Wisdom Literature

Today on Renewing Your Mind… I'm Lee Webb. Welcome. Welcome.

Welcome. A hymn of praise to sensuous attraction and love that adorns the marriage relationship. And so to get around this seeming scandal of the Old Testament, it was completely allegorized to refer to the love that Christ has for the church. The only problem with that is that if it's improper for the Holy Ghost to inspire human love song, how much more improper would it be to attribute that to the relationship between Jesus and the church?

So you have to go figure. But what we have there in the Song of Solomon really is a beautiful love song of a couple anticipating marriage and celebrating their mutual attraction and so on. Now, let's look at some of the characteristics of the wisdom literature because it's called wisdom literature in the first instance because it places so much emphasis on the gaining of wisdom. The book of Proverbs is the clearest example to that, and it tells us over and again that it is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom. So that the necessary prerequisite for achieving wisdom in the biblical sense is to have a sense of reverence for God.

In the quest for wisdom and the love of wisdom in Hebrew thought, you begin with a proper attitude, respect, and reverence for God so that the reverence for God becomes the sine qua non for the achieving of wisdom in Hebrew categories. Also, the wisdom literature, particularly the book of Proverbs, makes a sharp distinction between knowledge and wisdom. We've maybe sometimes heard the phrase, so and so is an educated fool. You know that some people are educated beyond their intelligence where they maybe have a string of alphabet soup after their name indicating the degrees that they've achieved, which is supposed to be some measuring barometer of intelligence, and yet these people have no common sense, can't find their way out of their out of their office at the end of the day without stumbling over the wastebasket. You know about people like that who, though they're educated, they act in a foolish manner. Now, it's not that the Hebrew says what's important is wisdom and not knowledge. It's not like Jewish wisdom despises knowledge, but rather it sees knowledge never as an end in itself, but simply as a means to an end, albeit a very important means to the end so that the wisdom literature will say, get knowledge, pursue knowledge, but even more, what?

Get wisdom. Well, several years ago I had a businessman who ran a large corporation ask me the question about Ligonier Ministries. He said, R.C., what's the big idea?

I said, what do you mean? He says, well, every business and every mission, every organization has a consuming idea, not just their mission, but it's this idea that determines everything they do, and every department within that organization has its own big idea that contributes to the big idea overall. And so he wanted to ask me, what was our mission? What were we trying to accomplish? What was the big deal? What was the big idea?

And I just gave him two words to answer the question. I said, here's the big idea. The big idea is Coram Deo.

Now, I didn't invent this. I stole this from the Reformation because this was the big idea of the Reformation, Coram Deo, meaning before the face of God or in the presence of God. And that big idea is this, that God in His Word is teaching us how to live every moment of our lives before His face. We are to live all of life before the presence of God under the authority of God and to the glory of God. So that's the big idea of the Christian faith, isn't it?

That we are all to live our lives aware that we are walking every moment before the face of God. Now, in that sense, the big idea is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is an idea that determines behavior. And so the Hebrew thinkers again made this statement, that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

Let me say that again. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Now that's strange sounding to the ear because when we talk about thought, we usually think of the organ that is connected with thought is the brain. And so we would think, well, really what the Hebrew mind is saying here is this, as a man thinks in his mind or in his brain, so is he.

But instead, it's as a man thinks in its heart. Now, it's not because the Hebrews thought that the heart was the organ for rational thought. But what the Hebrew is getting at is that we have an abundance of ideas that clutter our minds and that we can recite them and pass exams on them, but they never penetrate to the place that is the core of our existence. And that, of course, is the heart. When the Hebrew talks about the heart, the Hebrew is talking about the center of one's being, not about an organ that pumps blood throughout the body, so that we have what we call head knowledge that never seems to get beyond the head so that it begins to inform our lives. But rather, the Hebrew is saying it's that knowledge that thought that gets to the heart that determines who you are and what you do and how you behave. Now, in our day, with the massive influence of existential philosophy and neo-gnostic thinking, the idea in our culture is that it's not the head that matters at all.

It's simply the heart. And we are to respond with our hearts. Don't give me any of this knowledge stuff. We shouldn't have intellectually loaded content in our sermons or in our music. Leave that stuff out of it. Just may just respond from my feelings and from the heart. And so we see this dichotomy established in post-modernism between the mind and the heart.

Here's the problem. God does want us to love Him with all of our hearts and with all of our soul and all of our strength, not only with our hearts, not simply to have a cerebral, intellectual grasp of Him in that manner. But the way God has so constructed human beings is that the avenue to the heart is through the mind.

If you try to bypass the mind, then what you get are empty emotional responses that mean nothing. The Word of God is intended to be understood. And with the idea being, the more I know Him, remember the old song?

The more I know Him, the more I love Him. I cannot really grow in authentic affection for Christ and for God based on ignorance. And that's what the message here is that the Proverbs and the wisdom literature is saying, get knowledge, but get beyond the knowledge to the wisdom because what wisdom literature is about is teaching us what is pleasing to God and how to please Him in our everyday experience. It's how to live, quorum Deo. And that's why I think it's a wonderful thing that we have this special group of books in the Bible, and it would do us well to spend time in the wisdom literature on a regular basis. One good little discipline is every day to read ten Psalms or five Psalms or two Psalms, a couple of Proverbs. Get that into your thinking.

It's amazing how practical this wisdom is. I can remember when I was in seminary, I was driving home from downtown Pittsburgh. And to get to the South Hills, you have to go through what's called the Liberty Tubes or the Liberty Tunnels that go right underneath Mount Washington. And when you got out to the other side, there's like six or seven lanes and only the couple of lanes turn left, and I was in the wrong lane coming out of the tunnels. And there's a sign there, you know, you're not allowed to cross lanes. There was a policeman standing at the edge of the tunnel.

I came out of the tunnel. I realized I was in the wrong lane, and I just darted over into the lane that I wasn't allowed to dart over into because the light was still green. But just as I made that change of lane, the light in front of me turned red. And so I stopped, and I saw more red.

I saw this policeman who was heavyset. I looked in the rear view mirror. He was running to me. His face was scarlet, and I could tell he was furious.

He came running up and pounded on the top of my car, and he was enraged, and I knew I was in big trouble. And the words came into my mind, a soft answer turneth away wrath. And he says, what do you think you're doing? I said, oh, I know. I just did the wrong thing. I said, I know I wasn't supposed to do that. I said, I'm sorry, sir.

He said, well, don't do it anymore. And I said, thank you, Solomon, for getting me out of that. But I mean, that's what the wisdom literature is concerned with is a very practical matter, teaching us how to be industrious, teaching us how to be practically skilled, how not to behave in our lives. As a door turns on its hinges, so does the sluggard turn on his bed. And the author will say to us, consider the ant. It tells us to pay attention to the behavioral patterns of ants.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever sat and watched a colony of ants breaking down pieces of bread, and then you see each soldier ant, as it were, taking his little piece of that bread, and it looks like the piece of bread is bigger than the ant, and they drag it back to the anthill, and you see how industrious they are. You don't see five of them leaning on their shovels while one of them is working.

Working. But again, when we see wisdom literature and we see proverbs, for example, we have to understand the difference. If you remember when we were looking at the law earlier in this course, I made a distinction between two types of law, apodictic law and casuistic law.

Well, we're going to put a third category here because this gets people in trouble from time to time. You have apodictic law, casuistic law, and then the category of the proverb. Now, apodictic law comes to us in the form, you shall or you shall not.

It's the form in which the Ten Commandments come to us. And the apodictic law is like the Bill of Rights in American law. They're the foundational laws upon which every other law is judged. They're the moral absolutes, if you will. The casuistic law is the case law, and it has the literary structure of the if-then clause. If your dog tramples down your neighbor's rose bed, then dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, certain consequences will come to place.

The case law is to give you for instances or examples of how to apply the overarching law. But both of these are structures of law. And sometimes Christians who want to be faithful to the Word of God put the proverb at the level of law, and the proverb is not a law. A proverb is a maxim of wisdom, and it has to be applied contextually. Now, we see the same thing in American wisdom.

I've given you this illustration before from the pulpit. You have these kinds of English proverbs. Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost. Well, if you're going to look before you leap, in order to look before you leap, you have to hesitate. You see how sometimes our proverbial wisdom, if you absolutize it, will end in a contradiction. Well, the same thing is true in the Hebrew wisdom, in the proverbs, in the same chapter. You have two different proverbs, one that says, answer not a fool according to his folly. And in the same chapter it says, answer the fool according to his folly.

Some people read that and they scratch their heads and they say, this is inspired, this is the truth of God, how can that be? These two proverbs actually contradict each other, and how could the author or the editor of this work not have seen that blatant contradiction where on the one hand he says, don't answer a fool according to his folly, and then in the next verse, do answer the fool according to his folly. Again, if you see those as moral laws, you're going to end up in total confusion.

But they're not. They're just like I look before you leap, and he who hesitates is lost. That is, there are some real, concrete life situations where wisdom demands that you count the cost before you embark on a particular project, that you look the situation over and don't jump into things rashly, but that you consider the consequences and that you look before you leap. But there are other crisis situations in our lives that we've all encountered where you have to act and you have to act in order to live, and you have to act decisively.

You don't have the time to deliberate because if you hesitate now in this situation, everything is lost. Alright, now when we look at wisdom literature, we're interested in certain characteristics that define it. I said earlier that sometimes wisdom literature is simply called the poetic literature, and then I corrected myself by saying that traditionally the five books that I mentioned, although they have much poetry in them, are not the only ones that are loaded with poetry. And now the next question is how do we recognize Hebrew poetry? The Hebrews, when they did their poetry, weren't the least bit interested in rhyming sentences or verses. Even though they had no rhyme for their poetry, they did have a reason for their poetry, and their poetry had a certain meter to it, just as English poetry does. However, the metrical structure of Hebrew poetry differs somewhat from English meter. What Hebrew poetry manifests more than anything else is not a rhyme of vowel sounds or a rhythm of vowel sounds, but rather a rhythm of ideas or of concepts, which is called parallelism.

And there are different types of parallelism, but so much of wisdom literature is written in couplets or in three or four or five verses where you find the repetition of ideas or the contrast of ideas or the complex building up of ideas, all of which are common to the literature. Now, in the King James version of the book of Isaiah, there is a passage in Isaiah that has created all kinds of problems for people where Isaiah writes in the King James. Isaiah didn't write the King James, but some people think he did. But in any case where he says, I bring equity, and I create evil.

And you look at that, and people read that for the first time. They run to me and they say, why does the Bible say that God is the creator of evil? We thought that it was axiomatic in our faith that God is never, ever, ever the author of evil. Well, there are about eight different words in Hebrew for evil, and there's all kinds of different sorts of evil.

There's just really an error that the translator failed to see a clear example of parallelism, where in this case it was a case of antithetical parallelism, where what the later translations will show you is something like this. I am the Lord God. I bring wheel, that is prosperity, and I bring woe. Or I bring prosperity, I bring calamity.

I will give you good gifts or blessings, but I will also bring curses upon you. And if you would see that the way in which Isaiah writes this text uses this poetic structure of parallelism, you would never fall into the trap of thinking that the text is saying that God actually creates evil like at the beginning of time. That's not what it's talking about at all.

Now again, if you see the parallel form of that, it helps unlock the text. Because again, when we interpret the Bible and we have principles of interpretation and rules of interpretation, there's a science of interpretation called hermeneutics. You know hermeneutics.

He's a plumber up in Apopka. But hermeneutics are the science or the rules of how to interpret it. And the most fundamental rule of biblical interpretation is this one. You interpret the Bible like you would any other book.

What? The Bible's not like any other book. Well, in some regards it's not like any other book.

It's the only one I know of that's inspired by the Holy Ghost, and that way it's unique. But like every other book, it has sentences, paragraphs, phrases, words, and it has all different types of literary structures in it. It has historical narrative. It has didactic literature. It has poetry. And what you do is, just like you do in English, you interpret poetry a little bit differently from how you interpret didactic literature, don't you?

When we read in the Bible that the hills clap their hands, we know that this is a metaphorical expression, a poetic expression that conveys a truth to us, but it's not the same thing as a scientific textbook on the anatomy of hills, is it? And so again, all I'm saying here is that we are able to recognize the literary structures in which these things come can really help us unlock the meaning of the text. That is so helpful.

That's R.C. Sproul on the importance of interpreting wisdom literature correctly so that we apply it correctly. All week we have been bringing you messages from you that we've never aired before on Renewing Your Mind. This is a great opportunity to highlight the benefits of becoming a ministry partner with Ligonier.

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