Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching Old Testament Wisdom in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I will abbreviate this a bit since I do not want to overlap wisdom into the next day’s material. There’s enough there. Once again, too, I shall avoid technical questions about the connection of biblical wisdom and Egyptian wisdom and its connection or otherwise with apocalyptic and many other questions that have been discussed in recent literature.
The bibliography on the nature of wisdom is huge, but it’s readily available in any decent theological library. I’m more concerned about stripping things down for a preacher who’s preparing for next Sunday or the Sunday after that and the month after that. Let me begin, then. My longest point is my first point.
Let me begin with a brief description of biblical wisdom. I am dependent, in part, on what I’m going to say on some unpublished material from Bruce Waltke who has thought about this sort of thing a great deal and is in the process of writing a major commentary on Proverbs. But then I want to extend beyond some of that material here and there.
Bruce argues, rightly, I think, that wisdom, in some ways, operates on two levels in Scripture. Downstairs, in the first place, the more profound level, what wisdom deals with is the structure of everything in God’s universe. The structure of everything in God’s universe, even before anything exists! Thus wisdom says, “The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old” in Proverbs 8:22.
In this framework, because God knows all of this, it is the glory of the Lord to conceal a thing. The glory of kings to find it out. That is to say, God’s got it all. He knows the whole pattern and structure of the whole affair, and it is part of his glory that he doesn’t tell it all. Partly because he’s omniscient. Partly because he wants the whole universe to acknowledge him.
It is part of the glory of the king, we’re told, to find it out. Which means, of course, that it is part of the mediators of the covenant. Part of the responsibility of those who are the representatives of God to think through God’s ways and words, his self-disclosure, and mediate it on. In the non-wisdom setting you get some of the same theological theme in a passage like Deuteronomy 29:29. “The secret things belong to God, but the revealed things to us and to our children forever.”
Notice again you’re still dealing with the kind of vision of reality I mentioned this morning over against both modernity and post-modernity. It was much better understood both in the Middle Ages and at the time of the Reformation. You begin with God and what he knows. There is, in other words, I think a distinctive biblical epistemology, but I leave that one aside.
The modern problem is that although Proverbs recognizes it is the glory of the Lord to conceal a thing (that’s not his only glory, of course; he reveals a great deal) and the glory of kings to find it out, our modern problem is that we recognize the glory only in the latter, in the finding of things out. We do not any longer perceive the glory of God in what lies behind what we discover.
An astronomer finds something and names it after himself! Halley’s comet. He didn’t make it! He can’t tame it. He doesn’t own it, but it’s “Halley’s Comet.” Not, “Oh! Yet another comet to the glory of God.” We mark it with our name the way a dog marks something he finds on his turf. Yes, including coffee.
All of this (this downstairs stuff in wisdom) is foundational for what is upstairs. All the practical things that are upstairs (I’ll come to them in a moment) need the hard ground floor. The fear of the Lord. Thus, dozens of proverbs that stress God’s sovereignty and God’s providence and God’s control. Words may come from the king, but the Lord turns the king’s heart anywhere he wills.
God is behind all of it. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That’s all on the ground floor. It’s God’s universe. Upstairs, wisdom is more like a skill. A skill located in several different rooms … four rooms in particular. (This is still Waltke’s analogy.)
1. Survival skill.
Proverbs 30:24 and following say, “Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise. Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer; conies [rock badgers, probably] are creatures of little power, yet they make their home in the crags; locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks; a lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces.”
We normally don’t think of ants as wise or rock badgers as wise. Certainly not lizards. The reason, of course, is that we’re thinking of wisdom in a slightly different way. A wise person is someone who knows a great deal, and then knows how to put it together for wise, practical, effective action. Whereas these little beasts are just acting intuitively, aren’t they? But if we think of the wisdom as a skill to survive, then we’re closer to understanding what is meant.
It works out in many, many proverbs to young people about seizing opportunities when they come. It’s part of surviving. It’s the skill of surviving. This is the day of salvation, in effect. Lizards may not be all that bright. You can catch them with your hands. But they are founds everywhere; they survive. Ants aren’t much, but at least they store up for the winter. The rock badger hides in his crag. The eagle doesn’t get it. Which suggests, as it were, that we’re despicable little lizards, but look where we are by God’s grace. By God’s grace we may survive.
2. Technical skill.
This is not common is Proverbs, but in the Old Testament canon, it is certainly bound up with wisdom. Perhaps the most famous passage in this connection is Exodus 28:3. This has to do with preparing the priestly garments and then preparing the tabernacle, and so on.
“Tell all the skilled men, to whom I have given wisdom in such matters that they are to make garments for Aaron, for his consecration” and so on. Then you have the finely twisted linen and the gold and the waistbands, the two onyx stones, and all the rest. Now it’s not wisdom as we think of it in the Western world, but if you watch a skilled craftsperson poke away at something, it’s wonderful to see. Isn’t it?
I remember when I was a pastor of this church on the West Coast of Canada. We had in our church a mechanic. Now, I like to work with my hands. I like to fix cars. I like to build things out of wood, and so on. But this chap was a mechanic’s mechanic. He was a mechanic for Rolls Royce. He was unbelievable! It wasn’t just that he was good around tools. I mean, he was. I was just an amateur. But I’d take a screwdriver, stick it in there, and start turning.
He laid it on the slot and put it in. There was an artistry to everything he did. It was unbelievable. How you can be wise in changing a starter motor I don’t know, but he could. Do you see? I turn things on a wood lathe. You know, chips flying off everywhere, but at the end of the day, I’m not wise. I’m not a really skilled tradesperson who really handles wood well. I make a piece of furniture and try to distract my wife so she can’t see the bad bits. Technical skill. It’s very common, but usually outside of Proverbs.
3. Administrative skill.
That is, not only to govern and rule, but also to hear and discern the truth of any matter. That, too, is very common, occasionally in Proverbs, but more commonly outside of it. Perhaps one of the most famous passages in this regard is Deuteronomy 1:15. “So I took the leading men of your tribes, wise and respected men, and appointed them to have authority over you as commanders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens as tribal officials. And I charged your judges at that time,” and so on.
Now, if I am not mistaken, it is this that Solomon asked for. He was asked by the Lord what he wanted, and he asked for wisdom. What we so often hear by that is wisdom in the modern twentieth-century sense. Then we have a hard job figuring out why he went so wrong. “If he was so cotton-pickin’ wise, why did he have a thousand wives?” But what he was asking for, quite clearly, just by the way he frames things … He says, “I need wisdom to rule this people of yours.” It’s administrative wisdom.
What’s the first story that’s told after that? The two women coming in, for example, with one baby, and he is wise to discern and sort it out. Now by itself that’s not going to keep him from having a heart that goes after idols. By itself it’s not going to guarantee that his heart is not turned away by his many wives and want all their pagan temples. In fact, I suspect he got just a bit too bound up in his own administrative and judicial wisdom that he began to worship himself. He needed to ask for one or two other things as well. But it is a great gift.
We’ve just had a seminary president retire at Trinity, where I teach. Actually, we didn’t retire him. We bumped him upstairs to chancellor where he can raise money. Although I may not have always agreed with him (he didn’t always agree with me), he was an extraordinarily wise man in his handling of funds. Just extraordinarily wise.
The man comes from a fairly wealthy family, but in addition, he knows his way around money and investments and what’s believable. While many, many North American theological colleges and seminaries have now just come through a scandal called the New Era Foundation scandal, we came out smelling like a rose. He refused to have anything to do with it. He just knew there was something wrong though he couldn’t put his finger on it.
This man comes from the Dark Ages. This man doesn’t like computers, except in one area. He discovered early on in the game that computers can give him printouts of what’s going on in every department, with every account, all the time, at a fingertip. He wanted that right away! Shrewd!
If the photocopying department … Something as small as that. Our operation is 12 or 15 million turnover a year. We have 35 buildings or whatever; it’s a fairly big operation. If something is going wrong with too many people copying stuff on the computer, he knows it before the end of the month and you’ve received a rude note from his secretary. That’s wise. That’s good administration. It means we always end the year in the black. Always! It’s a matter of principle with him.
By itself that doesn’t mean that you’re wise unto salvation. There are some very efficient, wise, pagan people running IBM or Mitsubishi or whatever. Nevertheless, this is an important wisdom, and it is a wisdom found in the Messiah. Read Isaiah 11. That’s your homework for tonight. He knows how to discern, how to rule, how to administer. It is one of the wisdoms of the Messiah.
4. Social skill.
This is the room that’s particularly important in Proverbs: how to relate to spouse, to friends, to employees, to employers, and above all, to God. The principle social skill is, in fact, speaking. There are scores and scores and scores of proverbs on the tongue or on lips or on speech or the mouth.
To summarize it all: Wisdom is full of how to live in God’s universe in the fear of the Almighty. It takes very different forms. Most characteristically, it is bound up with the proverb, but in modern literary analysis, we include in Wisdom Literature Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Canticles, and some of Psalms. Psalm 1 is considered a wisdom psalm for reasons that I’ll mention in a moment.
Now, notice, what is typical of all these in some respects is the epigrammatic. The pithy, punchy saying. That’s as true of Job as it is of Proverbs. Proverbs has a lot of independent pithy, punchy sayings. Pithy, punchy, pointed sayings. Ecclesiastes has its share of pithy, punchy, pointed sayings as well, only they’re strung together to form a drama. Job is cast more like a drama. You start getting into mixed genres, don’t you?
In the second place, let me run through some of the ways these things work: wisdom as proverbs, wisdom as drama, wisdom as religio-cultural comment, and wisdom as psalm. Let me quickly run through some of these characteristics. I do not have time to deal with them at length.
First there is wisdom as proverbs. What they are not, as I indicated this morning, is case law. I gave the example of Proverbs 26:4–5. These verses tell us, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” When do you do one, and when do you do the other?
The first one clearly means, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be dragged down to his or her level.” That’s what’s going to happen. You will be like him yourself. If you spend all your time with stupid people, you start saying stupid things yourself. If you spend all your time with materialists, you start becoming materialistic.
If you spend all your time with people who think about nothing but sex, you start thinking about nothing but sex. If you spend all your time with people who think about nothing but sports, you start thinking about nothing but sports. Likewise, if you spend all your time with fools, you become a fool. That’s what the text says.
On the other hand, the text says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” When do you do that? The best example I’ve heard of that one recently is from this chap Perry Downs, again at Trinity. (We used to ride into work every day together so I got to know him pretty well. Then one of us moved house and we don’t ride in so often, but for 15 years we were in the car every day together.)
He used to teach part time at a junior college near us, a secular thing that he’d go to in the evening sometimes. On this particular occasion, they asked him to go in, along with a Catholic priest and an Episcopalian priest, to talk about their respective visions (he was a Baptist) about what the Christian faith consists in. They each had 40 or 45 minutes in this long three-hour evening block to expound. Then it was supposed to be opened up in a free-for-all discussion.
Well, the Catholic priest went in and, unfortunately, he was drunk so his case was not going to be well presented. The Episcopalian priest went in, as it happened, and he’d just gotten his PhD. So he was zinging right over the heads of all these 17- and 18-year-olds who are in their first year of junior college. Then Perry went in, in his blue jeans. He’s about as laid back as a piece of paper lying on a desk. He is so laid back, he had them eating out of his hands.
It was turning into a nice evening, he thought. Then in the question and answer time, the first question that comes, comes from a little girl who’s 17 or 18, chewing gum. “Dr. Downs, I listened to everything you said, but what about all the Hindus?” Perry, without batting an eye, without pausing for a moment, said, “Didn’t think of that. I’ll have to start all over.”
Love it! Answer a fool according to her folly, or that person will be wise in her own eyes. Now after the whole class had stopped guffawing, in all fairness, he said, “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but it is very important for you to understand that the church has been thinking these things through for 2,000 years, and you’re not going to wipe it out with one smart question.” Then he gave some answers.
That was a wonderful example of negation. Some of us couldn’t get away with it. It would be such a put-down, you know. You’d be thrown out on your ear in the ensuing riot. But Perry can get away with it. Now my point is not this particular use of this particular proverb, but how do proverbs work? Aphorisms are generalizing statements about how things work. They are not infallible rules, case law, or divine promises that always work out under every circumstance whatsoever, without exception.
They are wise perspectives on how things are in God’s universe, how things work. Our problem in the West is that very frequently as soon as we hear a proverb like “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” is instead of seeing it as a wise aphorism that gives a general description of the way things work, first, we absolutize it, and secondly, we individualize it.
“This is a promise from God. God says it. It’s in the Word. I believe it.” Then we individualize it. “It’s true for everybody. It’s true for him. It’s true for her. It’s true for me. This is the way it is.” It’s important to realize that at one level this is the way it is. Usually, if you train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old he does not depart from it. He may depart from it for a while, but when he is old he doesn’t depart from it.
Usually when children go astray you can find something wrong in a parent’s life that has contributed to it. Yes, occasionally, you find huge blemishes of character or whatever. What do you expect? The kids turned out that way … Look at the parents! What do you expect? Nevertheless, we’re not automatons. Grace doesn’t run in the genes.
You can’t “behaviorize” people into the kingdom. You don’t guarantee the children are among the elect because you’ve been a good daddy. It’s more complex than that. There are other factors that are involved. This generalizing perspective on the way things work in God’s universe ought to encourage us to be good parents.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” It doesn’t mean that it’s so individualized, such a case of canon law, or a promise, that you cannot cope with a parent who, in all fairness, has been godly. They have sinned, but then, so have we all. Still, as parents they’ve been among the best in your congregation. Then Johnny or Suzie have really gone off the rails, in any case. What do you do?
They’re distraught. You who are parents, you mothers, in particular … In my experience the mothers feel more guilt than anybody else. They examine. “What did I do wrong?” They’ve got enough guilt, thank you. You don’t need to add to it. You don’t need to tell them that they failed now and then; they already know that. That means it is important then from a canonical perspective to tie the wisdom of Wisdom Literature to the larger themes of Scripture to get things in balance and proportion.
Proverbs are normally discrete (individual ones), but they can appear in collections or in thematic clumps like the one that I tackled this afternoon. Our book of Proverbs as a whole is often divided into three parts. Chapters 1 to 9 are mostly encouragement to the moral life, with two principal emphases: applying oneself to wisdom and avoiding sexual immorality, which is viewed as the supreme folly.
In chapters 10:1 to 22:16 the atmosphere changes. There are many more one-verse sayings, often linked in some way. (That’s why I included that bit of link in there today. I probably wouldn’t have included it in a real sermon.) There is a lot on righteousness, on marriage, on work, on the tongue, on the king, on ruling, on wealth, on relationships with one’s spouse, on peacefulness.
Finally, in chapters 22:17 to 31:31 there are five further collections with one final poem about the ideal woman, a poem of 22 verses. There are parallelisms in this literature of various kinds: antithetic, synthetic, modified step parallelism, and other kinds. The presupposition of all of this is this is God’s universe, and we are not limited to our own experience and our conduct. We can draw from the experience of others.
In a sense, you see, Wisdom Literature is distilled experience from godly people left in the Scripture for our learning so our wisdom, our skill in all of these areas, and our grasp of what God has disclosed of himself is greater than we could accumulate in our lifetime. That’s proverbs wisdom.
There is also wisdom as drama. Many people have trouble preaching from the book of Job, for example, because you go through these long swaths of material with their pithy sayings. Speeches of Eliphaz the Temanite, for example, or Bildad the Shuhite (who some say was the shortest man in the Bible). We start worrying about whether this little bit of utterance is good advice or bad advice.
If it’s from the Temanite, is it good advice? Or, because he’s contradicting Job, and Job’s going to say something back, is it bad advice? You go through the book of Job, and you’re not quite sure whether this utterance is good or bad. You don’t know what to do with it, so you skip that. What is fundamentally flawed in this sort of approach is that you are losing the dimensions of the drama. You’re losing the storyline.
I have tried to lay out what Job is about in the ninth chapter of my book on suffering, How Long, O Lord? Or, if you can get hold of them, get hold of Roy Clements’ four tapes, four expositions, on the book of Job. You’d have to get them from Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge, which is not very convenient. But that tries to show you how the storyline works on the whole.
You cannot make sense of the individual utterance of Bildad or Zophar apart from seeing that in each case it’s part of an extended discourse building on previous discourses, building up further and further in the responses of Job, until you finally have responses from Elihu. Then God speaks from heaven. All of that is framed within the opening bit, where God is dealing with the Devil, and the closing bit, where there’s final vindication for Job.
Unless those bits are put within that larger dramatic framework, you simply cannot manage those individualizing verses in any particular sermon. Which means, in that kind of Wisdom Literature, you must deal at the level of the big movement of thought on the dramatic, unlike the book of Proverbs, where you may have a whole lot of individualizing, discrete proverbs brought together under some thematic heading.
Something similar has to be said about Canticles, although it also has some other questions bound up with it. Probably some of you have read J. Hudson Taylor’s little book Union and Communion in which the entire book of Canticles is understood allegorically to refer to the relationship between Christ and the individual believer.
I remember when I first read that, at about the age of 15 or thereabouts, I thought it was ever so warm and inspiring. Then I became “wiser,” to coin a phrase, and I thought it was a load of nonsense. Now I am a little older, and I think that it is nonsense in the way it goes at the book, but there is a small kernel of truth to it.
On the face of it Canticles is really a drama that does reflect much more about a love relationship between a man and a woman, with various difficulties and sidetracks, and so on which says a great deal about married love and what it looks like and is very important in that connection. Nevertheless, canonically, it is tied to another major theme that runs all through Scripture and is extraordinarily strong when you start looking at it. Already in Genesis 2 you have a structure of marriage. Then Yahweh presents himself as the bridegroom of his people.
When the people apostatize in about 14 to 15 passages in the Pentateuch and the pre-prophetic material, you have this pictured as spiritual whoredom, breaking the covenant, thumbing your nose at the group. The book of Hosea is bound up with this whole thing. Is it not? The Prophets are full of it. How like you’re out in the field like some female horse, a mare, neighing after the stallions, wanting every stallion to come along and give you a turn. “That’s the way my people are, going after the various false gods.”
Then you move to the New Testament. This is picked up, now not Yahweh and Israel, but Christ and the church. “I have betrothed you as a virgin to keep yourself pure for the marriage supper of the Lamb,” which takes place in the last book of the Bible in chapter 21 and 22. In fact, some have described the whole book of Revelation as A Tale of Two Cities: The Harlot and the Bride.
The two cities are Babylon and the New Jerusalem, and the harlot and the bride are, of course, the whore in chapter 17 and the bride, who is consummated with Christ himself in the last chapter, in the marriage supper of the Lamb. Marriage itself is regularly perceived to be a kind of picture of the relationship between Christ and the church. How can you read Ephesians 5 and not see that?
“This is a great mystery, but I am speaking of Christ and the church.” Or, “This is a great mystery, but, on the other hand, I am speaking of marriage.” Somehow our theology of marriage must, at some level, get beyond this argument, endlessly, of who is up and who is down and what “head” means and figure out how this pattern fits into the entire biblical theology of Christ’s relationship with his people!
In this connection a book like Canticles does have something to say. Hudson Taylor was wrong in how far he went and how easily he got there, but he was not entirely wrong. The only way you’re going to handle Canticles responsibly in that kind of framework is if you are also fitting it within a large canonical structure. Some of those inferences are almost unavoidable.
There is more I would love to say on wisdom psalms and the like and on the personification of wisdom and even wisdom Christology, but if I don’t, maybe in God’s mercy you’ll invite me back again.
