Proverbs 1:1-7 "The Big Picture" Scott Hoezee

Suppose that about 3,000 or so years ago you had been a student at some Ancient Near Eastern school of wisdom. It is believed that just such schools existed, particularly in Egypt and possibly also in Israel. The teachers in these schools were renowned sages: wise guys whose speech dripped with proverbs, adages, axioms, aphorisms, maxims, and bywords. The students were young men whose job it was to learn at the feet of these older and wiser teachers. But if you were a student in such a school, what do you suppose the final exam would look like? No one is certain, of course, but a number of scholars have found evidence that exams in such schools involved the teacher throwing out the first half of a proverb with the student then being required to complete the wise saying.

Even today probably most of you could do pretty well on such a test. For instance, let me toss out for you the first part of some proverbs--feel free to answer me (out loud!) by finishing the line. "Spare the rod . . . spoil the child." "When the going gets tough . . . the tough get going." "What goes up . . . must come down." "A fool and his money . . . are soon parted." "If you give him an inch . . . he'll take half a mile." "The grass is always greener . . . on the other side of the fence." "With friends like that . . . who needs enemies." "People who live in glass houses . . . should not throw stones."

Those of us who have been around in life know these saying well. Proverbs, someone once said, are easy to say but hard to forget. At least that is the case for reasonably healthy individuals. Indeed, that last proverb I just mentioned about people who live in glass houses is very often used by psychiatrists when they are evaluating the cognitive status of a mentally ill person. Sometimes the patient is asked to complete the proverb and other times the entire proverb is given out by the doctor, who in turn asks the patient if he or she can explain what that saying means. Curiously enough, very confused or disturbed people cannot complete the proverb or come anywhere close to explaining its meaning.

Most all of us know what proverbs are and we even have a fair number of such sayings in our memory banks. What may be less clear to us, however, is exactly what we are to make of the biblical Book of Proverbs. What is this somewhat haphazard collection of proverbs doing in the Bible? This morning let's wonder about that. Why is Proverbs in the Bible? What is it supposed to teach us? More than that, however, we will also ponder this morning the ways in which Proverbs, both in its entire sweep and in its details, cuts against the grain of the society in which we currently find ourselves.

The purpose and premise of this book are spelled out in the opening seven verses. The goal is to nurture a battery of related virtues: wisdom, discipline, prudence, discretion, knowledge, guidance, and understanding. The goal, in other words, is to form character in people. And no one is exempted from the need to have a genuinely discerning character molded in them. Those who are already wise are told in verse 5 to add to the learning they already have. Those who are already quite discerning individuals can nevertheless be guided along into still greater awareness and discretion. Certainly the young and the inexperienced, the simple and the naive, have lots to gain from paying close attention to the insights which older and wiser people have to offer.

The goal is character. The goal is figuring out what's good for you. A further goal is to nurture the discipline you need to be able to say "No" to what's not good for you. As such, Proverbs ranges widely across the face of life in this world. Wise observations include common sense things like not spitting into the wind and not sawing off the branch you're sitting on. But wisdom goes much further to include dicier and more snarled matters like knowing how best to deal with a know-it-all or how best to handle someone who talks too much. Wisdom is the knack for getting along well in life's many and varied situations.

That's why proverbs can never be a "one size fits all" phenomenon. As we've noted in passing before, flat-footed biblical literalists have a hard time with the Book of Proverbs in that, on the surface at least, this book contradicts itself. One verse says to rebuke foolish people. But as you read along you may discover, just a few verses farther down the pike, a proverb that tells you to walk away from the foolish and not say a word to them. Apparently it takes wisdom to apply wisdom. In the mouths of careless and thoughtless people, even true proverbs can be misused in ways that wound. Remember: most of what those miserable "friends" of Job had to say to him were proverbs. It's not that what they said to Job was untrue, it's just that those things were not true in that situation.

So the goal of Proverbs is quite grand: it is nothing short of a very well-developed character which has the savvy to discern not only what's right and wrong, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy in general but also how all of that interacts with the specifics of a given situation or a given individual.

You see, the proverbs are pretty much free-floating. They are not nestled within any narratives or stories, and yet proverbs summon up stories--whole bundles of stories, in fact. The proverbs presume that you have a real life in which you can reflect on the truth of what any given proverb says. "Haste makes waste" is an adage we know well. It conveys no story but it likely summons up anecdotes in most of our minds. For instance, you may recall the day you rushed through a recipe and then it flopped because you mis-measured a key ingredient in your sloppy, slapdash rush to get the thing into the oven.

So you learn. You say to yourself, "'Haste makes waste!' That is so true and next time I'll do things differently so that I won't end up with precisely nothing to show for my efforts." Of course, if you are wise, then you will even so not apply "Haste makes waste" universally. Maybe some time after your failed culinary effort you will be faced with your child growing suddenly ill and having difficulty breathing. But in that case you would not want to say, "Well now hold up a sec: haste makes waste and so I don't want to go rushing this kid to the hospital. I'll take my time with this decision." No, in that situation it's time to reach for a different proverb, perhaps "He who hesitates is lost!"

The only way you will ever gain the kind of wisdom that can sort all of that out is by paying very close attention to life over the long haul. But the Book of Proverbs is based on something fundamentally more interesting than just that. It is based on what Proverbs 1:7 calls "the fear of Yahweh." Wisdom begins here. Why? Because having a proper reverence for and acknowledgment of Yahweh means first and foremost that you recognize the order, stability, and reliability of the good cosmos God made. Wisdom must begin here because if this world is not stable, if the creation we call home does not possess an underlying and overarching unity of design and orderliness, then wisdom's attempt to discern patterns of wholeness is futile from the get-go.

Perhaps it is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of you can spend hours and hours putting together very large puzzles with maybe thousands of individual pieces. It is a great challenge and can now and again even be rather frustrating, but you do it because you know that scattered among all those funny-shaped pieces--each of which by itself looks like precisely nothing--is hidden a single picture which you can see depicted on the puzzle box and which you can re-assemble if you stick with it long enough. But how long would you spend working on a puzzle if someone told you the whole thing was a hoax? How much energy would you devote to piecing together all those little chunks of cardboard if you realized that no matter what you did, it would never come together because there had never been a single picture in the first place which had been jigsawed into so many pieces? You wouldn't even try, would you? There would be no point to it.

Wisdom tries to piece together a way of life which will, in the end, assemble a portrait of what God drew up for us in the creation. But the pursuit of wisdom would be futile if there were no larger "picture" of creation to discern and figure out. If the world is just a booming, buzzing confusion with no unity, no orderliness, no God-given stability, then wisdom is a dead end. Of course, life in this world is often confusing. Sin jigsawed its way through God's good order, leaving behind all kinds of pieces which need to be put back together again. But if you believe that there is finally a picture to re-assemble, then you can work at it. But if there is no picture but only random pieces which add up to nothing, then what would be the sense at working at the puzzle?

The fear of Yahweh is the "beginning" of wisdom because it tells us also that wisdom has an "end" in the sense of wisdom's having a goal. The fear of Yahweh is like seeing the picture on the front of the puzzle box: Yahweh drew the original picture and now assures us that the pieces in the box go along with that picture. If you work at being discerning, wise, prudent, diligent, and disciplined, you can (by God's grace and Holy Spirit) begin to figure some stuff out and fit some pieces back together.

The Book of Proverbs proceeds from that basic belief. And so throughout its many and varied wise sayings this book claims that in all of life there are precisely two paths you can choose: the wise path which leads to life and flourishing and wholeness or the foolish path which leads to death and diminishment and disintegration. As we noted once when we studied the Book of Psalms, the Hebrew psalter routinely divides up all of humanity into two groups: the righteous and the wicked. There is not much quarter given to a third category. So in Proverbs we are not proffered any middle-of-the-road paths. You can walk on Wisdom Boulevard or you can trot along Folly Lane. Choose your path.

But it is just here we detect where the Book of Proverbs grates on our current society. As Tom Long once pointed out, most everyone takes their cues from some set of guiding principles which gets summarized in adages and pithy slogans. Americans are no different, it's just that our favorite and most-often quoted national proverbs cut against the grain of the biblical Book of Proverbs.

Some while back I mentioned one author's contention that this is the quintessential, the most basic, of American proverbs: "Different strokes for different folks." But you cannot detect a lot of respect for universally underlying truths of God's creation design in that proverb. When faced with lifestyles which run the gamut from church-going religious types all the way over to pornography consuming men who cheat on their wives, Americans shrug through their most-loved proverbs. "Different strokes for different folks. Live and let live. To each his own. A man's home is his castle. Don't rock the boat." These are America's most-loved proverbs. But what they all boil down to is that one-word phrase which, though not a proverb, in many ways spells the doom of all biblical proverbs: the great postmodern verbal shrug of "Whatever!"

What American proverbs convey is the notion that when all is said and done, this world's many jigsaw puzzle pieces cannot, and so will not, be assembled into a single, coherent picture of life. Wisdom in the biblical sense need not be pursued because there's finally no point to it. Each of us has been handed a little box of puzzles pieces which conveniently snap together in any number of different ways. So if the picture I end up assembling of what I think my life should look like ends up being wildly different from what you piece together, big deal! Different strokes for different folks. Why would anyone even expect that any two puzzles would end up looking similar?

The Book of Proverbs offers a concentrated graduate course in the art of living. It is an education founded on the premise that life adds up to something coherent and good, stable and full of shalom because there is a Creator God who made each person and each thing. Further, God made each person and each thing to work in certain ways (and not in others) so that if everybody functions the way they were made to function, life would get webbed together into a marvelously complex, inter-locking system of mutual affirmation. There simply is a wise way and a foolish way to do most anything.

That's why most of the Bible's proverbs are not prescriptive but descriptive. They don't command you to do something but simply notice what works and what flops. The wise one takes notes on life, not to answer the question, "What should I do?" so much as to answer the question, "Hmmm . . . what's going on here?" So, for instance, a wise person might watch all those shouting-match, Jenny Jones-like daytime talk shows in which families appear on the show so that the whole world can watch them swear at each other, take swings at each other, and just generally disintegrate on national TV. And a wise person might note that nine times out of ten some form of deviant sexuality lies at the prurient and puerile base of those dreadful spectacles.

In those situations you could swing in with the Ten Commandments and start barking out moral imperatives to the people. But a wise one would perhaps start with the straightforward observation, "Something isn't working there at a very basic level. What is it? These people are not happy. They are not united. Their lives are deeply disjointed and as a result a good many of them are having no fun at all. Let's sift through the layers to see where things started to go wrong and maybe then we can figure out a better way so that you can all live together happily under one roof instead of falling apart in front of strangers who are turning your tragedy into their afternoon entertainment."

The overall point is that we try to order our lives around various principles and proverbs in the belief that what we are finally aiming at is a coherent, cohesive life which fits with the larger picture of creation which God himself sketched at the dawn of time. The fear of the Lord means we believe that there just is a certain way that life is supposed to go. Wisdom and the pursuit of a prudent life stems from and depends on the up-front belief that despite how messed up and fragmented life often looks, in the long run all those diverse pieces belong to a single puzzle, the picture of which is held in the mind of the one true God in Christ Jesus the Lord.

Because in the New Testament it becomes clear that Jesus is the Wisdom of God incarnate. Somehow, despite the odd way in which he lived and despite the scandalous quirk of his death (which seemed like the ultimate dead end), somehow this Jesus started to put the puzzle pieces back together again in a way more dramatic than anyone before or since ever managed to do. In Christ, the apostle Paul liked to say, God has turned the wisdom of the world into folly. One piece of conventional wisdom that Jesus overturned was the loopy notion that life is whatever a given individual makes of it.

Not true, Jesus said. Life is what God makes of it. And to prove it the very Son of God allowed himself to get jigsawed to death so that thereafter, when his disciples picked up the various pieces of his body in the holy supper of communion, they could gain wisdom and insight as God, by his Holy Spirit, re-assembled life's many broken pieces into the one Body of Christ. The fear of that Lord is the beginning of wisdom. In Christ it is the end, the goal, of all wisdom, too. Blessed are those who pay attention, for theirs is the big picture that just is the new creation! Amen.