Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Proverbs 1:1-9

Sermon text today is found in Proverbs chapter 1 verses 1 to 9. Proverbs 1:1-9. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

The Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel: to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity, to give prudence to the simple, to the young men knowledge and discretion. A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel.

To understand a proverb and an enigma, the words of the wise and their riddles: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of your father and do not forsake the law of your mother, for they will be a graceful ornament on your head and chains about your neck.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this wonderful book of the Proverbs. As we grab a hold of it now and over the next six talks, we pray your blessing upon us, Father, as we try to attain to that wisdom. We cry out for wisdom as we’re instructed to do in the context of this book. And we pray that you would answer our cry, Lord God, and minister wisdom—the wisdom of our Savior—to us. Help us, Father, to know how to live our lives in beauty, in grace, and in wisdom before you.

We pray your blessing upon us, Father, as we look at the text of Scripture today in the Proverbs. Illuminate our hearts with the grace of your Holy Spirit that we may indeed be transformed and may become wiser. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

This first section of our six-part series in the book of Proverbs follows appropriately after the last few sermons I’ve done on marriage and the marriage relationship. We began our service with a processional that describes the marriage feast, the supper of the marriage—the supper of the Lamb—that we’re all invited to every Lord’s day. We’ll conclude today with the final song being about how well-fed the Lord Jesus Christ permits us to be in the context of worship.

And Proverbs is a book that is intentionally somewhat enigmatic. It is a book that is to be chewed upon, to be meditated upon, and is difficult to understand in its completeness, of course, but it’s also a book that has some pretty big themes laid out—particularly in what we’ll be looking at this morning, the first nine chapters. And one of the biggest themes is: it calls us, I think, these first nine chapters—the introduction to the formal proverbs themselves—it calls us to the question of who do we embrace? Are we embracing Lady Wisdom, or are we embracing the harlot?

I don’t want to take away the very specific and very direct application to young men in terms of preparation for marriage and young women. Nor do I want to take away from those aspects of these first nine chapters, which we’ll look at in a minute, that talk about the need to avoid harlotry and the adulteress and the strange woman. I also don’t want to take away the strong warning that it is to husbands in the obvious and first sense of the text.

I’ve counseled many a man over the last twenty years who have difficulty in this area. I read a thing this last week that men are kind of reproductively hardwired in terms of their appreciation of the beauty of women. And that is true, and that is to be focused upon our wives. And so I don’t want to take away the strong warning that this sounds, because I know that over the last twenty years I’ve counseled a lot of men who have difficulty in this area.

And sexual temptation and sin is not something you want to coexist with. It’s not something you want to be doing a little better at this week than you did last week. It’s something you want to put a wooden stake through the heart of—the wandering eye—particularly in the context of our culture today and the easy access of pornography and the strange ways people have of expressing themselves sexually—the homosexual marriage thing, et cetera.

So I want to certainly—if nothing else today, if the rest of my talk confuses you—at least go away with a renewed appreciation for the need for fidelity in your relationship and the need not to coexist with sin in this particular area of your life. Cry out for wisdom. The elders of the church can give you wisdom and accountability in this area.

So I want to leave that in place. But on the other hand, I also think that what’s going on in these first nine chapters is kind of an introduction to grab our attention, to make us cry out for wisdom, to give us a little analysis of what that looks like. And the service itself—the Lord’s day service—is a continual reminder of what these first nine chapters tell us: that is, to embrace wisdom, to embrace the wisdom of Christ, and to shun the wisdom of the world.

And so that’s at the center as we’ll see in a minute of this introductory chapters of the Proverbs. So it figures and follows correctly upon what we said the last couple of weeks about marriage. I know that last week I preached on how to make your wife submissive. But I will certainly do a sermon for wives on how to make your husbands love you sometime in the next few months.

So we’ll do that, and I’ll have some wisdom in that area for you today as we get into the center of this introductory section of chapters 1 to 9.

There is this joy in community that is a necessary adjunct to wise living in our homes. In other words, we said last week that marriages exist in the context of an extended community, and that community is important.

I saw an article recommending we perhaps think about changing our honeymoon practices. Apparently in the Jewish community there is this thing called the seven blessings. And after a couple gets married, they don’t immediately leave by themselves for a week or two someplace far off away from everybody else. They integrate into community as a couple first. The first seven days after the wedding are seven days of blessing. Each night they’re invited over to a different family’s house—an older couple, and maybe a couple of other couples might be invited as well. And they’re given wisdom from an older married couple each of those first seven nights.

And the nice thing about that is it trains the couple immediately that marriage will only exist properly and is best supported by the covenant community of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then later the couple would go off by themselves for a honeymoon.

I’m not suggesting we have to start doing that or anything, but I think that the idea of it is a good one and a sound one—that it is this need to see marriage directly related to the community.

Proverbs is about how to live wisely. We all want to live gracefully, beautifully, wisely in the context of our lives. And Proverbs tells us that this is really to be seen in the context of the extended community as well. This relationship we have with Christ—this personal relationship—is certainly at the core of wisdom. Wisdom goes beyond the law of God.

I remember years ago we had Greg Bahnsen at our family camp, and he of course wrote a book called *Theonomy and Christian Ethics* that many of us were pretty influenced by. We came to a renewed love for the law of God as found in the entire Scriptures, including the Old Testament. We came to a renewed appreciation for the need for these standards on how to not just govern our personal devotional lives, but that the law of God provides instruction and truths in terms of our civil structures and our church. And so we came to all of that, and we really became people that love the law of God.

I remember when we had Greg in to teach at family camp on wisdom and the Proverbs, the first thing he said was: the law is not enough. And here’s the guy who wrote the book *Theonomy and Christian Ethics*, calling the church back to loving the law of God and seeing its importance to us. And yet he said that the law is not enough. We have to be wise in how to apply the principles of God’s law in difficult and complex situations.

And so this book is important to us. And as we look these next six weeks at the wisdom found in Proverbs, our prayer is that God might use it to cause us to mature in our wisdom—that we might see our lives as beautifully, graciously lived in connection to our relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ as mediated to us in the context of our personal relationships as well.

Now, this book is part of the poetry section—so-called—of the Old Testament along with Job and Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. It has its place in that particular grouping of literature. It’s not written as a law code. As I said, we read, for instance, in Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5:

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

So if we took this as a series of law commands to us, we’d be very confused. These are deliberately placed here, I think, among other things, to remind us that we’re dealing with wisdom literature, not with law and specific commands.

There’s a time and a place to answer a fool according to his folly. It’s wisdom to do so. And at other times, it’s wisdom not to answer him according to his folly. You know, you can show them the silliness of what he does by repeating back his arguments to their logical end. But then we also want to show them that the fool who doesn’t base his understanding on wisdom, but rather on something else—we want to show them a better way. So there’s a time and a place for both of those things.

And we have wisdom literature here. And it’s wisdom literature that’s meant to be meditated upon and chewed upon, to be thought through.

One of the most difficult things in the Proverbs is a big word that people use who study the Bible. Pastors talk about it: *pericope identification*. Big words. It just means: where are the sections, the units together? We’ll see the value of that as we get into the text a little bit here in a couple of minutes.

You remember last week we identified a section of Ephesians that began and ended with the call for wives to submit to their husbands and wives to respect their husbands. That was a complete unit, and it’s easy to see those in the epistles. Harder in the Proverbs, and in fact some people think there are no units after we get into chapter 10. That isn’t true. There are at least some very obvious large units that we’ll talk about in a little bit.

But even a meditation on the Proverbs as you read through them and try to think through how do these things string together—that is accomplishing the purpose of the Proverbs. It’s getting you to meditate on these specific little nuggets and their relationship to one another, which is the way you achieve wisdom: through a quiet meditation of what God instructs us of in this book given to make us wise.

The very beginning of one of the sections that we’ll talk about in a minute of the Proverbs is Proverbs 25:2. This is the first proverb of the so-called Hezekiah collection, and it says:

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.”

So, you know, if you’re going to be mature, you have to understand that God has concealed things. And like gold is arrived at through digging usually, so the goal—the wisdom that is much more precious and valuable than gold—has to be dug out. It has to be meditated upon. God has deliberately concealed it. And he calls us to be mature kings and to search these matters out, to pore diligently over the text, meditating upon what it is and what it isn’t, and achieve wisdom as a result of that meditation.

Now, we’re going to talk about wisdom and the things we’re supposed to do to mature in wisdom. But we have to keep in mind another one of these poetry books or wisdom literature: Ecclesiastes. It is in a sense the bookend to Proverbs.

Proverbs, as we’ll see in a minute, is written to young men with the primary audience. Proverbs says you can figure an awful lot of things out in life: if this, then this. Don’t do this because of this. And it lays out all this stuff, and it says you can figure it all out. You can be wise and know how to approach a fool, a sluggard, a scoffer—you know, a different people are like, and how to talk about them differently. A proper biblical categorization is part of what goes on in Proverbs.

But the complement to this is Ecclesiastes. And Ecclesiastes, as you know, says you can’t figure anything out. Ecclesiastes is written to mature men in their, you know, past—in the time of the darkness of the soul, that troubled time, midlife crisis our culture has called it. People have, you know, 40, 45, 50, and they understand that yes, there’s an awful lot about life that can be understood and discerned maturely and wisely. But still, life is enigmatic. Life is not able to be figured out totally.

So there’s, you know, the other side of this Proverbs coin is the Ecclesiastes one, and it’s a reminder to us: Yes, we’re supposed to diligently try to search out wisdom and cry out and try to attain to her. But there’ll be many things in life that reflect the complexity of our Creator God that we will not be able to figure out.

So that is a kind of by way of introduction to this particular book, and I do think it’s important that we understand this book and what its intent is.

It can be said to be God’s inspired officer training manual. How do we achieve a wisdom to make judicial decisions? For instance, how do we attain wisdom to decide what to do in the context of a position of authority, whether it’s in the church, the state, and the home? Well, this is the book that tells you how to grow up. This is a book that’s important to our culture because we live in times that R.J. Rushdoony has characterized as a revolt against maturity—a continuing immaturity in our culture.

God has called us to lead the culture. The Christian church is to be involved in cultural leadership. And we do that by becoming wise, mature people that know how to make good decisions. And we cannot do that, I don’t think, without a careful study and an exposure of ourselves to and a seeking out and a crying out after the wisdom of our Savior as found in this book. So it’s an important book for us—vitally important. It is the inspired officer training manual.

And we’re trying more and more—I’m trying more and more—to integrate parts of this book into the formal process for elder training and evaluation. For instance, that’s a long-range goal of mine over the next twenty years: to try to integrate more and more of this into that use.

Ultimately, of course, what we’re talking about today is not some kind of abstract Greek notion of wisdom. And these first nine chapters, including the stuff we just read responsibly, help us to avoid that kind of folly, right? I mean, wisdom is pictured as a woman that we’re supposed to embrace. And on the other hand, folly is portrayed as a harlot or an adulteress that we’re not supposed to embrace and warned against.

And so wisdom has this intensely personal aspect of it.

Ultimately, of course, Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God. 1 Corinthians 1:24 says that Jesus Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. So Jesus is wisdom incarnate, as it were.

Colossians 2 says:

“I want you to know what a great conflict I have for you and for those in Laodicea and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh—that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the knowledge of the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in the Lord Jesus Christ. So we don’t want to approach Proverbs apart from Christ. And we also, however, on the other hand, don’t want to think we have a good personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ if we ignore the wisdom that finds its fulfillment in him—if we ignore the wisdom in the Proverbs as well.

So our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ is matured as we focus upon the wisdom and the attaining of that wisdom given to us in this book of the Proverbs.

Let’s look at the first few verses that I read, beginning in verse one, and we’ll look at kind of the introductory material.

Actually, before we do that, turn your outline over, and we’ll talk a little bit about these sections in which the Proverbs are composed. Now there are seven of them. Most commentators—not all of them, but most—agree there are these seven sections, and they’re pretty easily defined.

We know, for instance, that Proverbs ends with the sayings of Lemuel, that great acrostic about the virtuous woman, and that’s a whole chapter at the end. We know that chapter 30 isn’t written by Solomon either. It’s written by some person named Agur, or at least going by that name. So we know that’s a separate section, right?

Now what you may not know as well is that in Proverbs 25, verse 1, we have clearly marked the section description there too. Turn to Proverbs 25:1. And what we read here is:

“These are the proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out.”

And then we have verse 2 that I read earlier. So now this is a section header, and it goes—nothing else stops this section—until we get to chapter 30, where the sayings of Agur are recorded for us.

So this section, 25-29, is clearly a separate section of the Proverbs. And these are proverbs of Solomon copied out by Hezekiah’s men. That’s about 300 years after Solomon wrote his proverbs. According to 1 Kings 3, Solomon wrote 3,000 or more proverbs. He wrote that many. Nowhere near that many are found in our book. Maybe about 500 or 600 or so. But out of those, we have some recorded for us in the book of Proverbs.

And these particular sections, chapters 25 to 29—200 years later, these manuscripts of Solomon’s 3,000 proverbs are still lying around, and Hezekiah’s men take them and put together another collection of Solomon’s proverbs. Now the Lord God is using Hezekiah’s men to produce part of our inspired Scriptures. So this is a completely separate section that was actually composed and put together and edited into this form 300 years after Solomon dies. So these are probably put together about 700 BC.

So in the last half of the book, there are these clear sections: Hezekiah’s stuff, Agur’s stuff, Lemuel’s stuff. In chapter 10 begins clearly a section. Look at chapter 10, verse 1. It says:

“The proverbs of Solomon.”

That’s a header. It’s inspired. That isn’t put in there by your editor of your translation. That’s the inspired word of God saying: now these are the proverbs of Solomon. So one to nine form an introduction. Then we have these specific proverbs of Solomon that go on till about the middle of chapter 22. And then after that we have Hezekiah’s stuff.

Now turn to chapter 22 and look at verse 17:

“Bow down your ear, and hear the words of the wise, and apply your heart unto my knowledge, for it is a pleasant thing if they dwell within you.”

So there now we have a separate section as well. It’s not quite as clear as the other ones, but this is now talking about the words of the wise. Verse 20:

“Have I not written unto you excellent sayings?”

And what we’ll see when we get to this in a couple of weeks is that there are very specifically a set of thirty proverbs that are called the words of the wise. We’ll see that as we get to that section of the text.

So we’ve got an introduction. Then we have the proverbs of Solomon. They go on to about the middle of chapter 22. And then we have a whole another section called the words of the wise. They go on to the end of 24. And then we have Hezekiah’s collection of Solomon’s proverbs. And then Agur and Lemuel. These are very clear delineations and breaks in the book of Proverbs that show us these are indeed sections that are unique unto themselves.

Now go back then to what we read earlier. And we read in the first few verses very clearly an introduction to the book, right? It tells us who the author is. Proverbs, chapter 1, verse 1, tells us their purpose: to know wisdom and instruction, perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity. And then it tells us the audience: to give subtlety to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.

“A wise man will hear and will increase learning. A man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels. To understand proverbs and interpretation, the words of the wise, their dark sayings.”

So this is like a formal introduction—short and pithy.

Now, the next break—I’m not sure. But by the time we get to verse 8 or 10, we have a specific phrase that begins to be used throughout the book: “My son.” Verse 7:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of your father and forsake not the law of your mother. For they shall be an ornament of grace upon your head and chains about your neck. My son, if sinners entice you…”

And then it goes off and starts to develop some major themes. So it seems to me that we have this opening formal introduction that goes on for a few verses. Then we have an extended introduction, which many commentators call the “my son” section. And now we don’t have this formal heading of who wrote it, what’s the audience, what’s the purpose. Now we have a discussion specifically to the son. And those then lead up to the proverbs of Solomon, which again stress “my son.”

So based upon this, I provided a seven-part outline of the entire book. And this is as I said, nothing much controversial about this. Some people may break it a little differently, but I think it pretty readily falls into seven sections.

Now, to help you in memorizing these seven sections, it’s good to know what section you’re in when you’re reading a proverb, right? Because each section has a little different spin to it. I think that it’s proper to connect these seven sections to the seven days of creation. And most of you know by now and have heard us talk a little bit about the seven days of the creation. These are a major theme. This is the way the Spirit of God moves in creation and recreation and establishing things.

When we look at the seven feasts of Israel, they connect up very obviously with the seven days of creation. God is training Israel in the Old Testament that what the liturgical activities she engaged in were really to be seen in terms of a new creation. And I think that if we look at the book of Proverbs in these seven sections connected to the seven days of creation and the seven feasts of Leviticus 23, it helps us to kind of keep in mind that what we’re dealing with here is that wisdom from above. It’s the wisdom of the new creation. It’s the wisdom that Jesus Christ will put into full effect, as it were, and minister to us in the fullest sense as he ushers in the new creation of God.

It’s that wisdom from above. It’s the wisdom of the new creation. You know, the world has its wisdom based upon intellectual attainment or savvy and what’s good and what’s bad. And Donald Trump is maybe the modern picture of that worldly wisdom. It’s wisdom from below. It’s wisdom from the old creation. And we want to embrace not that harlotry wisdom. We want to embrace the wisdom of the new creation centered in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so this sevenfold outline of Proverbs helps us to remember that we’re learning about new creation wisdom.

Now, the formal introduction is similar to the Sabbath. And when God says, “Let there be light,” the Sabbath begins the cycle. In Leviticus 23, we have the transcendent work of God coming to establish a new creation. And here Solomon represents that light—that coming. He’s the transcendent one who brings this wisdom. And remember that Solomon had asked for wisdom and was granted it by God. So we have here divinely inspired wisdom being brought to us at the beginning of the book. This transcendent wisdom of God.

And then the “my son” introduction, as we’ll see more in a couple of minutes, we’ll see it really over the course of this whole six sermons. What God tells us is that the way the world works is there’s two kinds of paths out there—just like Psalm 1 begins with two paths, and we recited that or sang that recently. So Proverbs begins after the formal introduction by saying there’s two paths. There’s two kinds of women. There’s two ways to use your tongue. There’s two ways to attain wealth and go after success in business. There’s a worldly way that leads to death, and there’s a godly transcendent heavenly new creation wisdom found ultimately in the person and work of Christ that leads to life.

Now on the second day of creation, God places the firmament and separates the waters above and the waters below. The second feast was the feast of Passover when you either were under the blood or you weren’t. You’re either God’s heavenly people or you were in that old creation fallen state. The firmament brings division.

And as the Proverbs begins its exposition of what wisdom is, it goes for nine chapters telling us that there is a division in the world. That there is built into the structure of the world opposition and antithesis—two paths. And it encourages us. It drives home over and over the fact that you’re on one path or the other. You’re embracing one woman or you’re embracing the other woman, okay? And this is driven home in this formal—or rather, this “my son” introduction.

So it connects up with that second day of creation.

The third section of Proverbs—chapter 10, verse 1: “The proverbs of Solomon.”

These are the beginnings of the proverbs of Solomon. More will come later from Hezekiah’s men. And these are like the first coming up of the proverbs of Solomon. On the third day, all vegetation didn’t happen. God made—separated the land and the water—but then he brought up vegetation. And the third feast of Leviticus is the feast of First Fruits. Jesus is our First Fruit. And so the beginning of these things happens in section three of this book.

And what we’ll see when we get to this in a couple of weeks is that these proverbs are different in kind from the proverbs that Hezekiah’s men produce in the fifth section of this book. The proverbs in the first section are simple. They’re mostly a series of contrasts: this but this. We’ll notice that next week in our responsive reading—the word “but.” It’s these obvious contrasts that are given to us in chapters 10 through the middle of 22. It’s fairly simple stuff.

But how does the fifth section compare? The second collection of Solomon’s proverbs—remember how they began what I just mentioned to you in verse 2 of 25? This is going to be tough. These are enigmatic sayings. “It is the glory of God to conceal these things, but it is the glory of kings who have become mature to search them out.” And we see that with Hezekiah’s collection. These are kingly proverbs. These are proverbs that are difficult. They’re harder to understand than the first section. And they’re more mature.

But we’re moving from immaturity and learning the beginning stages of wisdom in the third section to finally becoming mature by that fifth section. There’s a movement to the book of Proverbs. There’s an arc, as it were, to it. And that arc is that we’re moving from being a son—”my son, my son, my son”—to finally becoming a king.

Now the son of a king is a prince, right? And a prince is meant to become a king. Proverbs is given primarily to teenagers, post-puberty youth, to train them how to be kings in their castles at home, to train them how to be rulers in the church, in the state. That’s what it’s made for. And so that is accomplished as the book moves ahead. It does so in a progression from relatively simple domestic proverbs to more difficult, civil, and reigning kingly sort of proverbs in Hezekiah’s collection—put together by another king, Hezekiah.

And when we finally get to the end of the Proverbs by the seventh day—the Sabbath was to be a day of enthronement. The seventh feast was the feast of Booths, the great harvest festival at the end of the year. Everything’s brought to completion by that time. We have Lemuel speaking. And who is he? He is a prince who has become a king. And you know how he did it? By listening to his mother. It says that Lemuel—these are what his mother taught him. And then Lemuel expounds the virtues of a godly wife.

We move from princes to kings by way of embracing the right kind of wisdom, embracing and finding the right woman—a gift from God—listening to our mothers. And in all this, we’re becoming wise enough to rule. And so Proverbs moves that way—from a son here who needs to hear the parents to a son who has heard the words of the mother and finally become a king, and not only a king, but a godly king with a great wife.

And the proverbs move that same way: these fairly simple, less mature domestic stuff in Solomon’s first collection, and the kingly stuff in the second collection.

This points out our need for these Proverbs today in our culture, doesn’t it? The church has for the most part abandoned cultural leadership, and we need to exert ourselves in terms of cultural leadership. We don’t need just to finish by having good families. What we’ll learn in the Proverbs is there is a movement from establishing vocation and having a good family. But the third leg of that three-legged stool is exercising power and influence in the palace, in the community, in the culture in which we live.

Now, in order to do that though, we’ve got to be mature. In order to be granted that kind of ability to change the culture, we have to mature from being simple people to wise people. And it doesn’t happen just through age. It happens through an understanding of this book. It happens through loving the Lord Jesus Christ. And understanding that our great desire to have relationship with him will be met as we read his wisdom that’s now unpacked for us in this book called Proverbs.

And as we cry out for that wisdom from God, we’ll receive that wisdom. And as a culture and as a people, we will be matured. And we’ll learn how to rule in the context of the world.

Now, the very center of all of that seven parts—moving into a center, coming back—we’re moved from a son to a king. We’re moved from two paths to being humbled before God. Agur is a humble man—sixth day of man’s original creation and probable fall. And Agur is a humble guy. It’s completely different than Lemuel. It’s a movement, and the movement hinges around this center section of thirty sayings of the wise.

Just like the rest of the book, they go from diligence in vocation to establishing a home, and then the last ten sayings have to do with civil rule. So this book is a beautiful book. It puts before us as a goal creating a new world. It puts before us this prophetic idea that the voice of God’s people is intended by means of our speech and how we use speech to speak a different existence into reality in our communities.

If we’re surrounded in our communities by devolution, it’s because the church has lost her voice. The church has become immature. The church needs to mature, and so do we. And the way we mature is by attending to this book and seeing Christ ministered to us in the context of it.

So that’s a chart you can look at in your homes. I would recommend you keep it in some permanent place. I hope you have some permanent place where you keep study aids and study notes for your Scripture study. And this is one I think that is useful to you on a variety of levels and to review regularly. Husbands and wives, as you go over the Proverbs with your children, this is a good thing to keep in mind as you do that.

All right. Now let’s look at the first two sections—then the first section is this rather formal introduction. And then we’ll spend a couple of minutes looking at the second section.

The formal introduction, and I’ve already gone over most of this: the author is given to us. This is Solomon. He is the son of David. He is a king of Israel. So this is a book of covenant language, right? He’s the king of a covenant people. And this book is addressed to covenant people. So that means covenant people of which you have two paths in front of them.

It’s interesting that in that first collection of Solomon’s proverbs, there are exactly 375 proverbs in chapter 10, verse 1 through 22:16. 375—and that is the same as the numerical value of Solomon’s name in the Hebrew. No mistake there, no coincidence. The Scriptures are definitely written with these kind of associations to help us in our memorization. So Solomon is the one whose imprint is upon this book. Now a couple of parts of it are written by others, but this is basically Solomon’s book.

And then we have the purpose of the book: to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity. And right away we’re told that wisdom is not abstracted from how we live our lives. The wise man in the Scriptures is not the fool on the hill that sits back like a philosopher and never engages. No, because here it says: to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, equity—application to our culture.

God says that it is the fool who doesn’t apply what he knows in terms of that culture. Biblical wisdom is wisdom in the context of relationships, in the context of applying God’s law and equitable, just, properly judging things and our discernments and evaluations. So wisdom is immediately put in an ethical context for us here and will be in the rest of this book.

Verse 6 says: “To understand a proverb, an enigma, the words of the wise and the riddles.”

And there’s a progression here as well. Proverb—fairly simple, comparing things but using words to describe something, throwing two things alongside of each other. Other enigmas, and then finally the riddles that have to be dug through. There’s this progression again to the Proverbs that’s given to us in its very purpose statement.

So this is to develop mental clarity and perception—to perceive words of understanding. Mental clarity is aided by this book. Beyond that, moral discernment and discretion—and might be able to end up with an ability to rule in the context of our homes and culture.

The audience is given as: to give prudence to the simple and to the young man knowledge and discretion. Now, wise men will also hear and increased learning. A man of understanding will attain wise counsel. But the primary audience is the young people—the naive ones who by reason of age are still young, immature, and to a degree foolish.

The young man will get knowledge and discretion. The simple one will be given prudence. He’s not simple because he’s an idiot. He’s simple because he’s young. He’s uncomplicated. He’s unlearned. But the whole point is that this book then is given to post-puberty boys primarily—application to girls, of course, is there—to make wise men out of them, to make rulers out of them.

And then in verses 7 to 9 is the summary statement:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of your father. Do not forsake the law of your mother, for there will be a graceful ornament on your head and chains about your neck.”

Usually verse 7 is abstracted out from verse 8. I’ve kept them together in the way I look at them here because to say “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—you know, okay, so I have reverence for God. I fear God. I have reverence for him. Well, do you? Well, you do if you know in verse 8 whether you do that or not.

Do you hear the instruction of your father? Don’t forsake the law of your mother? If you think you have reverence for God, whom you’ve not seen, and don’t hear the instruction of your parents and obey the laws—remember, this is teenage boys he’s writing to. And right out of the chute, he says: to have reverence for God is to obey your mother. Hear the instruction of your father. Obey the law of your mother. Allow yourself to be commanded by a woman. Toughest thing for teen boys to do, but that’s what it says.

And this is the indicator whether you fear God or not. And if you rebel against your mother’s commands or aren’t interested in hearing the instruction of your father at your teenage years, well then you haven’t the reverence of God, and you’ve missed the summary statement here.

Summary statement is: have reverence for God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Do that by paying attention to your parents. And guess what? God always promises these wonderful blessings to us. And that is the same here.

Now, let’s look at the next section, the longer section. And we can’t look at it in any kind of detail. I’ve given you an outline here again that helps us to kind of put it together. And as you read through the Proverbs, if you read through them this week, you’ll see I think the structure itself mark itself out pretty clearly. We’ll go over it a little bit.

What we have beginning in verse 10 is another “my son” statement: “My son, if sinners entice you, don’t go with them, right? And so the very first part of this formal introduction is a warning against not being enticed by sinners. And they’re going to steal. They’re going to encourage you to steal. They’re going to want to swallow up the innocent like Sheol. And they’re going to end up actually in death, not life, okay? So that’s the warnings given to us in that section of this second introduction to the son.

Well, at the end of this, at the end of chapter 9, there’s a short section talking about the harlot. And the harlot is going to tell you that stolen stuff is good to eat and drink. She’s going to invite you to a secret meeting with her. “Bread eaten in secret. Stolen waters.” Her paths will swallow you up into Sheol—or the place of the dead. A different word is used, but like that place of the dead. She has stolen water, bread eaten in secret, and death is the end of this woman.

So we have at the beginning and end some very clear indicators that the brackets for this section are the dangers of bad company and ultimately the wrong kind of woman. Right? You can sort of see those two as different things, or you can see them as a common thing—that the woman is an embodiment of that bad company. That culture is feminine to an extent, and the culture that you hang around with is a harlot if you’re hanging around in the wrong kind of culture.

So my question at the beginning of the sermon was: who do you embrace? And you say, well, I’m embracing the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m embracing Lady Wisdom. And I tell you that if you have associations and strong friendships with non-Christians or with people that profess the name of Jesus Christ and yet really are not committed to uprightness, moral rectitude, and all that stuff, and truth, then you’re embracing a harlot when you embrace those guys, okay? You hang out with a group of even Christians who are not obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ and are enticing you to do things in violation of what your parents have commanded you. You are now embracing the harlot.

Because these things are matched up in the very structure of these first nine chapters of Proverbs. It tells us that while a few of us are going to openly embrace a harlot, and I can’t imagine your young men actually doing that, you certainly will begin to be developed by your associations with ungodly friends. And that’s equated in the structure of this section.

The next section I’ve identified as: wisdom calls in reproof. Several times in these first nine chapters, wisdom is portrayed as calling out to you. And this begins in chapter 1, verse 20. So why don’t you look at that?

And wisdom is calling out here. And she’s calling out in a specific way. She’s calling out in reproof. Later, she’ll call out in different ways. Later, she’ll call us to knowledge, and she’ll call us to a feast. But as she begins her call in the book of Proverbs, verse 20:

“Wisdom cries out. She utters her voice in the streets. She cries in the chief places of concourse, in the opening of the gates, in the city she utters her words, saying, ‘How long are you simple ones? How long will you love simplicity?’ And the scoffers delight in their scoffing, and fools hate knowledge. Turn you at my reproof.”

So wisdom begins by crying out in reproof. Wisdom begins by calling us to repent of our sins. And wisdom cries out. This is matched up at the end of the section. If you look at your outlines down at the B prime section: wisdom calls to you and calls you to a life-giving feast.

So the way this thing moves is: you’ve got these warnings against the wrong woman crying out to you and desiring you. And then you’ve got matching bookends of wisdom calling to you, first in reproof. And then finally, by the end of this section, she calls you to a feast. And that matches up.

The naive and the scoffers are the subject of both of these addresses where wisdom calls out. Reproof and instruction is repeated in both of these sections. And so these clearly mark themselves up.

After wisdom cries out in chapter 1, verses 20-33, beginning of chapter 2, the wise son calls out to wisdom. So wisdom calls to you, and then you’re exhorted to cry out to wisdom. And if you don’t cry out at the right time, and finally you’re dying and going down for the third time, she may not answer when you call. You don’t want her counsel on crisis conversions, but we’re supposed to cry out for wisdom in response to her crying out to us.

And this is matched up as the outline moves at the bottom section here: by wisdom calling out offering knowledge. In chapter 8, she calls out offering knowledge. So we’re to call out to wisdom. She calls out to us. And this is some of the central aspects of this introduction to the book.

Moving in to the D sections: the harlot appears in bad company. Again, this inner mixture—as the other as the book ends—kind of mix them together. In chapter 2, verses 10 to 22, there’s more instructions about bad company. But now the harlot makes an appearance as well. And she does it in the context of bad company.

And connecting with this at the bottom of the outline in verses 7:1 to chapter 7:27, the harlot flatters and tempts you. So now it’s strictly a description of the harlot at the other side of this chiastic structure.

Now we move toward the middle of the book, and this is what I want to kind of conclude with.

In E we see the blessings of wise living given to us—which are riches, honor, favor. And on the other side of that, we have the eschatology—the curses of the adulterous woman. And then moving in, we have seven don’ts listed in Proverbs 3:21-35. There are seven things you’re not supposed to do.

And connecting with that are the six, yea, seven things that God hates. On the other side of this middle section—in the very middle of the book—is embracing the right woman. In chapter 4, verses 1-27, we have this embrace of the right woman. And then on the other hand, we have embracing the harlot, given in the very next section—chapters 5:1-14. And then as chapter 5 moves out, it talks about embracing your wife.

Let’s look at that section a little bit. This is the very heart, I think, of this part of Proverbs. So turn to chapter 4, rather, and we’ll see this middle section and the basic message of it to us.

“Hear, you children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding, for I have given you good counsel. Forsake not my law, for I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me also and said unto me, ‘Let your heart retain all my words. Keep my commandments, and live. Get wisdom, get understanding. Forget her not, neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee. Love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom.’”

And it goes on this way. So the idea is that we’re supposed to grab a hold of wisdom. Wisdom is a woman. And we’re supposed to embrace wisdom in the context of this woman.

Look at verse 20 now of chapter 4. Well, actually, down to chapter 5, verses 1, 2, and 3:

“My son, attend unto my wisdom. Bow thine ear to mine understanding, that thou mayest regard discretion and that thy lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil, and her end is bitter as wormwood.”

So now we have a section where we’re warned about embracing the harlot woman, right? In verses 7 and 8:

“Remove your ways far from her. Come not nigh unto the door of her house, lest thou give thine honor unto others, lest thy years be given unto the cruel.”

And then down in verse 15, we have the positive stretched again—or stressed again:

“Drink waters out of your own cistern and running waters out of your own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own and thy strangers with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed. Rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as a loving kind and pleasant roe. Let her breast satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman?”

What we have at the very heart of this structure is embracing. We’re urged to embrace wisdom. We’re warned about embracing the wrong kind of wisdom—of the harlot—through stupidity. And then we’re urged to embrace our own wives.

The very heart of this opening introductory section are the practical implications—the blessings and curses laid out in the context of who it is that you embrace.

Now, as I said, you know, none of us are going to embrace a harlot literally, but I think that the fact that this is bounded on either side by a list of seven don’ts and then a list of seven things that God hates tells us what it is to embrace the harlot. We’ve got to—we’re supposed to embrace the right woman both in terms of wisdom and our own wives. We’re not supposed to embrace the foolish woman. And to give us an understanding of what that is, we’re given these seven things on either side.

So let’s look at those in closing. We read these. I have given these to you on the structure of your outline, and we can just read these in conclusion. This is how you know whether you’re embracing the right woman or not.

And by the way, the three things that woman is called in this opening section is our mother. You’re supposed to listen to your mother. Wisdom is referred to as our sister in our responsive reading in chapter 7. You know, approach your wisdom as your sister. And then wisdom now is specifically related in this middle section to our wives.

Wisdom is a woman. And we can sort of evaluate how wise we are as men in terms of our relationship to these three women in our lives: our mothers, our sisters, and our wives.

And now some specific things that are given to us in chapter 6, verses 16-19. And then the seven things that God hates. These are the seven things that God hates that are an abomination to him:

A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked paths, feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, one who sows discord among his brethren.

Here again, none of us are hopefully going to engage in the middle three of these: hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift and turning to evil. But that’s not the only things that God hates. God hates deceit—a false witness who speaks lies, or a lying tongue. When we use deceit, we are embracing the harlot.

And the other thing that God hates is one who is prideful. And as a result of that pride, so is discord among the brethren. He has a haughty look.

Who are you embracing today? As you look at your life this last week, did you enter into falsehoods, lies? Did you tell lies? Did you cause dissension in the context of the extended covenant community—in terms of the church, your family? Did you create dissension in the context of that, or did you create peace? Do you pride yourself in your actions, or were you humble to one another, seeing the need for community?

This is a description of who it is that we’ve embraced practically this last week.

Again, in chapter 3, verses 25-32, I’ve got it on your outlines. The other seven bookends of this central section of embracing:

“My son, do not let them depart from your eyes. Keep sound wisdom and discretion. So don’t let go of sound wisdom and discretion. There will be life to your soul and grace to your neck. Then you will walk safely in the way, and your foot will not stumble. When you lie down, you will not be afraid. Yes, you will lie down, and your sleep will be sweet. Do not be afraid of sudden terror, nor of troubles from the wicked when it comes. For the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being caught. Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due when it is in the power of your hand to do so. Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go and come back, and tomorrow I will give it,’ when you have it with you. Do not devise evil against your neighbor, for he dwells by you for safety’s sake. Do not strive with a man without cause if he has done you no harm. Do not envy the oppressor, and choose none of his ways, for the perverse person is an abomination to the Lord, but his secret counsel is with the upright.”

As the first—as the seven things that God hates has as its center this I—or the bookends rather, the need to not sow dissension in community and to not tell lies, here at the heart of these six or seven things that God commends to us or says us not to do are sins against community.

Verse 3: don’t withhold good. Verse 4: don’t be improperly withholding stuff from your neighbor. And verse 5: don’t devise evil against your neighbor.

God says that wisdom is living a life of grace and beauty in the context of community. Wisdom understands that wisdom—to the Lord Jesus Christ—embracing the right woman is a matter of embracing our neighbor, of doing good for our neighbor and not evil, of building peace in the context of our homes and in the church, and of putting away from us sowing of dissension, telling lies, withholding of good, not being gracious one to the other.

The Lord Jesus Christ says that we’re to build upon his foundation as wise men. And wisdom, for the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, for the members of the covenant community of Christ, is an embracing of the positive obligations we have to extend grace, mercy, compassion, and friendship to one another, and to put off the embrace of the harlot, which is at its core dissension, pride, and deceit.

The Scriptures tell us that wisdom can be easily discerned in our lives. God says that wisdom cries out to us—to hear her rebuke, to hear her reprove. The Lord Jesus Christ tells us today: “Leave alone, leave behind sins of deceit, dissension in community, and acts of ungraciousness one to the other.”

The core of embracing the right woman, embracing wisdom, is gracious acts in community, truthtelling to one another, and the embracing of our responsibilities we have to encourage each other in the faith and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this book. We thank you, Father, for the great place it has in maturing us as a congregation and Christian culture. We do pray, Father, that you would cause us to grow and mature in cultural leadership in our homes, in our communities, and in our state as well. We pray to that end that you would minister wisdom to us. Help us, Father, to see that as horrible as it would be to us to embrace a harlot, that’s just what we do when we sin by causing dissension in the context of our home or this church, when we sin by not being truthful, by being proud and not humble.

Help us, Father, to see the positive obligations we have to each other. Help us, Father, to know that it is to embrace the wisdom of the Lord Jesus Christ by being gracious and kind in our speech and in our acts one to the other. Cause us to mature in our wisdom. Now we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.