Hello everybody and welcome in to episode #356 of the Bible 2021 podcast. We are reading Proverbs 2 today and our focus is on he Two Women of Proverbs – the Forbidden Woman and Wisdom Herself We are a daily 10ish minute podcast, where we will dig in to the truth of the Word of God by reading one Bible chapter a day and discussing it. Welcome to new listeners in T. Our goal is to encourage DAILY Bible reading, so you can jump in at any time and join with us. We want to invite as many people as possible to join us in daily Bible reading, so help spread the word and share the podcast! Don’t forget about our web-page, Bible2021.com – contact page, show notes, transcript and more– Click here for our Bible 2021 reading plan\
Take a deep breath – after 5 days of intense end times talk in the book of Revelation, we are taking a two day Old Testament break in the book of Proverbs. Great chapter today, absolutely loaded with wisdom. Today we are going to be presented with a choice, of sorts – to follow wisdom, or to follow the way of the wayward woman/forbidden woman. Chapter 2 of Proverbs begins with a wonderful exhortation to pursue wisdom:
My son, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you,
2 listening closely to wisdom
and directing your heart to understanding;
3 furthermore, if you call out to insight
and lift your voice to understanding,
4 if you seek it like silver
and search for it like hidden treasure,
5 then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and discover the knowledge of God.
6 For the Lord gives wisdom;
from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.
7 He stores up success for the upright;
He is a shield for those who live with integrity
8 so that he may guard the paths of justice
and protect the way of his faithful followers.
Two things in these first verses that jump out to me.
#1 – Wisdom does not come naturally. Wisdom must be SOUGHT. vs. 4 says, if you seek wisdom like silver and search for it like hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God. In other words, said simply, if you pursue wisdom wholeheartedly, like a treasure, you will find it. I appreciate the analogy that Solomon in using here, and understand it more now than I would have before the pandemic hit. In the first few months of the pandemic, we here in California were under a “shelter in place” order, which meant we could go to the grocery store and drug store, but not much else. We could, however, go outside and enjoy nature, exercise, hike, etc. And in the midst of that, I picked up a pandemic hobby – ordering a metal detector from Amazon. Since then, I have gone on at least 100 “treasure hunts,” and have grown to really enjoy finding interesting things in the dirt. I didn’t find my first silver coin until about 10-15 hunts in…took me a while to learn the detector and learn how to find things. Pretty much all American dimes and quarters that are older than 1964 are 90 percent silver, and thus are quite valuable now, and very rare. You really have to work to find a silver coin in the ground. I’ve found hundreds of dollars of modern change in the ground, but you really have to work to find silver. It takes a lot of digging, and a lot of searching – most places I’ve searched simply do not produce silver coins. Solomon tells us that finding wisdom is quite similar to finding reasure and silver – in other words, wisdom does not come easily. If you want to be wise, then you’ve got a lot of digging ahead of you – but not digging in the ground, and that brings us to point number 2.
#2 Wisdom comes from God’s Words. Vs. 6 tells us that wisdom comes from the Lord, and He gives us His wisdom through His word – knowledge and understanding come from His mouth. This is an echo of Psalm 119:104, “I gain understanding from your precepts;
therefore I hate every false way.” and many other passages like it.
John Piper rightly calls us to pick up the Word of God and dig persistently for treasure inside it, saying:
Receive, treasure, be attentive, incline your heart, cry out, lift your voice, seek as for silver, search as for hidden treasures. This is ransacking the Bible for all that it is worth. If there are hidden treasures, act like it. If there is silver, act like it. By all means pray (as verse 3 says) but don’t substitute prayer for ransacking. God ordains to give to those who seek with all their heart (Jeremiah 29:13)….The Lord “gives wisdom.” It is not merely the product of human effort. But that gift is not separated from searching diligently for wisdom the way a miser seeks for silver and treasure. So it appears that God unites, rather than separates, the “revelation” of himself and our earnest study of what he has shown of himself in his Word and his world.
When Peter recognized that Jesus was “the Christ the Son of the living God” and was told that this was owing to a revelation of the Father (Matthew 16:17), he had not been ignorant of Jesus. The revelation did not come “out of the blue.” He had looked at Jesus and listened to Jesus and spent time “knowing” the Jesus he could see with his eyes and hear with his ears and grasp in some measure with his mind. In and through this natural way of “knowing,” God the Father “revealed” to Peter what he could not have seen without divine assistance.
John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God, Rev. and expanded. (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2000), 285–286.
John Piper, Sermons from John Piper (1990–1999) (Minneapolis, MN: Desiring God, 2007).
So remember the promise: “For the upright will inhabit the land,” those who come to God for wisdom from His word and diligently seek it – will be established and dwell in God’s promised land – those who go to foolishness, folly, adultery and participation with the forbidden woman of foolishness and her forbidden fruits – these will not reach the path of life. Digging for the treasure of wisdom is very much worth every ounce of effort and every hour of your time. Tomorrow, we will look at the life of Solomon, and how it ended, and discover that simply knowing wisdom, is not quite enough. Let’s read our passage.
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Bible Memory passage for the month of December: Revelation 5:12, “They said with a loud voice: Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
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