Reading Proverbs for God’s Mission
“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. There is no God but this God.” —Stanley Hauerwas
If this is indeed the case, then the Bible is the story about this God.
Draw a timeline and connect these dots: God makes the world, God saves Israel at the Red Sea, God raises Jesus from the dead, and God remakes heaven and earth.
If we read the Bible with our eye on God’s mission making all things new, we might also say it this way.
Our story is the story of the Church.
The story of the Church is the story of Jesus.
The story of Jesus is the story of Israel.
And the story of Israel is the story of the God who made the world and is rescuing it from Death and Sin.
But if this is the story that provides our lens for understanding what we read in Scripture, when we come to the book of Proverbs, we might be left scratching our heads.
The exodus event, God rescuing Israel from slavery in Egypt, God parting the Red Sea—this is the defining moment in the Old Testament. Most of the books in the Old Testament call back to this event, reminding us that this is the God that God is. But not the book of Proverbs (nor Job, Ecclesiastes, or Song of Solomon, which make up the genre of Wisdom Literature in the Bible). So what do we make of that?
Proverbs seems unconcerned in God’s salvation, that God is rescuing people. It does seem concerned with what saved people look like, how rescued people live, what people soaked in the holiness and wisdom of God move about in the world. If sin has fouled up the interior wiring of humanity, Wisdom and “the fear of Yahweh” (two major themes in Proverbs) represent what humanity with the right wiring looks like. The book of Proverbs is concerned with God’s sanctification of humanity.
The book of Proverbs is all about how to live the Good Life. Proverbs calls this “wisdom,” and this idea drips from nearly every line. Eugene Peterson calls wisdom, “the art of living skillfully.”
In the ancient world, the pastime of writing “wisdom sayings” was considered a high art form. The idea was to say the most witty, clever, deep, and philosophical thing in as few words as possible. And in a world without higher education, like we know in the Western world, the book of Proverbs provided a curriculum for young men training for work in government and administration. What makes Israel’s “wisdom sayings” unique is the way they reveal the presence of the God of Israel.
You won’t find any abstract spirituality in Proverbs. Proverbs doesn’t care about your church life. Proverbs may be the most practical and worldly book in the Bible. Money, power, sex, work, friendship—this is the stuff of Proverbs. Proverbs does care about your work life, your money life, your bedroom life. Proverbs teaches us that this life matters. Most importantly is the fact that the God of Israel sits right at the center of this life. It is a right relationship and understanding of God that gives all the stuff of this life real meaning. This is what “the fear of Yahweh” means.
A word of caution when reading Proverbs: These witty sayings are general observations about life. And that means they have limitations. Sometimes they are hyperbole, or exaggerating to make a point. Don’t read Proverbs without the book of Job. They represent two halves of one whole. Proverbs offers formulas about life. Meanwhile, the book of Job shows the angst that happens when we take that view of the world too far. If you take some of the words of Proverbs just at face value, you wind up sounding like one of Job’s unhelpful friends. There’s a tension to be held between Proverbs and Job.
Lastly, if one of our strategies in reading the Bible is to see Jesus at the center of the whole story, then how do we see Jesus appropriately in Proverbs? Two passages from Paul’s letters may give us some insight.
Paul opens his letter to the Colossians with an epic poem about the presence and involvement of Christ in creation (Colossians 1:15–20):
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation…
He existed before anything else,
and he hold all creation together.
It has some striking parallels with a poem about Wisdom personified in Proverbs 8:22–31:
Yahweh formed me from the beginning,
before he created anything else…
I was the architect at his side.
It may be that Paul has this poem in mind and is echoing it in Colossians.
Secondly, in 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16, Paul contrasts human wisdom with the the wisdom of God, appealing that his message comes from the latter and not the former. About Jesus he writes, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:24). And then, “For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself” (1:30).
With these passages in mind, we can then imagine that Jesus himself is the Wisdom talked about in Proverbs. While the compiler of Proverbs at various times poetically offer a voice to wisdom, the Gospel writers finally give Wisdom a particular, human face. The “wise person” and the “righteous person” portrayed in Proverbs are no longer hypothetical people, but they become an actual person in Jesus.
May we all find the art of living skillfully.
If you want to dig deeper into Proverbs, I recommend these:
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs for Everyone by John Goldingay
Proverbs by Leo Perdue