it.

Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.

Without the fear of the Lord, there is no wisdom.

Not in the mind of the author of Proverbs here.

So probably it's in our best interest to understand what we're talking about when we talk about the fear of the Lord, right?

Here's why I want us to open to Proverbs 1.7.

Wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

This is something like a cadence we'll see repeated again and again through the book of Proverbs.

Proverbs 9 · chapter mention

Chapter 9 restates it this way: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Now, I wonder how that hits our ears.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

So I need to be scared out of my wits if I expect to be wise, right?

What do we mean by fear?

Do we mean terror?

That thing that gets us just to flee and run the other direction as quickly as possible.

Well, you might be surprised, but I'm gonna say, at least partly, yes.

There needs to be a sense of holy hmm.

It's like the old English terrible.

Do you know this?

It's one of those words that has completely reversed its meaning over time.

We hear terrible and we think that's awful.

Terrible, uh, in its you know more etymological origins, means awesome, overwhelming, something like that.

Okay, so there's some kind of sense of holy fear that we ought to recover if we're going to engage in wisdom.

We're gonna get to the rest of the story in a minute.

Hebrews 10, verses 26 to 31 here says this if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there remains there to no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.

Hebrews 10:26–31

And here's the conclusion.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

There is a sense of holy fear there, isn't it?

Maybe that sounds very unlike the way we often talk about the Lord.

But wisdom begins with an acknowledgement that God is overwhelmingly, consumingly holy, other, separate, pure, uncorruptible, eternal, everlasting.

All these ideas are contained in that word.

God is all of these things overwhelmingly so.

And so, yeah.

We stand in awe.

We stand in holy fear.

This is the kind of thing we're giving expression to in Revelation Song, by the way, which we just sang, right?

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.

Right?

Rolls of thunder.

This is the kind of imagery we're giving expression to that with.

So do we run away from God in holy fear, scared out of our wits?

No.

Because Proverbs wants to remind us of God's name, God's name communicates who he is to his people.

We in our English translation read uh the Lord, it's the fear of the Lord, which is more of a kind of title to us, isn't it?

We need to bear in mind that in Hebrew, when Hebrew is translated into English, the Lord, when it's in all caps in our Bibles like that, it's communicating his covenant name, Yahweh, which is inseparable from all his covenant promises that he's made to his people.

Promises not to leave them nor forsake them.

Exodus 34 puts it this way: this is, in the minds of ancient Israelites, there is no more uh, like this is the apex of God's self-disclosure to his people.

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

That's what comes to mind when we hear the Lord.

A God gracious, a God who forgives, a God who's merciful, a God who fiercely, zealously loves us.

That's the Lord.

So we need to bear in mind that yes, there is a holy fear, but this is a gracious God we're talking about.

He does not look for every opportunity to zap us with lightning like Zeus would.

This is a God who is for us and not against us.

He is a holy God who is for us and not against us.

So one commentator concludes that the fear of the Lord is something like reverent obedience.

And a theologian, Michael Reeves, says that this fear of the Lord gives believers a knowledge that no natural-born genius could ever have.

Let's think of it this way.

Who had a bonfire this summer?

Anyone go to a campfire bonfire?

There you go, I love it.

I remember uh number a couple years ago going to a bonfire, we got those flames going probably eight, nine, ten feet high.

It was glorious.

Now, when you go to a bonfire and you go to enjoy the the Warmth and the light, you kind of have that sense of power that the fire has, don't you?

But here's the thing: you see the overwhelming, consuming power of the fire, do you run the other direction screaming?

Generally, no.

If I found that fire in the middle of my living room, I sure would.

But here's where the fire is meant to be located, right?

I'm not running the other way screaming, but you better believe I'm not being flippant or casual around this fire, right?

This is a fire that, uh, well, what do they say, right?

You play with fire, you're gonna get burned.

There's a modern proverb for us.

There's a sense of right relationship to this fire that we can have.

If we want to enjoy its light and its warmth and the community we share around it, then we need to be rightly related.

We need to have the right disposition of our heart, the right attitude towards this fire.

You see where I'm going with this?

Maybe another way to put it uh is like this.

The fear of the Lord is a little bit like uh the love of a little child for their parents.

As they grow up, that child should know.

I knew as a child, my parents fiercely loved me.

There's nothing they wouldn't do to care for me or show me uh compassion, and yet I also knew they weren't my buddies.

And I wasn't gonna pull a trick on them, and I wasn't gonna play them off each other.

You know what I mean?

Never doubted their love for me.

But again, there's a sense of reverent obedience there in how we relate rightly.

We need to see something of a picture of the fear of the Lord in all of this.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because only the fear of the Lord locates the true source of wisdom and reverentially stands to enjoy its warmth and light.

We have holy fear of a holy and gracious God.

And so we stand in awe and reverence, and we stand to enjoy his warmth and his light and his goodness and his grace.

So the application for us over and over again in the book of Proverbs is going to be don't be a fool.

A fool is someone who either flees the other direction in terror or is flippant towards a holy God, casual, neglecting God's holiness.

Don't fall into these gutters, is what the book of Proverbs is trying to say to us.

Wisdom enables us to live better by God's design.

Therefore, we have to begin with how we relate rightly to this God of wisdom, to this holy God of grace and truth and wisdom.

Now let me land here, friends.

When we go through the book of Proverbs, we're going to see the truth that God has revealed through these age-old sayings come to full fruition as the story of the Bible and the history of redemption plays out.

We're going to see that the wisdom that we're being pointed to here in the book of Proverbs ultimately comes to us.

Wisdom is a pursuit, but it's not principally our pursuit, it's God's pursuit towards us.

We actually get a hint of that in verse 20, don't we?

Wisdom cries aloud in the streets, in the markets, she raises her voice.

Wisdom is pursuing us.

Wisdom is calling us to herself, as it were.

Wisdom is calling us to abandon simple and foolish and short-sighted decisions and instead to occupy ourselves with what will cause us to flourish both now and into eternity.

That's what wisdom is doing.

That's the pursuit.

And this God of wisdom, this wisdom that pursues us, ultimately pursues us in Christ.

Christ, we need to understand, is more than just a wise, religious or moral teacher, more than just a particularly wise guy who, you know, said a couple of neat things that we should pay attention to.

The claim of Scripture, the claim of the church, is not that Christ is a particularly wise guy, it's that Jesus Christ is wisdom incarnate.

He is the person of God's wisdom that this image of wisdom crying aloud in the streets only points us to.

We know the face of wisdom when we look at the face of Jesus.

Colossians chapter 2 puts it this way: In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

All the treasures in Christ.

If we want to be captivated, characterized, enmeshed in wisdom, then we have to do business with Jesus.

We have to.

And that's what Jesus is trying to get us to think about in Matthew chapter 7.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention

He's concluding his sermon on the mount, his wisdom sermon, as it were.

And he concludes with an image of a man who's built his house on the rock and a man who's built his house on the sand.

And Jesus is saying, there are two outcomes here.

There are the two outcomes that we see in verses 32 and 33 of Proverbs chapter 1.

Proverbs 1 · chapter mention

The simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them, but whoever listens to me, wisdom, will dwell secure and will be at ease without dread of disaster.

Do you see how that works?

The claim Jesus is making is not just that I have some wisdom to share with you, it's that I am wisdom.

If you want to build a life that will not be shaken by the storms of life when the floods come and the rains come, and we know what that feels like, then you need to build the house of your life on the rock.

Maybe you're here today and you're just considering who this Jesus is.

You're just curious to ask what this guy's all about, what it is we're talking about, then maybe the question you want to bring with you through this journey is this.

Is Jesus the solid rock on which I can build my life?

Does Jesus' promises stand to deliver in a way that nothing else can?

Nothing else seems to.

And for those of us who are committed to following Jesus, here's the thing I want us to bear in mind, because by the way, I get really freaked out about that image about two houses getting blown, one's getting blown over.

Why?

Because I'm always going, boy, am I building on the sand?

Right?

The thing I need to be reminded of is that the strength of the house does not come from the capability of the builder, it comes from the strength of what it's founded upon.

It's the rock that makes the difference, right?

And Jesus is saying, I am the rock.

The integrity of your life is bound up with his if you are in Christ.

If you are in Christ, you are founded upon the rock.

Therefore, sure, you will feel the rains when they come, you will feel the winds when they blow.

But it will be the rock that makes the difference in your life.

He is the rock.

So, friends, this is going to be a journey for us.

Wisdom calls us to live better by God's design.

Let's begin with a holy fear of God that leads us to wisdom incarnate in Jesus.

God be in our heads and in our understanding.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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