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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Proverbs is a very different book. It calls us to study, to think, to learn the practical discipline of centering all our thoughts and actions on God. Indeed, one of the main messages of Proverbs is—you’ve never really thought enough about anything.
Wisdom is not only for “deep thinkers.” It is how you get through daily life.
The Hebrew musar (instruction in 1:2–3) means training with strong accountability. It means being drilled under an instructor who often gets up in your face. So wisdom often comes through the pain of personal confrontation by friends (27:5), or from learning from one’s mistakes (26:11), or from the suffering that God judiciously allows into our lives (3:11–12).
As an athlete becomes physically competent only after rigorous training, so wisdom is hard won.
To be wise is to anticipate problems without falling into either the danger of overconfidence or the paralysis of overcaution. It is to know not only what to do but also when to do it. A blessing at the wrong time can have the effect of a curse (27:14).
As we can be moral and still be unwise, so it is possible to be very knowledgeable and yet be foolish.
But can you have wisdom without knowledge? No. You have to be knowledgeable about a subject before you can apply it with the discipline, discernment, and discretion of wisdom. So Proverbs calls those who would be wise to add to their learning. The Hebrew word leqah means extensive study.
To be wise we must understand human nature, how human relationships work, suffering and death, and the character of God himself. Wisdom is wedding thought and experience to become “competent with regard to the realities of life.”9 And among all other things we should study, true wisdom requires deep knowledge of the Scriptures.
Throughout the book of Proverbs the opposite of wisdom is called foolishness.
There are various forms of foolishness, as we will see. But the ultimate foolishness is to make anything the center of our lives besides God. That will always lead to disappointment and breakdown. Jesus describes the “foolish man” whose home is built on sand instead of on the solid rock of Christ’s word and wisdom (Matthew 7:24–26).
But Kagan argued that, unless parents intervene, children’s natural temperament will dominate, and they won’t learn how to act wisely in situations in which their habitual response is inappropriate or even deadly. In other words, we are naturally obstinate and unwise.
Vocab
Modern culture insists that we should let children be themselves, but what feels most natural to us might be disastrous (22:15). To become wise, the anxious must learn to be bolder, the bold to be cautious, and the chronically sunny to be more thoughtful.
As we have seen, the mark of the fool is to be wise in his own eyes. This leads to the deadly spiritual condition of smug complacency. There is nothing more foolish than to think you have life under control when it is not controllable.
The “Gideon principle” (Judges 6:15) is that God chooses the weakest and least likely to succeed, so that all glory is clearly his and does not come through the agency of men and women.
This is also a biblical “Peter principle.” Of the eleven surviving disciples, Peter failed most egregiously during Jesus’ arrest and execution. Yet in John 21 Jesus forgives him and makes him the leader. It is as if Jesus said, “Because you have been the biggest failure, you have the potential to be the greatest leader. Plunge your failures into my grace and it will make you both astonishingly bold and profoundly humble at the same time—and so profoundly wise.”
#vocab
Your family of origin may be great, or not so great, but the family you have been adopted into, with God as your Father and Jesus as your older brother, is the greatest.
