Proverbs 4 has everything to do with the heart. Its receptivity, its hunger, its trust, its purity, its treasures & how well it is guarded!
We established a very clear line between the teachings of this chapter (especially the later part), the teachings of James and the words of Jesus in Matthew 12 & Mark 11. Taken all together these teach a very well rounded lesson on the heart, the importance of treasuring God’s word and guarding the heart, trust and our words.
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Though it is not unusual to find peppered throughout the Old Testament, Proverbs 3 has some promises which Christians truly need to view in light of established New Covenant theology. The differences are made by the New Testament authors themselves and so they aren’t hard to discover and reconcile.
These issues deal with understanding & application of verses dealing with abundance, sowing and reaping & even God’s grace as first debuting with Noah before even the Old Covenant. The New Testament can only be understood through a robust knowledge of the Old Testament. There IS however, a huge difference between the Old Testament and the Old Covenant. Understanding this is crucial!
I hope this helps you in your study of not only chapter 3, but all of Proverbs and the greater Old Testament at large.
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Like Proverbs 1, the second chapter offers conditions for better understanding the Fear of the Lord and obtaining the knowledge of God. These bear much in common with Jesus’ teaching on the heart soils in Mark 4. Furthermore, you can see the words of this chapter in the New Testament letters of both Paul and James.
God stores up wisdom for us to store up in our hearts. He goes before us and prepares wisdom, insight and understanding for those who meet the conditions outlined at the beginning of the chapter but He goes on record as guaranteeing that we WILL receive it from Him!
This is a very important chapter in the overall book of Proverbs – primarily due to the clearly stated conditions for obtaining knowledge of God and understanding the Fear of the Lord!
Invaluable!
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Proverbs is the “goto” spot in scripture for wisdom of all sorts for all sorts of people. So it is naturally fitting that the first chapter of Proverbs would spend the first several verses telling us what types of wisdom can be found in these first 9 chapters. Furthermore, it informs us how to be the sort of person who can benefit from this wisdom.
After this, chapter one addresses all who read as children and tell us to listen to the words of a father and mother. This isn’t because all parents are inherently wise, but is more indicative of ideal and designed tutorship God baked into the parent child relationship which is first and foremost relational in a familial sense. The wisdom afforded a child runs contrary to the popular advice most children receive from their peers and that is the first example we are offered.
The chapter wraps up with wisdom presented as a woman crying out in the streets. Specifically she shouts out in the places of societal gatherings, judicial courts and commerce. She offers counsel that even the naive and simple can appropriate and spurns all those who turn up the nose at her.
Quite the intro… this most valuable book should be an informative and helpful read!
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Tonight we begin the book of Proverbs and as we have customarily do, we will kick it off with an overview of the book.
The word Proverbs means an object lesson based on or using a comparison or an analogy. So it’s similar in function and purpose to a parable, but in many ways they differ.
Proverbs is a poetic work. This would be easy to miss since Hebrew poetry does not rely upon rhyme & Meter as it does in most languages. Furthermore, being a translation into English all of that would have been lost anyway, which may be one of the contributing reasons why God had the Old Testament largely written in Hebrew. In the end, nothing is lost in translation!
Hebrew poetry relies heavily upon a thing called Parallelism which takes several forms which we introduced tonight.
Other facts we covered include:
• Proverbs is a compiled work of poetic, wisdom literature.
• It was pieced together over at very least 300 years.
• It has at very least 2 contributing authors, though likely considerably more.
• It is divided into 3 to 7 sections, only 4 of which we will recognize.
• It contains seven major forms – short potent statements for contemplation and meditation, stories, sayings, parental advice, moral discourses, concept personifications and an oracle.
I hope you will get something out of this introduction to Proverbs which will help you in your future studies and enjoyment of the book. Also, we hope that you will join us as we traverse Proverbs over the course of the next several months.
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