Wisdom And Its Stakes
Proverbs • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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20 Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; 21 at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: 22 “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? 23 If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you. 24 Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded, 25 because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, 26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, 27 when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. 28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me. 29 Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, 30 would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, 31 therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. 32 For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; 33 but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.”
Sermon
Sermon
As it has been awhile since we were in the book of Proverbs, we should orient ourselves to where we are in the text.
Recap Verses 1-7
Recap Verses 1-7
The first sermon covered the first 7 verses, and the focus of that section is verse 7. Let’s read it:
7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
This is the primary theme of all of Proverbs. Knowledge, wisdom, and instruction (that is, how we should live our lives), begins with Word of God. It all starts with the fear of the Lord (faith, love, obedience).
This makes sense to us the big questions (some call them the “spiritual” questions).
What’s the meaning of life?
Where will I go when I die?
Why do we die in the first place?
Where did we come from and where are we going?
These questions are the big, spiritual questions that any Christian can answer. What’s funny about this is all of human religion, philosophy, and science has scrambled around these questions for thousands of years. Meanwhile, God has answered these questions definitively.
What’s the meaning of life? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Where will I go when I die? Either heaven or hell, depending on whether or not you are in Christ.
Why do we die in the first place? Because of sin and God’s righteous judgment of it.
Where did we come from and where are we going? God created us in the Garden to be with him; God will take all his chosen ones into the joy and glory of heaven, to be with him eternally.
Simple.
The problem we face most often is not answering these big questions, but working these simple answers out in the countless smaller questions that arise in the Christian life.
5 Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance,
As Christians, we have been made wise to what God is doing to redeem humanity. We know and have been loved by his Son, and are united to him by faith. But there is yet still a life to live between here and there—we, the wise in Christ, are to hear and increase in learning, during the in between.. our life on earth. And the fear of the Lord is beginning of that learning. As it was in our salvation, so it is in our sanctification.
Recap Verses 8-19
Recap Verses 8-19
The second sermon covered verses 8-19, which pointed out a threat to this process.
10 My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent.
We will be tempted by the sin and sinners of the world. We will be tempted to forsake the wisdom of God for the foolishness of the world.
Read verses 11-13:
11 If they say, “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood; let us ambush the innocent without reason; 12 like Sheol let us swallow them alive, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; 13 we shall find all precious goods, we shall fill our houses with plunder;
The world wants to bribe the believer. Your soul is seated with Christ, in the heavenly places, and all the glory of that world awaits us—yet the evil things of this world would like us to turn away from those things and embrace the pleasures down here.
Like an angler fish, sin dangles a shiny thing, hoping we will swim away from the real light and towards it, so that it may devour us.
Our lifelong conflict of battling sin is where wisdom is most needed. The stakes could not be higher.
18 but these men lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives. 19 Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain; it takes away the life of its possessors.
So, wisdom and its stakes could not be higher. Life or death.
The Call of Wisdom
The Call of Wisdom
This brings us to our text today. Read verses 20 and 21 with me:
20 Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; 21 at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
This is how we ought to think of God’s wisdom in the world. It is crying aloud in the street. Wisdom raises its voice to be heard, but it’s ringing out in a noisy street. Even in the most important places, such as the city gates, Wisdom is crying out within a sea of noise and other voices. God is opening a picture book to us now.
Read on..
22 “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? 23 If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you.
Wisdom is now rebuking those who hear her voice, yet turn away. This is not the first nor the last time the Bible calls humanity stupid for ignoring God. The height of human idiocy is to be stupid and not care. The height of human depravity is to scoff at God and love doing it.
Because the mind of an unbeliever is blind to the things of God, they don’t understand abject horror of what they’re doing. They can’t see it.
For a Christian, though, rejecting God’s wisdom is very different. We know what we’re doing and who we’re offending. The Spirit that dwells within us convicts us of this sin and, if we submit to God and repent of our sin, we are welcomed warmly back into communion with him.
23 If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you.
The Disconnection of Sin
The Disconnection of Sin
One of the worst parts of sin is how it disconnects us from God, and makes us allergic to his grace. It makes absolutely no sense. When we continue to knowingly sin, we are like a fish out of water, flopping about and suffocating, yet refusing to get back into the water. Our problems started when we wandered, not when we realized we were lost.
Our problems start when we refuse to listen to the voice of our God.
24 Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded, 25 because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof,
It will be helpful to pause here for a moment and make sure we know who is being addressed here. These are the “simple ones”—people who do not know God, reject his authority, and are without true wisdom in this world. These are unbelievers. It’s clear in verse 29 these people “hate knowledge” and do not fear God.
In verses 26 to 32, we read of a kind of poetic judgment that falls on those who do not listen to Lady Wisdom. Wisdom and Folly are represented many times in this book as two distinct women. They are characters in a picture book to represent the two opposing sides of Proverbs: wisdom and foolishness (Lady Wisdom and Mistress Folly).
The men in this section encounter calamity, terror strikes them like a storm and whirlwind, bringing distress and anguish. They called upon Wisdom, but she not to be found. This is because they hated it when it was available freely to them. They turned away from the voice of wisdom in their lives, bringing their destruction.
32 For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them;
The Chaos Apart From Christ
The Chaos Apart From Christ
Let’s be clear: the wisdom foolish humanity needs to hear is that there is salvation in Christ. Real salvation. Full salvation. Eternal salvation. We need saving from those sins no one else knows about. We need deliverance from the powers of darkness that use sinners as slaves. We need love that can forever mend the broken heart.
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
Paul, here, is demanding all the so called wisdom of the world to stand before Almighty God.
Where is the therapist who has actually delivered a person from guilt?
Where is the author whose NYT bestselling book has actually saved a person from hell?
What have all the debates on social media actually contributed to the world?
They are foolish nonsense before the power and wisdom of God.
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
The world says, “Come with us and sacrifice for temporary pleasure.” In our flesh, this makes sense to us. We’re born speaking that language.
But God has said, “Come to Christ, whose sacrifice has made a way to the very presence of God, where there is fullness of joy and pleasure forevermore.”
We’re born into this world hating the message of the Cross. We’re born into this world rejecting the wisdom of God. Do you know why?
Because every single person knows that God exists and that they are not right with him. They say, “nothing is certain except death and taxes” — I would add guilt to that list. The sensation of guilt requires rules to be broken; rules requires someone to have given them in the first place, and the only person who fits that bill is God.
Therefore, unsaved people are condemned before God, know it, can’t do anything about it, and hate God for it all. They can’t ever be good enough or sacrifice enough to make their guilt go away.
Unable to accept this, they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
These are the people who are destroyed by their foolishness in our text today. They are all who reject God and the Gospel of his Christ. They call all of this foolish…
27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
Considering Unbelief
Considering Unbelief
These things are important for us know for at least two reasons.
First, so that we might rightly understand the nature of unbelief. And second, as a cautionary tale. Let’s near the end by thinking more about these two.
Regarding the nature of unbelief: What could be more relevant to the topic of unsaved loved ones than what God says about their unbelief? Nothing. None of you are going to disagree.
But all of us are tempted to think about unbelief in unbiblical ways.
Sometimes, a person we love or care about say they aren’t a Christian, but are upstanding citizens. They clearly love or care about you, too. They give generously, are great company, or otherwise enrich your life. What can happen, here, is that God’s common grace becomes more important than his saving grace. This poses a threat to our willingness to call them to repentance and faith in Christ. We must remember what God has said about their situation. However lovely they may be in outward appearances, if they have not been raised to new life, then they are dead in their sins—generous, polite, and loving in some ways, but ultimately dead in sins and trespasses. Jesus put it this way:
26 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?
Other times, we look at people who are so violently opposed to Christianity that we condemn them to the eternal fires of hell in our own hearts. They’ve done something so abhorrent to us that we take God’s prerogative and damn them. This is a different trap to fall into.
I recently fell into the black hole of true crime documentaries. That whole world is so dark and bizarre. Partly because you are exposed to levels of human evil that boggles the mind. A thought I kept having was this: that of all the wickedness in what I was seeing, only part of it could be explained by demonic possession. Only part of it could be nuanced by a diagnosis of “insanity.” Neither of those things explains why the human being is such a uniquely fertile breeding ground for evil.
“But for the grace of God, there go I.”
What keeps any one of us from being a serial killer? Your own strength and wisdom?
Yes, evil people run headlong into the fires of hell—but sneering at them as they burn is prideful, because God himself has rescued you from those same fires.
Let me balance this idea. I think it is good and appropriate to pray that God would destroy his enemies. There are prayers in the Bible that do this very thing.
There’s one in our text today. For some of God’s enemies, he says…
26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, 27 when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. 28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me. 29 Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord,
We trust God, because vengeance is his. But that’s the thing—it’s his, not ours.
If Christ prayed that God would forgive his murderers, for they “knew not what they do,” then we can pray that God would save foul humanity for his glory. To this day, judges can still be heard saying, “May God have mercy on your soul” while delivering a death sentence.
32 For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them;
It’s God’s great mercy to us that rescues us from this very fate.
The Cautionary Tale
The Cautionary Tale
With all of this said, we’ll end with the second takeaway: the text as a cautionary tale. A warning. A lesson for believers.
The wisdom of God cries aloud in the street. One of the wondrous mysteries of our salvation is what happens to our mind. When we are born again, we are now breathing God’s air. The Spirit dwells within us, awakening us to the truth. The Bible begins to make sense. We now see our sin as the ugly lizard that it is. Better than all this, we see the Lord Jesus walking with us.
He speaks to us in his Word, and what he says there addresses everything in your life.
He moves in our life through Prayer, because he personally receives it before the Father, day and night.
He feeds us at the Communion table, body and blood, nourishing us when we grow weak.
He encourages us through his Body—our brothers and sisters—supporting us, pushing us, sanctifying us through loving one another.
He gives us eternal hope, for…
33 but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.”
Let’s pray.
“Father,
We thank you and praise you, Lord of all, for saving us and washing us in the blood of Christ.
As we consider what happens to those who reject you, be merciful to us, and help us to see the ways we echo that rebellion by neglecting you.
Search us, O God, and know our hearts! Try us and know our thoughts! See if there be any grievous way in us, and lead us in the way everlasting.
Lord, I ask that you would move in our lives, expose our hidden sins, grant us repentance and restore to us the joy of our salvation. You are our victory, and in you we dwell secure. Grant us wisdom, and let us never forget it.
We ask in Jesus name, Amen.”
