Wisdom

Wisdom begins with fear

Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes are usually called the wisdom books, and the Song of Songs, a love poem linked with Solomon's name, often stands beside them (the Song of Songs). The Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches of the East also read the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach among the Old Testament's wisdom books; Protestant churches set those two apart with the Apocrypha.

These books say little about Israel's history or the temple. They talk about words and work, money and friends, parents and children, suffering and death: the life of everyone under the sun. Wisdom here is not cleverness but skill in living well in the world God made, and it has a starting point:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Proverbs 1:7

The same teaching returns in Proverbs 9:10 and Job 28:28, and Ecclesiastes ends with "Fear God and keep His commandments" (Ecclesiastes 12:13). This fear is not terror but reverent trust: honouring God and living before his face. John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, opens his Institutes on the same note: "Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves" Institutes 1.1.1. The wisdom books are not a manual for getting on in life; they teach a life that grows out of knowing God.

A proverb is a proverb, not a promise

A proverb puts in a line how life usually goes in God's world. It is neither a guarantee for every case nor a statute with a penalty. Take a well-known one: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6). It tells us that what a child learns early usually lasts a lifetime. It is not a verdict that the parents of a wandering child must have failed, nor a promise that settles every case in advance. Read as a proverb, it gives parents who keep praying for a child hope rather than a burden.

You can watch proverbs at work in two that stand side by side:

Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own eyes.

Proverbs 26:4-5

They do not cancel each other. Each gives its own reason: answer folly with folly and you become like the fool; say nothing, and he thinks himself wise. Both are true, at different times and with different people. Matthew Henry, the English pastor, comments on the pair: "We are to fit our remarks to the man, and address them to his conscience, so as may best end the debate" Matthew Henry. Wisdom is knowing which proverb fits this person and this moment.

So a single proverb is read with the other proverbs and with the whole of Scripture. The Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian churches calls ‘the Scripture itself’ the infallible rule of interpretation ch. 1.9, and Proverbs finds its place beside Job and Ecclesiastes.

Job's friends and the Teacher under the sun

Most of Job is long speeches between Job and his three friends. The friends say what Proverbs also says: God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. But they made that a rule for every case and pressed it on Job's suffering, and at the end the LORD says to Eliphaz:

My wrath is kindled against you and your two friends. For you have not spoken about Me accurately, as My servant Job has.

Job 42:7

So in Job, always ask who is speaking. The friends' words are truly recorded in Scripture, but they are not God's verdict. John Wesley, who led the Methodist revival in eighteenth-century England, explains that Job's view of providence was truer than his friends' view, "which was, that God did always reward good men and punish sinners in this life" Wesley. Their mistake was to turn ‘usually’ into ‘always’.

Ecclesiastes keeps saying ‘under the sun’. Seen only from within this world, labour, wisdom and pleasure all prove "futile, a pursuit of the wind" (Ecclesiastes 1:14). Wesley reads the phrase as a limit: by it the Teacher "implies that the happiness which in vain is sought for in this lower world, is really to be found in heavenly places and things" Wesley. Lift out one verse and the book sounds like a sermon on despair, so read it to the end. Its last paragraph speaks of the Teacher as ‘he’ and draws the whole together:

When all has been heard, the conclusion of the matter is this: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, along with every hidden thing, whether good or evil.

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14

The path of wisdom leads to Christ. Paul calls Christ crucified "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24), the one "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). The wisdom Job 28 searches for, and the Teacher could not find under the sun, is found in him. The flow and contents of the three books are in the Bible Overview lessons on Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes.

Try it

Open Proverbs 10 on the map. In the map under the Jesus tab, open Proverbs and tap chapter 10: it has a ‘One-line summary’ and ‘Notes’. From chapter 10 the short proverbs of Solomon begin, so read slowly, a verse at a time.

Look at what the two lines of each verse do. In this chapter the second line mostly sets itself against the first: the righteous and the wicked, the wise and the foolish, idle hands and diligent ones. Write in Notes, for instance, ‘v. 4: idle hands, diligent hands, a contrast’, and ask whether the verse says how life usually goes.

Set a proverb that sounds like a promise beside another passage. Read verse 27 with Ecclesiastes 7:15, and write down as a question how both can be true. Then put the whole chapter into a one-line summary.

Practice