Proverbs 22. We begin section 3 of the book of Proverbs tonight. Starts at verse 17. Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise, and apply your heart to my knowledge. For it is a pleasant thing if you keep them within you. Let them all be fixed upon your lips, so that your trust may be in the Lord. I have instructed you today, even you. Have I not written to you 30 sayings of counsels and knowledge that I may make you know the certainty of the words of truth, that you may answer words of truth to those who send you? Do not rob the poor because he is poor, nor oppress the afflicted at the gate. For the Lord will plead their cause and plunder the soul of those who plunder them. Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man do not go, lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul. Do not be one of those who shakes hands in a pledge, one of those who is surety for debts. If you have nothing with which to pay, why should he take away your bed from under you? Do not remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set. Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings, he will not stand before unknown men. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, consider carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are a man given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not overwork to be rich. Because of your own understanding, cease. Will you set your eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings. They fly away like an eagle toward heaven. Do not eat the bread of a miser, nor desire his delicacies. For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. Eat and drink, he says to you, but his heart is not with you. The morsel you have eaten, you will vomit up and waste your pleasant words. Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words. Do not remove the ancient landmark, nor enter the fields of the fatherless, for their Redeemer is mighty. He will plead their cause against you. That's the first 10 sayings. Let's stop there. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we need your help to understand your word. Help us to apply our heart to instruction and our ears to words of knowledge. Grow our faith tonight as this passage was intended to do. We pray that our faith would grow because we listen and we see portrayed in the text the mighty God, the Lord of wisdom. Teach us to worship Him, we pray, in His name, Amen. So the first two sections of Proverbs are the longest two sections. Together they comprise over 70% of the book. As is obvious, we're here halfway through chapter 22 and we're just getting to section three. We've only got about seven chapters left in Proverbs. What's different in this third section? Well, the content is not different. Rather, the format is different. When I was a college student many years ago, not that long ago, I don't remember the sermon at all, but suddenly the pastor stopped and he's like, it's warm in here. It is really warm in here. Would somebody get up and move the thermostat? Nobody moved, of course. So he said it again, and he kept saying it until one of the deacons got up and walked over to the thermostat and looked at it and punched a button. Then he's like, okay, I can resume the sermon now. And I said to him afterwards, what in the world was that about? Were you really that hot that you had to just break off? And he said, no, it was a little warm, but I was fine. Everyone was asleep and I had to vary what I was doing in order to bring them all back. And that's what came to mind. Call for a thermostat check. And it worked. It woke me up. Anyway, there are about 930 Proverbs in this book. That's a lot of Proverbs. This is our 77th sermon on the book, if I'm remembering correctly. This is Solomon. doing a thermostat check, saying, OK, you're about to drowse off. You have said too many proverbs in a row. Let's switch it up. And so he does. And this section and the next section, Solomon drops out as author. And instead, he's the editor here. He's pulling in items that he found elsewhere. And that's what it says. Here are the words of the wise, here in verse 17. And then the next section has the same sentence. These also are the sayings of the wise. Oh yes, chapter 24, verse 23. So two sections in a row, sections three and four, are sayings of the wise. Over section one, section two, Section five, all of them have this heading. These are the Proverbs of Solomon. But these are not the Proverbs of Solomon. These are the words of the wise. And that's the title. Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise. Now what's interesting about this is, well one of the things that's interesting about it is the source of these words of the wise. We don't know where all 30 of the sayings come from. But about 10 to 15 have pretty strong parallels in this Egyptian text called the Wisdom of Amenemope from 400 or 500 years before the time of Solomon. And this text has been discovered. One commentator that I have on my shelf has an exhaustive comparison between this section of Proverbs and what Amenemope wrote And you can certainly read that if you're interested. But this seems to present a theological problem. How is it that the word of God is pulling from some Egyptian pagan who lived around the time of Moses or before? Well, the obvious answer is it's what we've already seen. Proverbs 14, wisdom makes herself known in the midst of fools. Or Proverbs 9, does not wisdom cry and understanding put forth her voice? Wisdom can be found everywhere. So sections one and two said that in the abstract. Section three says it concretely by quoting from or selectively using this old pagan author. Rather than saying God learned wisdom from Amenemope, of course we should posit the opposite. Amenemope learned wisdom from God. Wisdom is omnipresent. She can be found everywhere, including in the midst of fools. Why is that? Because wisdom is the alter ego of the Son of God, who is everywhere, who is omnipresent. That doesn't mean that everyone is equally wise, or that everything the world calls wisdom is actually wisdom. But it does mean that everyone is equally in the presence of wisdom. And everyone has a chance, everyone hears wisdom's proclamation. Because Christ speaks, again, not only in his word, but also in nature, in history, in providence. Wisdom cries out. And Ammonimothy heard that crying, and some of the things he said were pretty wise. My favorite thing that's adapted from Amenemope is the one in chapter 23, verse 5. Riches make themselves wings, they fly away like an eagle toward heaven. Amenemope had goose. So, you know, these are updated a little bit. And definitely, who would, I would rather see an eagle flying toward heaven than a goose. And maybe eagles are a little faster, I don't know. But riches fly away like that. So Amenemope had some wisdom, and Solomon quotes from him and from other unspecified wise men from various times and places. Yes, God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. Nonetheless, some of the things the world says are still wise. We don't figure out whether they're wise by using the world's criteria. We evaluate them with God's criteria. And when we do that, we'll occasionally find a nugget in the wisdom of the world. Well, this section is by no means just a big chunk of M&M-P thrown in, but it's selectively used to tell us, yes, there is other wisdom out there. Wisdom is not only found in the circle of the covenant people. Wisdom is found anywhere that people listen to the voice of Christ, even in nature and history. The content is 30 sayings. Now this is an Egyptian feature. Egypt regarded the number 30 as an important number. There was an important high court in Egypt with 30 judges. Sounds like FDR's court packing deal, right? That's where this 30 sayings structure comes from. Take 30 chapters. Now, the word 30 is admittedly dropped out of the Hebrew text, and if you don't have the NIV or another contemporary translation, you won't see it. It's not in the New King James or the King James. Instead, this word for threeness is there, which is translated excellent things, in the New King James. But the number or variant of the word three is in the text, and I think it's pretty clear that it should say 30, especially since if you count, there are 30 sayings. So regardless, in one sense of whether the text says 30 or not, there are 30 here, and it's fine to call them the 30 sayings of the wise. So that's kind of the background on this section. What do we find here? Well, this is a little prologue. This is the first saying, verses 17 to 21, and it tells us what we're supposed to do and why we're supposed to do it. The command, of course, is in verse 17, incline your ear and hear the words of the wise. Listen up. Pay attention. Once again, we see the pairing of the ear and heart, Incline your ear to hear and apply your heart to gain this knowledge. And we'll see this again in the next chapter, verse 12. Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge. The wise focus on two things, the ear and the heart. They start by speaking. and they attempt to make it all the way into the core of your being, which is your heart. And then, what do you do? Store them up. It is a pleasant thing if you keep them in the casket of your belly. So, the sayings come in the ear, they go to the heart, and then you stash them in your belly. Now, the word belly has dropped out of all English translations. Apparently it was too graphic for the translators of the King James Version, and from then onward, it has not appeared. Instead, all versions say something like this, it is pleasant if you keep them within you. But honestly, if you look at a human being, and you just say, hmm, where's the main storage unit? From the outside, where are you going to guess that the major storage area is? Well, I'm going to say belly. And that, of course, is what the Egyptians said, too. Where's the archive room? Oh, well, look at that. There's a big one right in the front. Put them in there. Let them stick to your ribs, we might say, in our culture. Well, these sayings are supposed to come into your ear, lodge in your heart, stay in your belly. In other words, even be memorized. And then you'll have them ready on your lips. Let them all be fixed upon your lips. This is wisdom's sequence. It comes in, you take it to heart, you stash it away in the archives, and then you repeat it back out. And when you've mastered those four steps, you can have a pretty fair claim to being wise. I heard it. I believed it, I stored it, and now I quote it all the time. I have captured wisdom. That's the command. Listen with your heart as well as your ears and store these things inside you. Proverbs is a book that cries out for memorization. Now, it's hard to memorize in English. In Hebrew, it's not so hard because all the Proverbs Our genuine Proverbs, they sound easy to remember. Just like our Proverbs, a stitch in time saves nine. And they have little rhymes and all kinds of sound features that make them easy to store in the casket of your belly. It's harder in translation. So we could all move to Israel and then memorize Proverbs easily. Or we can stay here and learn them in English by listening to them repeatedly. and taking them to heart and doing our best to make them stay in the casket of the belly. It's easy to find articles all over these days commenting that we live in a golden age of fandom. People are fans of more stuff than ever before and they take it more seriously and they love it. But this verse really asks us the question, How much of a fan of Jesus are you? How hard do you pay attention? How much do you listen to what he has to say to you? We would have a hard time envisioning a genuine Star Wars fan who freely says, yeah, I haven't watched all the movies. Or a genuine NFL fan who misses most of the games of his favorite team. And yet, in something far more important, how many Christians say, well, I miss out on large chunks of what the Lord has to say to me. I sometimes apply my ear and my heart and store it in my belly, but there are parts that I'm not familiar with. It's a shame. we are supposed to listen to the words of the wise. And that means, of course, not just these 30 sayings, but everything contained in the Word of God. Now, why should we do this? Why listen? Well, the rest of this prologue is focused on the reasons to listen. And the first reason that the wise give is that it will be nice. It will be a pleasant thing if you keep them in the casket of your belly. Now, we mentally tend to associate sin with pleasure. Sin is fun. Doing the right thing is not fun. That's okay, I wanna do the right thing, but I just am reconciled to the fact that it's not gonna be fun. Let the wise say, you wanna have pleasure? You want something pleasant? Stash these in your belly. That'll be pleasant. Now, of course, if we only look at it that way, then we can say, well, maybe that's a pleasure I don't care to have. I don't care for the pleasure of roller coasters. I don't care for the pleasure of eating pickles or olives. And I don't care for the pleasure of stashing the words of the wise in my belly. And to those people, the wise say, imperative mood, command, incline your ear and hear, apply your heart. Do it. Even if you don't want the pleasure, do it because I said so. But God is also telling us, if you listen, if you pay attention to me, you will experience pleasure. It's more fun to be good than to be bad. And that can be a hard teaching to believe, but it's the clear words of the wise. It will be a pleasant thing, and then what's the implication? It will be an unpleasant thing if you don't keep them within you. Why will it be an unpleasant thing? Because you'll meet the fate of the fool who gets beaten, who gets kicked, who gets ultimately killed for his pains. Much more pleasant to listen with the ear, hear with the heart, store in the belly, and put back out through the lips. That is pleasant. So that's one reason. The other reasons are presented really as goals. Here's what will happen if you do this. Not only will you have pleasure, but, verse 19, so that your trust may be in Yahweh. Now notice, this is a five-verse prologue, or a five-verse first saying, and verse 19 is right in the middle. Two verses before it, two verses after it. Now the Hebrews call them simple-minded, but if something was central, where'd they put it? Right in the center. And so it is here. The central point of this is faith, your personal faith in Jehovah. In other words, Christian, if you think that faith in Jesus Christ, your personal faith, and the book of Proverbs are in two separate spheres, you're wrong. This book is about faith in Christ. And verse 19 emphasizes, I have instructed you today, even you. Don't look at the person next to you, Don't say, wow, so-and-so really needs this. No, this instruction is for you personally. You and your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, as we would say. Proverbs, of course, the most famous verse, one of the most famous verses, and the first section is trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Here that theme of faith is reiterated. If you listen, hear with your heart, store in the belly, speak with the mouth, what do you do? You learn to trust God. These proverbs reinforce faith. To trust the Lord is to know who he is and to accept that knowledge rather than resisting it. And ultimately, we could say to act upon that knowledge, to rest yourself on And of course, you've all heard the illustration of faith as sitting on a chair. I rest myself on this, trusting that it's going to hold me up. Solomon, how does this book evoke faith? Especially, how do these 30 sayings of the wise evoke faith? Well, in the first place, they show us God's wisdom. This is a God you can trust. Look at how wise he is in what he has to say. We, of course, evaluate people's trustworthiness, largely based on what they say and then comparing, listening to what they say and then comparing that to how they act. Some people say, yes, I'll be there, and then they're not there, and what do you say? Okay, well, your trustworthiness grade just got knocked down a considerable amount. But Proverbs tells us, here's what God says, and when we compare that to how he acts, our faith grows. We see that he is trustworthy. Furthermore, when we listen with the ear, pay attention with the heart, store in the belly, speak with the mouth, we are engaging in the practices that nourish faith. That is also how this book helps us grow in our faith. If you never listen to anything Christian, If you never say anything Christian, how's your faith going to be doing? If you overdose all the time on the world's thoughts, opinions, desires, and statements, right? Some of you may have relatives who sit in front of the television all the time. And you can watch their faith dissipating as that idiot box feeds into their life. Why is that? Well, what are they taking in, storing in their heart, putting in their belly, and then speaking back out? Not the word of God, but the words of pundits. The opinions of fools. And it has a punishing effect on them. But when you listen to God's word, stash it away, talk about it, That strengthens your faith. And furthermore, how else does Proverbs strengthen our faith? Well, it's a book of teaching, to know wisdom and instruction, to understand the words of insight, as chapter one says. And what happens when you teach someone? He learns. And when you've learned, what do you do? You believe. You believe what you know. Faith is not divorced from knowledge. Faith is predicated on knowledge. So this book is a book that enhances our faith, again, by teaching us about who God is so that we trust him more than we did before. Especially it teaches us about who the wise son is. It grows our faith, not only in God, but in Christ. This is my Savior. This is my Messiah. Remember, this is the fifth gospel because it provides a profile of Christ that instead of telling us what he did, tells us why he did it. Here's how the wise son thinks. That strengthens your faith to learn that this is what was in the mind of Jesus Christ. Now, what's the relationship between this goal, faith, and the stated goal of the book, the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom? How do faith and fear interact? Well, the answer is that they're both necessary. If you know who God is, then you're afraid to offend him, but you can't know who he is without believing in him. You're not afraid to offend somebody who doesn't exist. So faith is the first step, and that leads to the fear of the Lord. And of course, faith and fear have a place in every healthy relationship. All right, if your friend, you can say, well, I don't fear this friend. Okay, well, next time you go to their house, walk in the door, sit down and talk to them for a while, then just get up, walk into their bedroom and get in their bed. But all of you are afraid to do that. Why are you afraid of doing that? Why are you afraid of going to their freezer and helping yourself to some ice cream? Well, you would just say, well, it's not done. That's so far outside my paradigm, my desire to just walk in their house and get in their bed or to park in their garage or anything like that. But the reason you're afraid to do that is ultimately, well, what are they gonna say? What are they gonna think? That is culturally unacceptable. And if I do that, I run a very high risk of damaging my relationship. I'm afraid to offend you by going and climbing into your bed, I am. And I know from your behavior that you're afraid of the same thing with me. So we don't do that to each other. But of course, you have to believe that the other person exists. You have to believe that they have similar cultural beliefs and prejudices as yourself in order to do those things. For example, in Muslim culture, it's considered highly offensive to see the bottom of somebody's foot. You point your feet at the floor, and heaven forbid that you point your foot at somebody else. And so if I stand up here and cross my legs and point my foot at you, you might say, well, that's kind of an odd stance, but you're not gonna say, oh, I'm offended now, I can't go back to that church. In our culture, we don't care. But if I were to do that in a Muslim country, they would be horrified. There's faith and there's fear. I know who you are, I trust that you are who you say you are, and therefore I am afraid to offend you. In other words, faith comes before the fear of the Lord in a logical sense. The one who comes to God must believe that he is, and only then, once you believe that he is, you must learn to fear him. to beware of his dynamic energy, his power, his act, his pure activity that will destroy you if you touch it in the wrong way. So that's the first reason. That's the goal. That's the main goal of these 30 sayings of the wise is to enhance your faith. to give you greater trust in and reliance on the Lord, the God of the Bible. But the second reason that's here in verse 21 is so that you can know the truth, that I may make you know the certainty of the words of truth. Now again, this is part of faith to know, knowledge is a component of faith. or truth, we could say, as a component of faith. And this section is about helping you learn the truth. So it's going to present us with 30 different truths that we can be certain about. Don't move the ancient landmark. Don't be a glutton in the presence of a miser or in the presence of anybody else, including yourself. In our day, of course, the idea of finding out the truth about the world has more or less been dismissed. Why should we try to find the truth together? Isn't it enough to build something that works? That's what the pragmatists ask. If all we care about is the truth, then we're just going to get bogged down in endless debates. But the Bible is an old-fashioned book that cares about the truth. The wise want you to know with certainty the words of truth. The final purpose of these sayings, you may answer words of truth to those who send you. You can learn to bring an accurate report. Now, in those days, accurate reporting was extremely important. There was likely no other source of information about things than the report of your messenger. You didn't have a postal system. If you wanted to deliver a message, you had to send somebody to do it. And if you wanted to know what things were like where the message was delivered, you would have to ask him. What happened there? And of course, professionally, some of you are required to write reports, grade reports or contact reports or something along those lines. But even if you don't officially have to do reports, you will be informally called on to make reports all the time. What did he say on the phone? What did the doctor say about your child's sickness? What does the Bible say about a Christian's financial life? And on and on and on. And of course, inaccurate reports that are believed quickly become infamous. The most famous such example in the last two decades is the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. A ridiculous false report on which we spent years, lives, hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. For what? A false report. Somebody who didn't answer words of truth to those who sent him. Wisdom breeds faith. That's the message of these words of the wise. Wisdom breeds faith, and faith is about knowledge, it's about speaking the truth. If you do those things, if you listen to the words of the wise, pay attention with your heart, store them in your belly, speak them back with your mouth, your faith will grow. Jesus is a God you can believe, and you must believe. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, We praise and thank You for Your Word that engenders faith, that nourishes faith, that teaches us to believe, and encourages us to trust. Thank You that You teach man knowledge. Thank You that You have granted us the faith with which to believe that You are true, that Your words are right, that Your ways are just. Father, strengthen our faith tonight, we pray. Help us to believe everything you say because you say it. Help us to store these truths in our bellies and speak them with our mouths, that we might be wise sons and faithful children. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.