The Practical Wisdom of Proverbs (Part 1)

We are launching into our study of the book of Proverbs, and I believe this will be helpful to you in terms of providing practical guidance and instruction in a number of very important areas. Proverbs is a practical component of Scripture. It is a part of the Wisdom literature found in the Old Testament—along with Job and Ecclesiastes—and it occupies a central place in that literature. It is designed to give us a sense of purpose and understanding of practical holiness, a practical application of wisdom and skills in life, showing us that there is a universal and comprehensive sense to the maxims and precepts in this book. Proverbs talks to everyone; they are universal and generalized statements that tell about life. Even though individual cases differ, the principles are still broadly true and broadly correct. It has been said that a proverb is a short sentence based upon long experience.

When we look at Proverbs we are going to realize that it is divided into two major areas. I believe it was Robert Benchley who said that there were two kinds of people in the world—those who consistently divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not. As we look at the proverbs, we are going to see as well that they are constantly dividing into two kinds of people: those who follow the wisdom of this world and those who follow the wisdom that God provides for them— those who order their ways under eternal principles and those who do not. It is the wise and the foolish. We will see that wisdom isn’t so much a matter of intellectual perception; it is really more about moral acumen, moral discernment, and moral skills. We will see that it has a lot to do with the notion of depending upon God versus autonomous living, those walking in dependence upon God and those choosing to live their lives in some sort of autonomy.

It has also been said that “…a wise man learns from the mistakes of others; nobody lives long enough to make them all himself.” Consequently, we must learn from the wisdom of other people. The problem, of course, is that it is often easier to be wise for others than it is to be wise for ourselves. We are long in giving advice to other people and short in gaining insight for ourselves. It is interesting how we are foolish when it comes to our own situations and how we look back on our mistakes, discovering how really dumb we were.

A poem by Sara Teasdale I recently came across puts it this way:

When I have ceased to break my wings

against the faultiness of things,

and learned that compromises wait

behind each hardly opened gate,

when I can look life in the eyes,

grown calm and very coldly wise,

life will have given me the truth,

and taken in exchange -- my youth.

So, it does take time to gain perspective, and this is summed up in that old Pennsylvania Dutch proverb: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Somehow there is the notion that youth is wasted on the young. The idea behind that is that when we have our virility and our power and all of our potential, it doesn’t seem that we use it as well as we know we could have used it—if we could only go back and take what we now know and apply it to the years gone by. Wouldn’t that be great? Of course, the reality is that you could never do that because it took all those years to acquire what you have. It takes time—a lifetime—to gain real skill in the art of living life.

Proverbs is designed to give us some preventive as well as corrective medicine; they are designed to prevent foolish things by helping us live and learn—but also to learn and live. This is a theme I will be stressing again and again; they really encourage us not simply to live and learn; they tell us that it is also wise to be people who learn in advance as much as we can. That is why Proverbs has been given to us—to give us instructions on skill and, standing on the shoulders of giants, to gain some practical insight on how we ought to order our path. This was something much more common in Old Testament times than it is today. Today it is far less common for us to focus on the idea of acquiring wisdom. Today we live in an age where we are more interested in data—where data produces information and then that information overcomes knowledge. Today when you go for a university education you don’t see many courses on wisdom. In fact, if anything, a university education is now designed to equip us for the folly of autonomy—the idea that we can order our own pathways, doing pretty much whatever we like to do.