Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World

What is Wisdom

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loves you with his very life. Amen.

Proverbs.

So. Proverbs can be a strange thing when you sit down and think about them, and often, they don’t translate between cultures and languages well. Like think of just some American phrase like, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” or “ Don't make a mountain out of a molehill” or “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Just, like, how would you explain those to a non-native English speaker? How do you explain, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat?”

There is a whole book of ancient proverbs in the Bible, cleverly called, Proverbs, as you well know. And sometime, reading through it, the proverbs make sense and you are like, “Yes! I understand this, this is good advice, I should do this!” But other aspects of the proverbs are lost to us, in the same way that skinning a cat would be lost on someone else.

The book of Proverbs has this recurring Character in it, called Wisdom. Wisdom is portrayed as a woman, an honorable woman that any young man should aspire to marry. The book sets up against her another woman, and adulterous woman of foolishness who seeks to lead you away onto a path that leads to destruction.

King Solomon, as he tells his sons about this, sets up this call between the two leading you to ask the question, who do you listen too? To Wisdom? or to Foolishness.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”

When these words hit our ears its a bit like “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” It makes sense, but when you stop and think about it, it’s a bit harder to explain. What does it mean to fear the Lord?

There are two ways that we can talk about fear, and both are caught up in this phrase, “the fear of the Lord.” They are respect and terror. And both apply to us, and this saying, and we will take them one at a time.

First is respect.

Story about what it looks like to struggle with fearing the Lord.

Comfort we have in Christ