Wisdom Speaks

Sermon Transcript

In the summer my family and I enjoy going to the Francisville pool. It’s clean, it’s well maintained, it’s staffed with lifeguards, it’s a short walk from our house, and it’s free. It’s also generally not crowded. In fact, sometimes it’s uncrowded enough that kids around us will start playing Marco Polo. Do you know that game? The way we used to play it at least was that someone was “it” and that person would have to close their eyes and say “marco”, to which everyone would respond, “polo”, and the person who was it would then have to locate them based on the sound of their voice, not by seeing them.

 

One challenge for many of us in developing a friendship with God is that we cannot see him. How do you get to know and love an invisible being? Well, the good news for us is that he speaks, much like those who say “polo” can be found by the one who says “marco”. In this passage we’ll even see that while God is invisible, he is not hiding. But just as kids may hit a point in a game of Marco Polo where they start to wonder whether it’s worth it to really finish it out and tag all the other kids, so we can wonder whether it’s really worth it to listen to what God has said and find his wisdom, especially when he starts to say things that challenge our feelings and preconceived notions. Nonetheless, this passage tells us to follow the voice of wisdom, and we’ll see why by looking at four different things in it: The call of wisdom, the value of wisdom, the origins of wisdom, and the blessing of wisdom.

 

The call of wisdom

 

In this chapter Solomon begins with this question: Does not wisdom call? And the implied answer is “yes”. Wisdom is even depicted here as raising her voice on the heights beside the way, taking her stand at the crossroads, crying aloud beside the town’s gates and at the entrance of portals. A while back we saw a similar personification of wisdom at the end of Proverbs chapter 1. It’s a poetic device to teach us true things about wisdom, and there also in chapter 1 we saw taught what we see here: Wisdom is available. She’s not silent; she’s calling out. She’s not in hiding; she’s on the heights! And she’s especially available at certain entry points: The crossroads where you can go one way or the other, beside the gate, the entry way of a town, and at the entrance of portals. Wisdom is the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it. There is a givenness to God and our world, a certain way things truly are, and what this is saying is that God has made the perception of it and how to live in accordance with it available.

 

He’s made it available in the things that have been made. In the ancient world, you can find other wisdom texts that have a lot in common with Proverbs, though the people who wrote them were not part of God’s people. There is a general revelation of God in the things that have been made that calls out to us all. When you give in to laziness and find yourself impoverished, wisdom is calling out to you, and you should learn from that what is written in Proverbs 10:4 – “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” When you go to a righteous woman’s funeral and everyone is standing up celebrating how the Lord used her faithfulness in their lives, wisdom is calling out to you, and you should learn from that what is written in Proverbs 10:7 – “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot.”

 

God has not only published his wisdom in the things that he’s made, though. He has also spoken to his people at many times and in many ways through the prophets, and then had the same committed wholly unto writing, so that we now have Proverbs 10:4 and Proverbs 10:7 written down for us, and through these writings, God still speaks today. When you hear the Bible read aloud and rightly preached, you are hearing the call of wisdom. When you read the Bible, you are reading the call of wisdom, so that now when you give in to laziness, and you become impoverished, you don’t have to figure out for the first time what wisdom is saying through that situation. Instead, you know Proverbs 10:4, and through it God says to you, “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” But let’s look at the content of wisdom’s call in this passage.

 

Here she says in verses 4-5 that her call is to humans, and especially to the simple and foolish. The simple are the uninstructed. The fools are those who have been instructed, but who have rejected wise instruction. And yet do you see the grace and patience of God here? Even to fools, he still cries out! That’s why we have a Bible at all! That’s why we’re still here! Though God has published his wisdom in the things that have been made, we haven’t learned from it, have we? I mean, the main thing God has revealed in creation is that he exists and that we ought to worship him, and instead we’ve given our lives to things like the applause of people, money, and safety in this world. The first humans served a snake over him, and yet what has he done? He’s kept calling, and calls even today to fools like us. Some of you here today know that you’ve rejected his wisdom and you live with the consequences of your folly. Even to you, the call of wisdom goes out today.

 

And what is that call to the simple and foolish? Learn! You may be simple or foolish now, but you can learn! Hear, verse 6 says, and the reason then given is because wisdom will only tell you the truth. Wisdom may not tell you what you want to hear, wisdom may challenge and correct you in very uncomfortable ways, in fact I can pretty much guarantee that at some point it will, but it will never lie to you. Psalm 12:6 says the words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. Brothers and sisters, all the words of scripture are the words of God, and God will never lie to you.

 

So, are you willing to learn? Are you willing to listen to the call of wisdom? Can you just admit that you don’t have it all figured it out? If so, start with God’s words in scripture, and I would commend to you the practice of reading them regularly. I use a Bible-in-a-year reading plan; you could start even simpler by just picking a book of the Bible and reading a chapter per day, and then when you finish that book, read another one, and so on. Before you read it, pray, and ask God to give you wisdom to understand what you are about to read and especially how it applies to your life. Don’t let a sense of your own inadequacy stop you from trying to read and understand the Bible; do you see here that wisdom calls out precisely because it wants even the simple and foolish to understand it?! God isn’t trying to trick you with the words of the Bible. Granted that some are harder to understand than others, but God is a God who wants to be known, who wants to give his wisdom even to fools.

 

And God hasn’t left you alone to read the Bible by yourself. Notice again the publicity of wisdom’s call in this passage; wisdom isn’t just speaking to you in private. You aren’t the first or only one to read the Bible. God gathers his people into churches and within those churches even sets aside some as elders to labor in the preaching and teaching of the Bible. Listen to good preaching, discuss scripture with one another, then take the wisdom you are learning from reading the Bible, discussing the Bible, and hearing the Bible read aloud and preached, and use it like glasses when you look out at the world. What is wisdom saying when you are lazy and end up impoverished? Maybe it’s fuzzy to you at first, but put on the glasses of Proverbs 10:4, and what do you find? A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. What is wisdom saying in your present trials? Maybe it’s blurry to you, but put on the glasses of scripture, and prayerfully ask God to make it clearer. Wisdom is calling; follow its voice, because…let’s look next at the value of wisdom.

 

The value of wisdom

 

Verse 11 previews the value of wisdom: It’s better than jewels, and all that you desire cannot compare with her. Why, though? Verses 12-21 come in to answer the question. Look what comes with wisdom in verses 12-14: prudence, knowledge, discretion, hatred of evil, counsel, sound wisdom, insight, and strength. And who needs that stuff? Kings, verse 15 says. Remember that the immediate addressee of Proverbs is Solomon’s son, who would one day be king after Solomon. Remember why when God told Solomon he could ask for anything, Solomon asked for wisdom? “And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in. 8 And your servant is in the midst of your people whom you have chosen, a great people, too many to be numbered or counted for multitude. 9 Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?” (1 Kings 3:7-9). He knew he didn’t have it all figured out, so he asked God for wisdom, specifically to “govern your people”. I know at every elders’ meeting we’re praying for wisdom before the meeting begins, because we realize we don’t have it all figured out. That’s a great way to pray for both your governing officials and for your pastors, and frankly for anyone in a position of authority. Brothers and sisters, would you pray for me and Mark that way?

 

Why do those in authority especially need wisdom? Because those in authority have that authority from God, and therefore they are responsible to glorify God with their authority, but they typically must do so by making decisions in which the more-glorifying-to-God option is not immediately obvious. And look, to stretch this passage to its broadest application, all of you here today have authority over something under God’s authority. Even if you don’t own a single possession or have a dollar to your name, you have a delegated authority over your own body and time: God has given you the agency to decide what to do with these things. If you have money and possessions, that authority extends to those as well. And that means you have decisions to make: What foods will you eat or not eat, how will you exercise or not exercise, when will you go to bed and when you will get up, how will you dress, what words will you use your mouth to say, what words will you not say, on what will you spend your time, how will you spend your money, and so on. Then if you become a boss or a husband or a parent or a pastor or a ruler in the government, those decisions only multiply, as do the importance of them, because once you get into those kinds of positions of authority, you are not only responsible for stuff and tasks, but you also gain responsibility for people, images of God himself.

 

And some questions about how to glorify God with such authority the Bible gives us clear answers to. How can I glorify God with my body? Don’t unite it to a prostitute (1 Cor 6); clear. How can I glorify God with my time? Don’t spend it on sin (1 Peter 4:2-3); clear. And the prohibitions of the Bible are especially clear and important precisely for that reason. But the Bible doesn’t just give us prohibitions. For the body, for example, it also tells us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1). What specifically should that look like in your life? Less clear. Granted that we shouldn’t spend our time on sin, but how can we make the best use of the time as Colossians 4:5 tells us to do? Less clear. And again, that’s just in your life. Now multiply that up to higher levels of authority. The boss doesn’t just have to decide how to manage her time; she has to consider how to assign tasks to her direct reports in a way that best uses their time. A husband doesn’t just have to decide how he can glorify God; he has to also decide how to lead his wife to glorify God. Parents don’t just have to decide how to speak respectfully; they have to decide how to train their kids to do so, and so on.

 

So do you see, especially as your authority grows, how much you need wisdom? Those are the sorts of things with which wisdom deals. There is no verse of the Bible that will tell you how much screen time to give your kids. There is no verse of the Bible that will tell you whether you should take the night to rest and enjoy a show you like or spend the time with some brothers and sisters from church to encourage them in Christ. There is no verse of the Bible that tells our governing officials the best tax rates, nor is there a verse of the Bible that tells your pastors how to format our services or how best to care for members or how best to equip you all for the work of ministry; I often wish there were! And yet, we probably all sense that are better and worse decisions in many of these cases. So how can we arrive at such decisions? We need wisdom. Follow the voice of wisdom because of how valuable it is to leaders.

 

And follow it because of how valuable it is to everyone. Look at verse 18: Riches and honor are with me, enduring wealth and righteousness. It is natural, not sinful, to prefer wealth to poverty and honor to shame. But neither should be sought at the expense of righteousness, which is too often the case in our fallen world. When riches become your supreme good, and you have the opportunity to lie in order to grow your wealth with reasonable confidence you won’t get caught, what will you do? You’ll lie. You’ll act unrighteously in order to become wealthy. What’s the most common reason we do lie? To cover up shame, and try to get for ourselves honor from others. We act unrighteously in order to gain honor. But what wisdom offers is riches, honor, enduring wealth, and righteousness.

 

We have a strange teaching in America that we’ve lamentably exported to the world that we now call “prosperity theology”, which takes passages like this and says, “Look, God wants to give you wealth and honor; the Bible says so! Do you believe him for that? Believe today that God wants to give you those things. Don’t block your blessings. What’s the dream you have that you’ve been sitting on? What don’t you believe God can do? Go after your dream and believe that God can and will prosper you!” Do you see how that’s twisting this passage? First, there’s very little talk of righteousness, if any, in prosperity theology; the riches and honor become the supreme good. And furthermore, the path to riches and honor that they offer is not the path of wisdom, which is obviously the path to it here; the path they offer is “following your dream” or if they’re dressing it up in more Christian garb, “following your calling”.

 

This passage isn’t telling you to follow your dream and God will give you wealth and honor. It’s telling you to follow the voice of wisdom, and from wisdom, you will get wealth, honor, and righteousness. Start following the wisdom of scripture where God has you now, and trust him to provide according to his wisdom. Follow the voice of wisdom because it’s valuable. Let’s look next at the origins of wisdom.

 

The origins of wisdom

 

In verse 22 wisdom says of herself that “the LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.” In verse 23 she says she was “set up” before the beginning of the earth, in verse 24 she was “brought forth”, and her point in saying all this is that this happened before God’s work of creation, which is alluded to repeatedly in these verses. Wisdom was possessed, set up, and brought forth by God before God made the world. And that shouldn’t surprise us if we remember Proverbs 3:19, which says “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens.” We saw then that wisdom was a kind of blueprint, or a set of ideas in the mind of God, and he created all things in accordance with that blueprint, as an artist first generates an idea, and then brings that idea to fruition by their creative work, whether with a paintbrush or a pottery wheel or a carving knife. But in order for that final work of art to exist, the idea had to come first, and that’s what wisdom is saying here: Before God created, he possessed, set up, and brought forth the ideas by which he created.

 

So what’s wisdom’s appeal here? Why should you follow the voice of wisdom? Wisdom’s basically saying, “Because I was here first.” Not only was wisdom here before you, but wisdom was here before here, before there was any here, before God made the heavens and the earth, and guess what? It’s still here! It’s still calling! It has stood the ultimate test of time, because it existed before time began, and it is still calling today. Sometime in the past year or two a man named Bill Krispin died. Bill was a pastor in Philadelphia for decades and continued living in Philadelphia until the day he died. Every young pastor in the city wanted to meet with Bill; I met with him before we planted this church. Why? Because Bill had been in Philly for decades before we had, and we all sensed that he had wisdom we lacked. Bill had decades on us, and wisdom is saying here that she has all of time on us, millennia upon millennia, and she is even more available than Bill.

 

And wisdom is greater than Bill or whoever you look up to for wisdom because she’s not just a learner like we are; she’s the original through which all things were made! We saw that in Proverbs 3:19; we see it again in this passage. If wisdom was brought forth before God made the earth, what was wisdom doing while God made the heavens and the earth? She tells us in verse 30: I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, and delighting especially in the children of man, the crown jewel of God’s creation. Wisdom was in the beginning with God, and through wisdom all things were made. Everything in this world exists by wisdom. So if you want to perceive the reality of this world and live according to it, whose voice do you need to follow? Wisdom’s.

 

The real world in which we live is not undefined mush that we shape according to our own minds. The assumption of many in our world today is that’s what it is. Actions aren’t essentially good or evil; we just impose those categories on them, and if I impose a different one than you, who are you tell me I’m wrong? Humans are not essentially different from animals, we just impose greater value on them. Men are not essentially different from women, we just impose gender on them, and so forth. And therefore education and parenting, forming people positively, is not so much about passing on to them an already-defined wisdom, but teaching them how to assert themselves on their world. Therapy and correction, the things we use when something has gone wrong, are then not about helping people realign themselves with a wisdom outside themselves, but are rather about helping people heal from those who have tried to impose on them a standard outside themselves! Education, parenting, therapy, and correction are all very good things, but they get twisted when we detach them from the real world, a real world that was made through wisdom, a wisdom God has made available to us in the Bible! And the best way we can help our children and help others is by lovingly passing on that wisdom to them!

 

Now maybe you’re thinking, “Ok; I get it. Life’s hard, get a helmet. We all want to be gooey and comforting, but we’ve got to live in the real, hard, world. Facts don’t care about your feelings.” That’s not really what wisdom is saying either, though. Do verses 22-31 make the real world sound like something kinda miserable? No! The whole process of creation brought delight and rejoicing both to God and to his wisdom. And we can see that it will bring joy and delight to you if you follow its voice by looking lastly at the blessing of wisdom.

 

The blessing of wisdom

 

Here’s what wisdom says in verse 32: Blessed are those who keep my ways. Again in verse 34: Blessed is the one who listens to me, for, verse 35: Whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD. Everything God made is good, and those who find that reality and live in accordance with it do not find pain and misery; they find life and favor from the LORD himself. We saw earlier that everything wisdom says is true, and you may have to choose sometimes between the true and the comfortable. You may have to choose sometimes between the true and what you feel or what you were brought up to believe. But you never have to choose between the true and the good. Everything wisdom says is not only true, but good, and for the joy and delight of all God’s people. Wisdom gives enduring wealth, honor, righteousness, life, and favor from the LORD to all who find her.

 

And not everyone does find her. Wisdom closes her speech to us in verse 36 with a warning: He who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death. When you live as though the world is an undefined mush that you can just impose your own desires and beliefs upon, you may actually live more comfortably and feel better for a time, but it will not last. Over and over again reality will hit you and you will injure yourself. And if you keep doing the same things that lead to injury, it will not only end in injury, but in death. To hate God’s wisdom is not just to hate God; it’s to hate life! It’s to love death!

 

In this contrast between life and death at the end of Proverbs we have the contrast between God’s blessing and God’s curse, and it means at least three things: First, those who live by wisdom will, on average, live longer than those who reject it. If you live in accordance with the reality of how your body and the world works, you will tend to live longer than those who reject it. Second, the one who finds wisdom finds better life than the one who fails to find it. It’s life with riches, honor, and righteousness, not just life of greater duration, while the one who fails to find it injures himself in this life on the way to death. The one who finds wisdom lives under the favor of God, with the God who made and rules over everything smiling down on you, rather than turning his face from you. And third, it means eternal life. Not just longer life on average, but eternal life. How do we know that?

 

Well, who is this wisdom speaking in this chapter? Did you know that’s a debated question? You ready for a quick dip in the deep end? Thousands of years ago there was a very popular false teaching that many seemingly sincere people believed called Arianism, named after a bishop named Arius. Arianism taught that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not of the same essence as God the Father, but was rather the first being God made. They believed “there was a time when he was not”, and therefore, he is not God, and should not be worshiped as God. Today Arianism has representatives in Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism, and guess what one of their favorite passages is to appeal to for this idea? Proverbs 8:22-31. And what do they say? They say the wisdom through whom God made all things was himself made; see verse 23 says “ages ago I was set up”; the wisdom was set up by God, but God was never set up! Verse 24 says “I was brought forth”; but God was never brought forth! And the New Testament, the part of the Bible written after the coming of Jesus, likely refers to this passage when it calls Jesus “the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15) and “the beginning of all creation” (Rev 3:14), the one by whom all things were created (Col 1:16).

 

What can we say in response? What might you say in response when you are trying to share the gospel with a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness or even a Muslim? First, we should notice the genre of literature we are in. It’s printed the way it is in your Bibles because it is poetry, and we know that imagery is a technique in poetry that is not meant to communicate with doctrinal precision. So we should be very leery of formulating the finer points of doctrine from poetic texts, whether those texts seem to favor our doctrinal commitments or not. We should further notice that nothing in this text tells us that the setting up of wisdom or the bringing forth of wisdom happened in time. In other words, it never tells us there was a time when wisdom was not. It leaves open the possibility that the setting up of wisdom is an eternal setting up, that the bringing forth of wisdom is an eternal bringing forth, as the sun always radiates its rays, though we can distinguish the sun from its rays, and this is what we Christians confess about the relation of the Father and the Son: That the son is indeed brought forth by the Father, but eternally so. So even if this passage is about the son of God, it does nothing to disprove the eternality of the Son. And while it may be the case that passage is not about the son and is rather just a poetic personification of wisdom, it certainly at least points to him, as the New Testament passages that allude to it demonstrate. And finally, we should point out that scripture often speaks to us in temporal language, but we cannot press it too literally when we realize that time itself is created, and God existed before it.

 

Putting all those passages together, then, the great theologian Herman Bavinck helped me understand it more like this: First, the Father thinks the idea of the world; “but all that the Father is and has and thinks he imparts to, and expresses in, the Son. In him the Father contemplates the idea of the world itself, not as though it were identical with the Son, but so that he envisions and meets it in the Son in whom his fullness dwells.” In other words, God’s ideas for creation are eternally expressed in the Son, such that when God goes to create, he first contemplates those ideas in the Son, and in this way, creates all things through him. God’s wisdom is the blueprint for creation, and the Son, rather than being identical with that wisdom, is the one who holds the wisdom up and rejoices in it as the Father makes the earth and everything else. Now look, if that’s all a bit over your head, at least hear this clearly: That Son, the beginning of all creation, has now taken on flesh and come among us. In Colossians 1, in the same passage in which we read that he is the firstborn of all creation, we read that he came to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

 

Though he is the one through whom all things were made, all things were alienated from their creator and in need of reconciliation. So he came and revealed to us the fullness of the wisdom of God that included not only his plans for creation, but his plans for our reconciliation, which centered on the blood of the cross, on which he bore the curse we deserved, so that we might inherit the blessing that he deserved. And what was that blessing? The third day he rose again and ascended into heaven, never to die again. That’s why the life wisdom holds out to us is not just long life on earth or even good life on earth, but eternal life in a new heavens and new earth, and the risen Christ himself is now calling from heaven to all who hear to turn from their wickedness to him, to receive and rest upon him alone for salvation. In him is the wisdom to lead like he leads, who came not to be served, but to serve. In him is the wealth and honor that truly endures. In him is the only righteousness by which we can be righteous in God’s sight. He was here first, and he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Follow his voice.