The proverbs of Solomon, son of David and king of Israel.
Here are proverbs that will help you recognize wisdom and good advice, and understand sayings with deep meaning. They can teach you how to live intelligently and how to be honest, just, and fair. They can make an inexperienced person clever and teach young people how to be resourceful. These proverbs can even add to the knowledge of the wise and give guidance to the educated, so that they can understand the hidden meanings of proverbs and the problems that the wise raise.
To have knowledge, you must first have reverence for the Lord. Stupid people have no respect for wisdom and refuse to learn.
My child, pay attention to what your father and mother tell you. Their teaching will improve your character as a handsome turban or a necklace improves your appearance.
My child, when sinners tempt you, don’t give in. Suppose they say, “Come on; let’s find someone to kill! Let’s attack some innocent people for the fun of it! They may be alive and well when we find them, but they’ll be dead when we’re through with them! We’ll find all kinds of riches and fill our houses with loot! Come and join us, and we’ll all share what we steal.”
My child, don’t go with people like that. Stay away from them. They can’t wait to do something bad. They’re always ready to kill. It does no good to spread a net when the bird you want to catch is watching, but people like that are setting a trap for themselves, a trap in which they will die. Robbery always claims the life of the robber—this is what happens to anyone who lives by violence. (Good News Translation)
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
Theodore Roosevelt
A proverb is a short pithy statement of experiential truth. Proverbs are meant to teach one how to live a good life. This sort of education requires a lifetime of learning. There is always wisdom to be gained.
In order to have true understanding and wisdom, there needs to be a balance of intellectual knowledge, affective feeling, and intuitive knowledge. Only possessing some of these elements makes one nothing more than a half-wit.
A commitment to virtue, morality, and ethics is a must in the acquisition of wisdom, and thus, a good life. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual maturity all take time. Marinading over a long period of time in the wisdom of biblical proverbs will prove to be a life saver. At the end of one’s life, they can look back with gratefulness and satisfaction, instead of sorrow and regret.
So, from the very outset of approaching the Book of Proverbs, the mindset and heart stance must not be one of popping a few proverbial pills in order to achieve a self-centered goal or gain an immediate solution.
Rather, proverbial wisdom demands daily immersion in its wise sayings. It requires implementation and experimentation every single day. There needs to be decisive action, coupled with contemplative reflection. Anything short of this truncates and stunts one’s growth.
There is yet one more necessary prerequisite toward the sagacious and good life. Without this, nothing is possible. But with this, all things are possible: Acknowledgment, awareness, and adoration of the Lord.
A fool is one who stubbornly refuses to take in the full range of epistemic knowledge. Being only book smart is to actually be stupid. To be only a walking heart of emotional intelligence is foolish. And to live only by gut instinct alone is to cut off yourself from wisdom’s teaching.
A wise life includes the head, the heart, and the gut – and to have them all aligned together as an integral whole. To live other than this is to live as a fool who believes they already have the answers and the key to knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, this means that to take God and transcendent things off of the table, to begin with, is the most foolish decision a person can make. Conversely, to forsake the intellectual life and believe that all one needs is the spiritual, is to betray a woefully foolish approach to the good life.
There are also those who distance themselves from family, especially parents. On some level, this makes sense, if one had a childhood full of traumatic memories and difficult relationships.
However, learning to honor even these parents is to place oneself on the path of wisdom, and to learn what the good life truly entails. And this approach allows the person to see the good, and strain out the bad.
In other words, we discover that good and bad, wise and foolish, smart and stupid, exists within everyone and in every place. Wholesale jettisoning of persons and/or institutions gains us little to nothing.
This distancing from family and/or God is an attempt to assert some control, to effect one’s willpower upon life. But this will lead us away from the true path of wisdom.
That’s because wisdom is not something to be mastered. Wise sayings don’t exist to be collected, and their sagacity harnessed for one’s personal goals.
Yes, we are to avail ourselves of wisdom, yet perhaps not as we may believe or think. We do not capture wisdom, but are captured by it.
The importance of this mental, emotional, and spiritual stance must not be undervalued. We only learn wisdom by means of humility and reverence before powers greater than ourselves. Any vestige of pride in us shall cause wisdom to disappear and slip from our grasp.
Only until we both intellectually and experientially recognize that the essential operations of the universe are beyond us, shall anyone begin to trust and risk in a wisdom greater than our own.
“Without humility, all shall be lost.”
St. Teresa of Avila
Put another way, if we refuse to learn from God and from our parents, then we won’t.
Only by accepting this can anyone discern what to do and don’t do, say and don’t say, when faced with competing voices.
For there is continually a voice of foolishness, of wickedness, enticing us to get what we want quickly, selfishly, without any thought to the consequences or the effect upon others. A group of such voices becomes a gang who tries outdoing each other in competitive evil.
There is also a voice of wisdom, which admonishes us to avoid the fast, fun, and friendly gang of evil speech and behavior. The wise person discerns that what the wicked person does to another, comes back upon them.
The patient and powerful voice of wisdom communicates prudence in all things, that is, to do today what will lead to a better tomorrow.
So then, my friend, what is the thing – the decision, the action, the words – that you can and will do today which will help you accomplish a good, right, and just life for yourself (and others) for tomorrow?
Great God of all wisdom, help me to trust You and follow Your precepts in every twist and turn of my life. Grant me good understanding and guide my steps, so that Your will is done on earth, as it is always done in Your heaven. Amen.
Rev. Tim Ehrhardt 