The Message Remix (185 page)

INTRODUCTIONPROVERBS

 

Many people think that what’s written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven—getting right with God, saving their eternal souls.
It does have to do with that, of course, but not mostly. It is equally concerned with living on this earth—living well, living in robust sanity.
In our Scriptures, heaven is not the primary concern, to which earth is a tagalong afterthought. “On earth
as
it is in heaven” is Jesus’ prayer.

“Wisdom” is the biblical term for this on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven everyday living. Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves. It has virtually nothing to do with information as such, with knowledge as such. A college degree is no certification of wisdom—nor is it primarily concerned with keeping us out of moral mud puddles, although it does have a profound moral effect upon us.

Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work and exercising leadership, using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace. Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do. In matters of everyday practicality, nothing, absolutely nothing, takes precedence over God.

Proverbs concentrates on these concerns more than any other book in the Bible. Attention to the here and now is everywhere present in the stories and legislation, the prayers and the sermons, that are spread over the thousands of pages of the Bible. Proverbs distills it all into riveting images and aphorisms that keep us connected in holy obedience to the ordinary.

 

 

From:
King Solomon was Israel’s first international celebrity, known for his wisdom and his wealth. He studied plants and animals. He married an Egyptian princess and had a taste for everything Egyptian. Egyptian proverbs interested him, and that was fine. Egypt’s gods also interested him, and that tainted the whole country. As he got older, he dabbled more and more in Egyptian religion, mixing it with his worship of God.

Solomon’s successors kept his attraction to multiple religions but not his wisdom. King Hezekiah, who lived 250 years after Solomon and wrote some of the proverbs in the Bible, was a rare semi-bright spot among the kings of those latter days. Two other proverb writers were Agur (an Arab) and Lemuel (another non-Israelite).

 

To:
Proverbs were used to educate upper-class boys (it was mostly boys in those days) in the practicalities of living in the real world. Boys were expected to be wise, not just smart, and in Israel that included a healthy awareness that life revolved around God, not them.

 

Re:
Perhaps 970-687 B.C. Egyptians started writing wisdom-style proverbs when they were still building pyramids. Here’s one from 2450 B.C.: “Good speech is more hidden than the emerald, but it may be found with maidservants at the grindstones.”
¹

1.
Ancient Near Eastern Texts
, 412; quoted in Allen P. Ross, “Introduction to Proverbs,”
The Expositor’s Bible Commentary
, Frank E. Gaebelein, general editor (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1976-1992), CD-ROM.