Proverbs 8

Chapter 8 of Proverbs opens with something profound. “Does wisdom not call? Does understanding not raise her voice?” What we’re seeing is something too critical to simply pass up, as if it’s just a figure of speech. It most certainly is not!

Let’s consider that the Bible is telling us that wisdom is getting out in the town square, on Main Street, and in the centers of commerce, the halls of education and she’s calling to us. God’s call isn’t a whisper. It isn’t hiding on a mountain as if that’s where a sage needs to go – needs to get away from it all to see God. The thing to remember is that this is God’s world. All of it.

Once again we have a repeat of the central thrust of Proverbs. It cries to the simple and the fools – to those that are ambling through life under the horrible deception that the ultimate truth can’t be known and that they can remain neutral. To that person that’s just trying to be practical – just trying to get a good job or get into the right college…you know, just taking care of their responsibilities, the Lord says, “listen.” It says I’m out searching for you, crying out from the town center and everywhere you go and only from God will you learn about noble things (v. 6), what is right as well as the utter truth (v.7).

So, we have God’s promise again. And it is a promise. He says that all the words of his mouth are righteous and true, nothing twisted or crooked (v. 8). And He declares that if you lay hold of these things it will make you richer than you could possibly fathom. No amount of silver or gold or any other thing you could possibly possess can compare with her.

But, wait, is this saying that following God leads to crass materialism? Of course not. Perish that hideous thought. What Proverbs 8 is doing is presenting a love song to us. We hear love songs on the radio and they’re usually trite and full of cliches. Some, of course, are very well done but none rise to this level because only God is really love and in His love He promises us fellowship with Himself – real fellowship based in truth. We do well to remember that love devoid of Jesus Christ isn’t what we think it is because love does no wrong to a neighbor. Sexual union outside of God is hateful; it’s selfish and ruinous for both parties. The world is calling us too and it’s saying that love is a feeling and, to be blunt, that feeling is primarily sexual. To this God says that His wisdom speaks nothing twisted or crooked (v. 8). This means that at the end of the day those of us – fools and simpletons – that base our lives on Christ can rest assured that we’ll be led to truth. More still, that we’ll be loved perfectly by God and that this love will compel us and lead us to the paths of righteousness.

What does it profit a person, after all, to gain great wealth and yet ruin his personal life? This is what it means when it says that wisdom is greater than earthly possessions. And, naturally, it warns us that at the end of our lives we’ll face Him for judgment too. What good will those things we’ve amassed do for us then?

We lay hold of this wisdom through the fear of the Lord. This is Proverbs’ way of saying what Paul says in Romans 8 when he speaks of “the mind that’s set on the spirit” over against the “mind that’s set on the flesh.” And again in Romans 12 when he tells us not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This renewal is the reversal of sin’s order – which is self-worship. The fool doesn’t fear God. He doesn’t hold Him and His word as preeminent in all his reasoning. He’s trying to go through life on his own terms, figuring it out as he goes along – learning through experience and study.

The critical decision upon which all of life hinges for every person is how they answer this question: “Who is God? Is it me or is it God?” And despite what we like to tell ourselves, none of us are neutral on this point. We’ve all made a decision. The person who says, “well, I really don’t know…I don’t think there’s enough evidence…I have to wait and see,” is what God calls here the close-minded fool. Why does He call the unbeliever that? Well, because he’s saying that the very question at hand is absurd. The very question proves that point of Scripture – that man has fallen in sin and that his faculty of reason isn’t operating properly due to that moral rebellion against God.

Chapter 8 goes on to personify wisdom and extol the virtues of this attribute of God. Verses 22-31 isn’t making wisdom out to be the fourth person of the trinity. What it’s doing by this device is showing how God created the world in wisdom. It was all planned out in the mind of God, and that plan was known perfectly by the perfect mind. God didn’t start the operation of creating the world, run into a few hiccups as we all do in our labors, double back, consider things carefully, have a meeting with some architects or something and then get back to it. That’s a horrific thought because if God had to do any of that then we aren’t really saved. We need to see this truth carefully and fully. If God didn’t create the world in perfect wisdom – the wonderful mountains, the gentle hills, the endless fields, the skies above….all of it – then we’re walking dead men. There is no hope.

The average westerner, burdened by that abomination called public education today, that tells us that God isn’t the source of knowledge and the precondition for it, thinks that the world happened through evolution. They think that creation got this way, intricate, endlessly interesting and logical, and heart breakingly beautiful, by sheer mindless chance. Thank God this isn’t true. Thank God that He brought all things into being through His divine attribute of wisdom! If this isn’t so, then all that we see is a mockery. If all that we see is the result of godless chance then order, meaning, truth and love are nothing. Let’s ponder that for a moment. That means that we’re ultimately nothing. Truly nothing. The splendorous fall colors; the love of your child; the wonders of a smile; the beauty of a song. All of it utterly useless. Can you see why, therefore, God says that this understanding of His wisdom is greater than gold and silver?

There’s a phenomenon today that is inexplicable except in light of what the sage is telling us. Millions of citizens in the world’s wealthiest country are on anti-depressant medication. Even still, thousands commit suicide every year. We often hear about gun deaths in America and the number is shocking. But if there are 40,000 deaths by firearm every year in America it’s customary that two-thirds are suicides. How can this be?

Well, first, and always, there’s sin. Sin is an active force that devastates us. Sin, as the principle of Satan, that is to say that we can’t trust God and that God isn’t good, isolates us from true life. Sin, when in control, hides real love from our eyes. Wisdom is crying out to us but the principle of sin muffles it. “God isn’t really there,” it hisses in our ear. “And even if He was, He’s got bigger things to worry about than you.”

Sin lies about God. And since God is truth, beauty, life and wisdom, these qualities are cut off from us if we’re overtaken. Sin’s words, the words of the flesh, the words of the world’s philosophies, are twisted and crooked. The education system takes our children and keeps them from God five days a week. It says, “give us your child but not your God.” Then it fills them with the metaphysic of chance. It breaks their heart with the doctrine of divine nothingness. It crushes them with evolution because to believe that everything came from nothing is both intellectually nihilistic and morally insane. The sage is telling us that God is calling the simple and the fools to hear that these are enormous lies.

But these lies are precisely what the unbeliever is going to accept by default if he/she doesn’t put their flag down. To drift along and think you’re neutral in the whole thing is a terrible deceit. In “No Country for Old Men”, author Cormac McCarthy has a killer who’s utterly fascinating. The killer, Chigurh, says to one pending victim who refuses to believe what’s happening to them, to face their predicament, “how do you expect to protect yourself from a threat you refuse to acknowledge the existence of?” The sage would no doubt agree.

That’s why Proverbs 8 is so important because it shows not only that life isn’t random chance, but that it’s governed by a great, awesome and loving God. Also, that He’s founded everything on wisdom and it’s wisdom that’s the path to life. This is why the Lord says, “for whoever find me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.”

To hate God is to love death because there can’t be life apart from Him. To seek life without God is like going to a grocery store to watch an NBA game. It’s a contradiction in terms.

In all, what we are given here is the antidote to depression. Your life is meaningful because God made you and everything in the world. And God is joyous about the whole enterprise! Listen as He promises love, joy, goodness and truth without contradiction, shame, or regret. Depression is the natural state of the soul that needs God but doesn’t have Him. We were created for fellowship and it’s this fellowship that He offers. Take it, grab it, clutch it to your breast and never let it go and see for yourself how sweet, how divine, and how true God is.

Christ is the wisdom of God for us. In Him we see God’s redemptive plan throughout history and, in that, we behold His amazing plans in their glorious, fascinating and ever surprising detail. Wisdom is the whole counsel of God; it’s the word of God – the Bible. That’s the gist of this. If we set our lives on the principle of sin – of thinking we can stay neutral – we call God a liar and set ourselves up on a collision course with regret and, ultimately, judgement. It’s easy to do this because we have the flesh in us (though as Christians we are not in the flesh) and because the world’s philosophy is at war with God. Our education, our media, everything really, tells us that you can’t be sure of anything. “Who knows…” is the mantra of the times. And yet they know that God isn’t the way! Such hypocrisy. The mind today that’s set on the flesh is operating in all that darkness of the chance-riddled universe, that’s cold and full of despair. Darwin’s universe, Freud’s universe, Kant’s – they all offer a God who isn’t the loving, wise and all-powerful creator. That’s why the reformed epistemology is always on a collision course with modernity. It’s the clash of two antithetical worldviews and we must choose. Wisdom cries out. She says that Christ died for sinners, to redeem them from the death they deserve in a world God created. But sinners want that world but not the God who created them and it.

To set the mind of Christ is the only wise path since this is God’s world and there’s no way to life outside of Him. And then, in Christ, gloriously, wondrously, we rest assured in the inestimable promises of God that we are saved. Saved, loved, treasured, restored, forgiven; all these things and more. The fool walks in the principle of intellectual darkness (everything came from nothing) and claims to be logical. This sets off a horrific string of consequences that God gives them over to. Claiming to be wise, the fool conjures up meaning out of thin air and wonders why it’s always beyond his grasp. It’s from this that Christ saves us. It’s Christ that saves us from the pathetic folly of proclaiming that there’s no ultimate meaning to things in the universe – no personal creator – and yet, on the other hand, insisting that there’s no proof of God. But if there’s no meaning for everything, why would a person need proof of something?

Christ is the wisdom of the world and He created us and everything else. He did this in love and joy and wants us to know Him in all that love and joy. This is the truth of God that stands over against the so-called wisdom of the world.