The Book of Proverbs • What It Teaches About Being Good at Life

There are three books in the Bible that have come to be called the wisdom literature Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job and all these books are addressing the same set of questions What kind of world are we living in and what does it look like to live well in this world? so how to be good at life? Yeah!

So each of these books tackles these questions from a unique perspective and it's important to understand all of them to get a fully biblical perspective on the good life So as a thought experiment, you could actually imagine each of these books as a person So Proverbs would be like this brilliant young teacher and Ecclesiastes the sharp middle-aged critic and Job would be the weathered old man who seen a lot in his day We're gonna start by meeting the book of Proverbs the brilliant teacher And she's not just smart she's smart about everything, work, relationships, sex, spirituality She has incredible insights things you would see on your own Yeah! She would be the perfect friend have around when you need really specific advice So what makes her so smart? Well!

Proverbs can see things that most people don't see She believes that there is an invisible creative force in the universe that can guide people and how they should live You can't see it just like you can't see the gravity but it affects everything that we do So what's this force? In Hebrew, it's called chokma and it's usually gets translated into English as a wisdom It's an attribute of God that God used to create the world and hokmah has been woven into the fabric of thing and how they work So 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 Right! Or as it says in Proverbs chapter one the waywardness of fools will destroy them but the one who listens to wisdom lives in security So it's like a moral law of the universe Yeah!

It's a cause-effect pattern and no one can escape and Proverbs personifies all of this as a woman Yeah! Lady wisdom Right! She runs around the earth calling out making herself available to anyone who's willing to listen to her and to learn which leads to the second thing Proverbs believes that anyone can access and interact with wisdom and use it to make the beautiful life for yourself or others you can create with it like a designer Yes, 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 so you show you possess chokma when you put it to work and develop the skill of making a Good Life OK!

That makes sense. So let's do this. Let's go find some wisdom Before you do, Proverbs has one more really important thing to consider chokma isn't some impersonal force it's an attribute of God himself and so in Hebrew thought, your journey to becoming wise has to begin with what Proverbs called 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 you just unpacked are in chapters one through nine in Proverbs but when I think of the book of Proverbs, I think of the collection of sayings the Proverbs themselves.

Tell me about those Yeah! Those are what you 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 you find a path toward success and no matter what you do if I designed my life with these sayings, life is gonna be good Yeah! or if proverbs puts it, it'll give health to your bones, prosperity, a long rich life which is a really big claim but you can see how it's often the case wise people, they tend to do better, things usually work out well for them in life and so that is the promise and the wisdom of the book of Proverbs The book of Proverbs is really beautiful but if we take a step back some people would argue it's a little too simplistic cause 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 that's right which is why we need to go and listen 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 Hey guys!

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