In the book of Proverbs, we meet the brilliant teacher, she’s smart about everything, work, relationships, sex, spirituality. She has incredible insights, things we wouldn’t see on our own. She would be the perfect friend to have around, when we need really specific advice. What makes her so smart? She believes that there is an invisible creative force in the universe, that can guide people and how they should live, we can’t see it, just like we can’t see the gravity, but it affects everything that we do. What’s this force? In Hebrew, it’s called “chokma” and it’s usually gets translated into English as wisdom. It’s an attribute used of God, that God used to create the world and chokma has been woven into the fabric of things and how they work. Wherever people are making good or just or wise decisions, they are tapping into chokma and whenever someone is making a bad decision, they’re working against chokma. It’s like a moral law of the universe, it’s a cause-and-effect pattern and no one can escape it.
Proverbs personifies all of this as a woman, lady wisdom. She roams around the earth, calling out, making herself available to anyone who’s willing to listen to her and to learn. Anyone can access and interact with wisdom and use it to make a beautiful life for themselves or others. We can create with it, like a designer. In fact, chokma in Hebrew isn’t simply intellectual knowledge, the word is also used to describe the skilled artisan, who excels at their craft like woodworking or stonemason. We show we possess chokma, when we put it to work and develop the skill of making a good life. But consider, chokma isn’t some impersonal force, it’s an attribute of God himself, and in Hebrew thought, our journey to becoming wise has to begin with the fear of the Lord. It’s this healthy respect for God’s definition of good and evil, and true wisdom means learning those boundary lines and not crossing them.
Now, all those ideas we just unpacked are in chapters one through nine in Proverbs, but the Proverbs themselves are what we find in chapters ten onto the end of the book. It’s a collection of hundreds and hundreds of Proverbs about any and all aspects of life and chokma gets applied to them, resulting in this wise guidance to help us find a path toward success and no matter what we do. If we designed our life with these sayings, life is gonna be good or as Proverbs puts it, it’ll give health to our bones, prosperity, a long rich life. We can see how it’s often the case, wise people, they tend to do better, things usually work out well for them in life. But if we take a step back, some people would argue, it’s a little too simplistic, because sometimes horrible things happened to really wise people and sometimes foolish people get rewarded, it doesn’t always work the way we think it should work. We need to go to our next wise friend, Ecclesiastes, the critic, because he’s wrestled with that very problem and he’s going to push us further in our journey to find the good life.
Ecclesiastes, he’s the sharp middle-age critic and he’s says, we think using wisdom will bring us success, we’d better think again, because life here under the sun is meaningless. That’s a phrase he uses a lot in this book, but to understand this book, we have to realize that we’re hearing two voices. There’s the teacher and we’ve been calling him the critic, he’s the main voice in the book, but he is introduced to us by another figure, the author. The author is the one who’s collected the critics words and then at the end of the book, summarizes everything and gets the final word. Why does the author want to hear from the critic? The author wants to turn our view of the world upside down and he’s gonna let the critic explore really disturbing things about the world.
The march of time, whereas the critic says, generations come and generations go, but the earth, it’s been here long before us and will be long after. No one remembers people from long ago and all the people yet to come, they too will be forgotten by those who come after them. Admits this cosmic backdrop, our entire existence is like a blink in time, which leads to the critic’s disturbing observation that we are all going to die. The critic says, humans face the same fate as the animals. Death, all people, the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, those who offer sacrifices to God and those who do not, they all share the same destiny, all this activity and madness, then we all join the dead. Another disturbing thing for the critic and that is life’s random nature. In Proverbs, life isn’t random. There’s a clear cause-and-effect relationship between doing the right thing and being rewarded. But the fact is, that life doesn’t always work that way, the critic has observed a glitch in the system, he calls it, chance. The race doesn’t always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor does food always come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the educated, time and chance happen to them all. The critic’s point is that we can’t really control anything in life, it’s just way too unpredictable, so if we want to master life, then we’re setting ourselves up for a fall.
Now throughout the book, the critic uses a metaphor to tie together all of these disturbing ideas. Nearly 40 times he say that everything in life is “hevel,” it’s a Hebrew word that means smoke or vapor. Like smoke, life is beautiful and mysterious, it takes one shape and before we know it, it takes a new shape. Smoke looks solid, but try and grab it, it will slip right through our fingers. Our modern translations have lost the metaphor and they usually translate hevel as “meaningless,” but if we read closely, the critic isn’t saying that life has no meaning, but rather that its meaning is never clear. Like smoke, life is confusing, it’s disorienting and uncontrollable. What are we supposed to do with all of this? Surprisingly, the critic acknowledges the perspective of Proverbs, he says, it’s a really good idea to learn wisdom and to live in the fear of the Lord. But the critic said, that doesn’t guarantee success, but he knows it’s the right thing to do.
Since we can’t control our life, we should stop trying, learn to hold things with an open hand, because we really only have control over one thing and that’s our attitude towards the present moment. Stop worrying he says, and choose to enjoy a good conversation with a friend or the sun on your face or a good meal with people that we care about, the simple things in life. Both the good things and the bad, because both are rich gifts from God. The author speaks up at the end of the book, he doesn’t want us to lose hope, he wants to make us humble, into someone who trusts that life has meaning, even when we can’t make sense of it, that one day, God will clear the hevel and bring his justice on all that we’ve done. The author tells us, that the proper response to all of this, is to fear the Lord.
Proverbs personifies all of this as a woman, lady wisdom. She roams around the earth, calling out, making herself available to anyone who’s willing to listen to her and to learn. Anyone can access and interact with wisdom and use it to make a beautiful life for themselves or others. We can create with it, like a designer. In fact, chokma in Hebrew isn’t simply intellectual knowledge, the word is also used to describe the skilled artisan, who excels at their craft like woodworking or stonemason. We show we possess chokma, when we put it to work and develop the skill of making a good life. But consider, chokma isn’t some impersonal force, it’s an attribute of God himself, and in Hebrew thought, our journey to becoming wise has to begin with the fear of the Lord. It’s this healthy respect for God’s definition of good and evil, and true wisdom means learning those boundary lines and not crossing them.
Now, all those ideas we just unpacked are in chapters one through nine in Proverbs, but the Proverbs themselves are what we find in chapters ten onto the end of the book. It’s a collection of hundreds and hundreds of Proverbs about any and all aspects of life and chokma gets applied to them, resulting in this wise guidance to help us find a path toward success and no matter what we do. If we designed our life with these sayings, life is gonna be good or as Proverbs puts it, it’ll give health to our bones, prosperity, a long rich life. We can see how it’s often the case, wise people, they tend to do better, things usually work out well for them in life. But if we take a step back, some people would argue, it’s a little too simplistic, because sometimes horrible things happened to really wise people and sometimes foolish people get rewarded, it doesn’t always work the way we think it should work. We need to go to our next wise friend, Ecclesiastes, the critic, because he’s wrestled with that very problem and he’s going to push us further in our journey to find the good life.
Ecclesiastes, he’s the sharp middle-age critic and he’s says, we think using wisdom will bring us success, we’d better think again, because life here under the sun is meaningless. That’s a phrase he uses a lot in this book, but to understand this book, we have to realize that we’re hearing two voices. There’s the teacher and we’ve been calling him the critic, he’s the main voice in the book, but he is introduced to us by another figure, the author. The author is the one who’s collected the critics words and then at the end of the book, summarizes everything and gets the final word. Why does the author want to hear from the critic? The author wants to turn our view of the world upside down and he’s gonna let the critic explore really disturbing things about the world.
The march of time, whereas the critic says, generations come and generations go, but the earth, it’s been here long before us and will be long after. No one remembers people from long ago and all the people yet to come, they too will be forgotten by those who come after them. Admits this cosmic backdrop, our entire existence is like a blink in time, which leads to the critic’s disturbing observation that we are all going to die. The critic says, humans face the same fate as the animals. Death, all people, the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, those who offer sacrifices to God and those who do not, they all share the same destiny, all this activity and madness, then we all join the dead. Another disturbing thing for the critic and that is life’s random nature. In Proverbs, life isn’t random. There’s a clear cause-and-effect relationship between doing the right thing and being rewarded. But the fact is, that life doesn’t always work that way, the critic has observed a glitch in the system, he calls it, chance. The race doesn’t always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor does food always come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the educated, time and chance happen to them all. The critic’s point is that we can’t really control anything in life, it’s just way too unpredictable, so if we want to master life, then we’re setting ourselves up for a fall.
Now throughout the book, the critic uses a metaphor to tie together all of these disturbing ideas. Nearly 40 times he say that everything in life is “hevel,” it’s a Hebrew word that means smoke or vapor. Like smoke, life is beautiful and mysterious, it takes one shape and before we know it, it takes a new shape. Smoke looks solid, but try and grab it, it will slip right through our fingers. Our modern translations have lost the metaphor and they usually translate hevel as “meaningless,” but if we read closely, the critic isn’t saying that life has no meaning, but rather that its meaning is never clear. Like smoke, life is confusing, it’s disorienting and uncontrollable. What are we supposed to do with all of this? Surprisingly, the critic acknowledges the perspective of Proverbs, he says, it’s a really good idea to learn wisdom and to live in the fear of the Lord. But the critic said, that doesn’t guarantee success, but he knows it’s the right thing to do.
Since we can’t control our life, we should stop trying, learn to hold things with an open hand, because we really only have control over one thing and that’s our attitude towards the present moment. Stop worrying he says, and choose to enjoy a good conversation with a friend or the sun on your face or a good meal with people that we care about, the simple things in life. Both the good things and the bad, because both are rich gifts from God. The author speaks up at the end of the book, he doesn’t want us to lose hope, he wants to make us humble, into someone who trusts that life has meaning, even when we can’t make sense of it, that one day, God will clear the hevel and bring his justice on all that we’ve done. The author tells us, that the proper response to all of this, is to fear the Lord.