Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are about to walk through a book that no other book in the Bible is quite like. It is not a story that runs from a beginning to an end, and it is not a letter written to one church in one city. It is a treasury of wise sayings, gathered and set in order so that anyone who reads them may learn the hard, good work of living well. Proverbs is about wisdom, which the Bible does not mean as a head full of facts, but as skill, the practiced skill of a godly life: knowing how to hold your tongue, how to handle money, how to keep a friendship, how to raise a child, how to walk uprightly on an ordinary Tuesday when no one is watching. It was written down so that a young person just setting out and an old person who has seen much would both sit at the same table and learn, together, to walk wisely in the fear of the LORD.
As you read, hold this: Wisdom begins where a life bows low: the fear of the LORD is the start of learning to live well.
The Hebrew name of the book is מִשְׁלֵי (mishlei), pronounced meesh-LAY. It comes from the word mashal (Strong’s H4912), which means a proverb, a comparison, a wise saying that sets one thing beside another so that the truth becomes memorable and sticks. A proverb is a short thing you can carry in your pocket all day, a sentence built to be remembered. The book tells you plainly, on its opening page, what it is for: to give wisdom and instruction, to teach prudence to the simple and discretion to the young, and to let the wise grow wiser still (1:2 through 1:6). And then, having told you what it is for, it hands you the one key that unlocks the whole of it.
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline." Proverbs 1:7 (BSB)
That single verse is the doorway you must walk through to enter this book at all. Two more sayings stand near it and say the same thing from another side, and you will do well to keep all three close as you read.
"Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding;" Proverbs 3:5 (BSB)
"in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." Proverbs 3:6 (BSB)
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." Proverbs 9:10 (BSB)
The world of the book
The wisdom gathered here comes mostly from Solomon, the son of David, the king to whom God gave a listening heart wiser than any before or since. His sayings make up the great heart of the book. But other voices are gathered in as well, for wisdom was never the possession of one man alone. There are sayings from a group the book simply calls “the wise,” a whole company of teachers whose words were worth keeping. There are the words of a man named Agur in chapter 30, and the words that King Lemuel’s mother taught him in chapter 31. And there is a large collection of Solomon’s proverbs that, we are told, the men of King Hezekiah copied out and preserved long after Solomon had died, so that a later generation would not lose them. What you hold, then, is a book patiently assembled over many years, wisdom saved up and passed down like an inheritance from one household to the next.
Two roads run through the whole of Proverbs, and once you see them you will see them everywhere. There is the way of wisdom and the way of folly. There is the path of the righteous and the path of the wicked. The book sets them side by side again and again, the one leading to life and the other to ruin, and it asks you, gently and then not so gently, which road your own feet are on. Beneath both roads lies the one foundation the book will not let you forget: the fear of the LORD. That fear is not the terror of a slave before a cruel master. It is reverent trust and glad submission, the settled posture of a heart that knows who God is and bows before Him. Proverbs says this fear is where wisdom begins, the ground floor beneath every wise thing a person could ever learn.
And there is one more thing worth carrying in from the very start. When the New Testament looks back on all this praise of wisdom, it tells us where wisdom finally leads. Paul writes that Christ Himself is the wisdom of God, that in Him are hidden all the treasures the book of Proverbs was only beginning to name. So the wisdom this book teaches you to love is not, in the end, a set of rules. It is a Person, and every wise saying here is a signpost pointing toward Him.
"It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God: our righteousness, holiness, and redemption." 1 Corinthians 1:30 (BSB)
The map
- Proverbs 1–9. A father’s long, warm appeals to his son, urging him to love wisdom and flee folly. Here Lady Wisdom herself cries aloud in the streets and calls the young to come, warnings are raised against the seductive and ruinous path, and again and again the great refrain returns: the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
- Proverbs 10–29. Hundreds of short, two-line proverbs on the whole of an ordinary life: the tongue and the words we let out of it, work and laziness, wealth and honesty, friendship, anger, humility, and always, running underneath, the fear of the LORD. This is wisdom for every single day.
- Proverbs 30–31. The sayings of Agur, then the words King Lemuel’s mother taught him, and at the last the unforgettable portrait of the wife of noble character, wisdom no longer described but embodied, worked out in the whole of a good and faithful life.
This first stretch of our walk is Proverbs 1 through 4, the father’s opening appeals and the first call of wisdom. The rest is the road ahead of us. You are welcome to read more than one chapter when you sit down; only keep them in their order.
The verses the book stands on
The whole book rests on one confession, and it is spoken twice so you will not miss it.
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline." Proverbs 1:7 (BSB)
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." Proverbs 9:10 (BSB)
Everything else in Proverbs, all the counsel about the tongue and the purse and the marriage bed and the open road, grows up out of that single root. And the root has a name. Paul tells us that all the wisdom this book praises was pointing forward the whole time to the One in whom it is finally found.
"but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." 1 Corinthians 1:24 (BSB)
The God whom the wise learn to fear is the same God who came at last as the wisdom of God in the flesh, and that is why we begin here, at the beginning of knowledge, low and reverent, ready to learn.