The Blessed Life

Sermon Transcript

When my wife and I were first moving into our house here near where we are meeting today, I met one of my neighbors and told her I was a pastor. She said, “Good, because I need the blessings.” Who doesn’t want blessings, after all? People talk about blessings all the time; we can think of the somewhat cliché #blessed with a photo posted on social media, or slogans like “Don’t block your blessings,” “too blessed to be stressed,” “when the praises go up, the blessings come down,” but what is the truly blessed life? The passage on which we’re focusing today in the book of Proverbs is about that life. It begins with the word blessed, and when you see that word in the Bible, it basically something like “good,” “happy,” “full,” or “abundant.” God actually created us for that kind of life; did you know that? He did, but the path to it is not through hashtags, slogans, or even simply by a pastor moving on to the block (apologies to my neighbors). The path to it is through wisdom. Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and today to understand that better we’ll look at the worth of wisdom, the security of wisdom, and then finally the life of wisdom.

 

The worth of wisdom

 

Our passage today begins with the theme of this whole passage: Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding. Previous passages have held out to us the hope of wisdom and have called us to seek it, but here we get a description of the one who actually finds it. It is possible, in this life, to find wisdom, and to actually become wise. Why, though, is the one who finds wisdom blessed? The answer begins in verse 14: The gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. In chapter 2 Solomon told his son to seek for wisdom as for silver, and to search for it as for hidden treasure, but here we find that wisdom is actually more valuable than gold or silver. In fact, he goes so far in verse 15 as to say that nothing you desire can compare with her.

 

We can try this exercise fairly easily: Think about your future. Average life expectancy in America is about 80 years old, so for the sake of this exercise, let’s say you live that long. What do you think would need to happen between now and then for you to truly have the good life? Imagine your neighbors even. If you were to poll them and ask them that question, what answers might you expect? Get a better job. Retire from my job. Make a lot of money. Get married. Have kids. Get my kids out of the house and off to college. Buy a house. Buy a bigger house. Cross off my bucket list of travel destinations. Achieve certain milestones in my career. And so, these are the things we desire, aren’t they? Well, wisdom is more to be desired than all these things, and whatever else you came up with. If you can desire it, verse 15 says its worth can’t compare with wisdom’s.

 

Why? Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Long life, riches, and honor—that’s what wisdom delivers to those who find it. Health, wealth and honor—that’s a pretty blessed life, isn’t it? Maybe you’re thinking, “Well now wait, I thought those were the sorts of things we normally desire, but wisdom is worth more than those things? Now you’re saying wisdom delivers those things?” Yes. The idea is that if you make long life, riches, and honor your highest aims, you won’t really get them, at least not in a way that makes you truly happy, but if you make wisdom your highest aim, you will get it, and with it, you’ll get those things thrown in. Solomon knew this from experience. When God told Solomon he could ask him for anything, anything at all, and God would give it to him, Solomon asked God for wisdom, and here is what God said in response:

“Because you have asked this [wisdom], and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, 12 behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you. 13 I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you, all your days. 14 And if you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days.” – 1 Kings 3:11-14

 

Solomon asked for wisdom, and God said, “Wonderful; I will give you what you asked for: wisdom, and with it, I will give you what you did not ask for: riches and honor and length of days.” Aim at riches, honor, and length of days, and you won’t get them all, at least not in a way that makes you truly happy. Aim at wisdom, and you will get wisdom, and with it the other things thrown in. Just think of someone who aims at length of days above all else; they want to live a long life more than anything else. So they’re fanatical about their diet, they exercise like crazy, they never enter a building without a mask. Does that really sound like a blessed life to you? You know what’s likely to happen to such a person? They’re likely to die early of stress-related disorders. They’re likely to have no friends. What about the person who seeks riches above all else? Do you really need me to tell you that most of them aren’t happy? Experts have long been saying that once your basic needs are met, the correlation between wealth and happiness is incredibly weak. In a place like Philadelphia you all probably even have at least one wealthy friend you know isn’t really happy; maybe you are the wealthy person who isn’t really happy. And if you seek honor above all else? If you say, “I just want to do whatever it takes so that people will like me and praise me,” you know you’ll probably be one of the least likeable people around?

 

But if you seek wisdom above all else, you find it, and with it comes long life, wealth, and honor. If you seek wisdom, you find Proverbs like these: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it” (Proverbs 25:16); that’ll keep you healthy, right? “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich” (Prov 10:4); there’s riches, right? “It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling (Prov 27:2); there’s honor. Find wisdom, live by wisdom, and health, wealth, and honor will tend to find you.

 

It is worth noting in passing that while health, wealth, and honor are not to be sought as ultimate goods, this passage and the whole Bible really does treat them as relative goods. In other words, other things being equal, the Bible does view long life as preferable to an early death, riches as preferable to poverty, and honor as preferable to shame. There is a kind of false spirituality that as far as I can tell has popped up in every period of church history under various forms in which the highest form of spirituality or the life most pleasing to God is depicted as the one in which you fail the most at all earthly endeavors, and this way of thinking produces almost entirely negative results. Either you really swallow it, and so put all your moral energies into killing your natural desires for life, wealth, and honor rather than killing your sinful desires, and so end up unhealthy, poor, and disgraced while also harboring pride in your heart for how much more righteous you feel than anyone who seems to actually be enjoying their life, or, more commonly, you still do things like eat, work for a living, and try to act in a way that most would recognize as honorable, but you constantly live with a low-grade fever of guilt that if you really loved Jesus you wouldn’t make as much money as you do or be as successful as you are, and I hope if that’s you today that you will just see that is not what God wants for your life. Can you imagine any loving Father wanting that for their children? So why would you think that’s what your heavenly Father wants for you? It isn’t. The blessing of wisdom is held out to us so that we might find and enjoy it.

 

Look again with me at verse 17: Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed. If you really seek and find wisdom, it will mean you have to make uncomfortable changes to your life. It means you will have to accept correction of your current understanding, it means you will have to stop doing things that feel so right and good to you, and it means you have to start doing things that feel so wrong and bad to you, and that’s why many never find wisdom, isn’t it? We’d rather just hold on to what we already have. But the reason it’s ok to just let go and truly seek wisdom is because if you find it, you will find it is a pleasant, peaceful path, a tree of life! Where are you currently struggling to believe that the path of wisdom is more pleasant than the path that seems right to you?

 

Verses 19-20 show us why it is: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew. The wisdom revealed in the Proverbs is the same wisdom by which the LORD, the creator, made all things. As I’ve been preaching through Proverbs I’ve been defining wisdom as the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it, but verse 19 of our passage takes us beyond the limit of such a definition. Wisdom is an attribute of God, and God does not perceive reality and live in accordance with it; God determines reality and it acts in accordance with him. For God, to be and to be wise are not two different things. Wisdom is of his very essence, and that wisdom is revealed in the harmony, orderliness, and beauty of all that he has made. Before God had made anything, God had within himself the ideas of all that he would make, and then he created according to those ideas, rather than just spitting out a random world.

 

Here’s how theologian Herman Bavinck put it: “God is the supreme artist. Just as a human artist realizes his idea in a work of art, so God creates all things in accordance with the ideas he has formed. The world is God’s work of art. He is the architect and builder of the entire universe. God does not work without thinking, but is guided in all his works by wisdom, by his ideas.” God is the artist; the earth and the heavens are his art; that’s one way of thinking about what verse 19 is saying. To take it further, verse 19 is saying that God is an artist more like Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa than he is like Jackson Pollock throwing paint at a canvas. Da Vinci had an idea in his mind and tried to conform every stroke of the paint brush to the idea, while Pollock did not have a fully worked out idea of a final result at which he was aiming. Yet God is greater than Da Vinci, because Da Vinci first needed a real Mona Lisa, from which he got his idea, whereas God generates his own ideas. His ideas precede and create reality, and wisdom, for us, then, is the art of perceiving that reality and living in accordance with it.

 

And because his ideas are his ideas, all his ideas are good. So when we read the creation account in Genesis 1, what’s the repeated refrain? And God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. That’s why all the paths of wisdom are paths of pleasantness. Reality is fundamentally good because it is the product of the wisdom of the God who is fundamentally good! So if you find wisdom, if you acquire the ability to perceive that reality and live in accordance with it, you will be blessed! Some of us are cynical, aren’t we? At least I know I am prone to that, so I sympathize if you also are. And frankly, we live in a cynical age. Not that our flesh needed the help, but we are trained in the 21^st century West to be suspicious of all claims to goodness, to “see through” them to the real, hard truth of the power interests of the one making the claims or the inherent randomness and irrationality of everything, and yet we still have that natural desire to be happy, so what do we do? We try to escape reality through things like substances, television, or even “augmented” reality.

 

But blessed is the one who perceives reality and lives in accordance with it. Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, because wisdom is worth more than anything else you could desire, because wisdom is the very thing by which a good God made a good creation. All its paths are pleasantness. Do you believe that? Do you treasure wisdom like that? Are you aiming at long life, wealth, and honor, or are you aiming at wisdom, and trusting that as you live in accordance with the reality of how God made the world, he will throw those things in with it? Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, not only because of the worth of wisdom, but also because of the security of wisdom.

 

The security of wisdom

 

So in verse 21 Solomon tells his son to not lose sight of wisdom, but to keep it, and then in the verses that follow he goes on to detail the kind of security that living according to wisdom brings. Verse 23 says you will walk on your way securely, and your foot will not stumble. Earlier in chapter 2 we saw that this language of a path and the protection God provides on it means that God especially protects you, through his wisdom, from the temptations that would seek to lure you off the path of blessing and on to the path of curse. When you keep sound wisdom and discretion, you can recognize the counterfeits more readily and so resist them as you stay on the path to blessing.

 

Sometimes other voices seem so plausible, don’t they? And we hear a lot of other voices today. We hear commercials, professors, podcasters, bosses, co-workers, family members, politicians, and what are we often hearing from them? You need something. You need to buy this thing, you need to subscribe to this belief, you need to take up this cause, you need to change this about your daily habits, you need to start doing this in your parenting, but there is a beautiful security in being able to say in response to it all, “You know; God has revealed his wisdom to us in the Bible. So I’m going to hold on tightly to it. If God tells me there that I need something or need to do something, then I will trust that’s the case. But if not, I’m not going let you tell me what I need and don’t need to do.” Isn’t it a blessing to live like that?

 

Living like that can yield the life of verse 24: If you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. One of the later proverbs says, “The wicked flee when no one pursues; but the righteous are as bold as a lion” (Prov 28:1). I mentioned earlier how you can live with a low-grade guilt fever if you let the demands of a false spirituality shape your conscience more than you let the Bible shape it. Well, a similar way to live with a low-grade fever is to reject or ignore God’s wisdom. When you do that, you are living out of accordance with reality, and when you live out of accordance with reality, it registers on your psyche. It’s like continuing to drive your car when that light on the dashboard keeps flashing at you, or continuing to use your phone when that “low battery” warning keeps popping up. It’s still running, but it all feels a bit insecure. You can’t really rest that way.

 

My wife knows that I typically let the gas in my car get down to the empty warning light before putting any gas in it. I know that light flashes on miles before you’re actually in any danger of running out of gas, so I let it ride, and for years of my life, that worked, until one day…it didn’t. By God’s grace I was going downhill when I heard the exhaust sputter and realized my engine was off. The power steering and power braking went next, so I had to use all my might to turn the steering wheel into a nearby gas station, pull the emergency brake to stop, and then put it into neutral to push it close enough to the gas pump to refill it. Now when that light comes on, what happens? I can’t mentally rest until I fill the car up with gas.

 

But if you find wisdom, if you perceive reality and live in accordance with it…you can rest! You can lie down and sleep in peace. The reality, verse 25, is that sudden terror and the ruin of the wicked will come. The gas tank is not infinite, and the time we have on earth until reality catches up with us and the judgment of God comes is not infinite. That’s why you won’t be able to have real security and to really rest easy as long as you are living out of accordance with reality; it’s the same reason I can’t rest easy when the gas light is on in my car. We both know the clock is ticking; at some point reality is going to catch up with us. The car’s running for now, and you may be able to cobble together some kind of life for yourself while rejecting God’s wisdom, but you know the ruin of the wicked is coming and the game will one day be up.

 

So blessed is the one who finds wisdom, because he has nothing to fear in that day, for, verse 26: the LORD will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being caught. If you trust his wisdom and live according to it, you can trust that when he comes in judgment, he will protect you from it. Those who find wisdom don’t need to fear the future. They know God is in control of that future, and they are confident that he will protect all those who trust him. The blessed life is not only the long life, the wealthy life, or the honorable life; it’s the peaceful life. And what is that so many who are aiming at health, wealth, and honor lack? Peace. They’re trying to control their lives so they live as long as possible, they’re trying to earn all their wealth, they’re trying to manipulate others to get them to honor them, but guess what? They aren’t actually in control! You aren’t God; I’m not God; God is God, and when we let God be God, when we submit to his reality and the reality of how he made the world, we can go to bed and sleep well. That’s the security of wisdom.

 

Let’s look finally, then, at the life of wisdom.

 

The life of wisdom

 

Verse 27 surprises me. Did it surprise you when you heard the whole passage read aloud a little bit ago? Listen to the transition again from verse 26: “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 your power to do it.” What’s the one got to do with the other? Like, I would kind of expect verse 27 to say, “So have a good night’s rest!” Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, it’ll keep you safe, you’ll be able to have sweet sleep…so go ahead and enjoy that! But that’s not the life of wisdom we find in verse 27. Instead, the text goes right to how you treat other people.

 

And that probably shouldn’t have surprised me, actually, because this is a pattern throughout the Bible. You get these incredible promises of comfort: Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, in its hands are long life, riches, and honor, all its paths are pleasantness, you can sleep great even the night before judgment day, but then we learn that God has a purpose for our comfort bigger than our comfort. You can see this as early as God’s creation of the first humans. Genesis 1:28 tells us after God made them, the first thing he did was bless them. Comforting, right? And then God told them: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:28). He blessed them, and then he directed them as to how to use that blessing, and in that case, it was basically to spread it. We can see it again when God makes a covenant with Abraham. Here’s what he says to him: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen 12:2). If you’ve been around Christian circles much in your life, you’ve maybe even heard someone say that we are blessed in order to be a blessing; that’s where that comes from. And so here, blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and what does it look like to live that wise, blessed life? What’s that path like? Be a blessing to those God brings into your path.

 

First, do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. You should be able to see in your footnote there that the more literal translation is, “Do not withhold good from its owners”; why didn’t they just translate it that way? The idea is that when God brings another human into your life, any human, even an enemy, that human has a claim on your good because he or she is an image of God. They don’t have a right to take good from you, because the same requirement exists upon them: They are not to withhold good from you. But you can’t control whether they do that or not. What you can do is not withhold good from them, when it is in your power to do it. The limitation on our doing good is not based on the worthiness of the person, but on our ability. I have greater ability to do good to my own wife and children than I do to you all, and I have more ability to do good to you all than I do to people in Philadelphia I don’t even know, and I have more ability to do good to people in Philadelphia than to people in Johannesburg, and so on. And therefore the closer people are to you, the more you should not withhold good from them.

 

But sometimes we are tempted to withhold good from others even when it is in our power to do it, and how do we do it? We say to them verse 28: “Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it.” We know we should give it, but we want to keep it, so somehow it feels better to say we’ll give it tomorrow rather than just giving it now. Inflation may be bad, but it’s not so bad that the money will be worth significantly less if we give it tomorrow. The transaction is the same, but we can keep our goods for longer if we just keep putting off giving them to another. Time to pay your rent to the landlord to whom it is due, and what are we tempted to say? Tomorrow. Time to pay your credit card bill, “tomorrow”; time to give your boss or professor those hours that are rightly theirs, “tomorrow”, and what do you know? Tomorrow often never comes. Duty delayed is often duty forsaken. The life of wisdom means first that I give to everyone the love they are owed by me, without delay. Is there a good you owe someone still lingering in your mind today that you’ve been delaying? Someone you owe an apology, perhaps? Someone you owe forgiveness, perhaps? Someone you owe a prayer you said you’d pray for them? Do not withhold it any longer.

 

We’ve got three more “do not”s to cover here in verses 29-31 that further unpack for us the life of wisdom. First, do not plan evil against your neighbor, who dwells trustingly beside you. To be trusted by someone else is a sacred thing; don’t take advantage of it by secretly planning evil against them, rather than good. Do not contend with a man for no reason, when he has done you no harm, verse 30. When you scroll social media, are you hoping for someone to say something with which you disagree so you can pick a fight in the comments? Are you hoping your political opponents say something wrong to give you an occasion to argue with them? The wise are willing to get into fights if the cause of truth and justice requires that they do so, but their first instinct and desire will be peace. And, finally, verse 31: Do not envy a man of violence and do not choose any of his ways. Violence is one way that men can sometimes accumulate wealth and honor. Think of mafia or gang leaders who often have a lot of respect within their own communities and a lot of kids who want to grow up to be like them, who follow in their ways.

 

But the wise won’t do that, because again, they perceive the reality that judgment is coming for such people. They may appear powerful in the world, but the devious person is an abomination to the LORD, while the upright are in his confidence. His curse is on the house of the wicked, while he blesses the dwelling of the righteous. Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he gives favor. The wise will inherit honor, but fools get disgrace. That’s a judgment to come in the future—“The wise will inherit honor,” and it’s a judgment that’s already begun—“the LORD’s curse is on the house of the wicked,” and in fact, it’s even further along now than it was when these words were first written, because the LORD who founded the earth by wisdom also had a plan to redeem it by wisdom.

 

By wisdom he founded the earth, and even as early as the Garden of Eden, the first home he made for us to inhabit, he put a tree of life, holding out to us the promise we see in verse 18, that if we would just live in accordance with his reality, we could take of it, and live forever. It was a promise of blessing. But Adam and his wife Eve rejected God and chose to try to create a different reality in which they could be gods of their own lives. So instead of blessing them, God cursed them. Instead of eating from the tree of life and living forever, they were cast out of the garden and destined to perish, and we were born into that cursed house. Yet here we see the offer of life and blessing held out again to us. How can it be? It can be because the wisdom of God devised a way for the ruin of the wicked to come without ruining us! And that way was by God the Father sending God the Son to take on human flesh and live the life of wisdom for us. When it was in Jesus Christ’s power to do us good, he did not withhold it, even though we did not deserve it! When it was in his power to make a lame man walk, he did, when it was in his power to heal a woman who had been bleeding for over a decade, he did, when it was in his power to turn water into wine to serve guests at a wedding, he did, and so much more. He lived the life of wisdom, and yet you know what he didn’t get in this world? Long life (he was killed at 33), riches (the son of man had nowhere to lay his head), and honor (he died a shameful death on a cross with two criminals). Why? Because he was bearing our curse. He was ruined for the wicked so that all who believe in him could not fear the ruin of the wicked when it comes. He was impoverished, disgraced, and killed so that fools like us could become wise and so enjoy truly blessed life, the life he rose to when he rose from the dead on the third day, the life he enjoys now and will enjoy forever.

 

So turn from your folly to him. Let go of your efforts to escape reality or change it and instead embrace him who is at the center of all reality. Find him and you will find wisdom in him. Find wisdom in him and it will give you long life, wealth, and honor, but to what extent that happens in this life is in God’s wise hands. A servant is not greater than his master; if they persecuted him, they will persecute you too. In this life the blessing is always mixed with the remnants of the curse, and we still look forward to the day when the wise in him inherit the honor God has promised. But you can trust that the better life here, even if it is at times the harder life, is the life of the one who finds wisdom, and that the only eternal, wealthy, and honorable life is the one found in Christ. He is to be desired more than anything else. If you are in him, do not be afraid of sudden terror, or of the ruin of the wicked when it comes, for since we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath to come. So at the very end of the Bible, the end of the whole story, we read these words “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates” (Rev 22:14). Blessed indeed is the one who finds Christ.