The request today was to talk about Proverbs and how in the world you read those things. Who in here has read the whole book of Proverbs? We'll start with that. One. You think, okay, you know, it's a lot of, since it's not really a cohesive story, it's sometimes kind of hard to remember if you really went through the whole thing, because we're always picking things out of it, you know? You know, there's a few things that all run together, like the very last half of a chapter, you know, the virtuous wife or whatever they call her. There's another name for that, not virtuous. Excellent wife, something like that. Anyway, some kind of wife, I don't know. Yeah, the standard that all women are held up to and then get kind of frustrated about because nobody, I think, reads that all that well or that correctly sometimes. Well, why aren't you investing in land? You know, that's in there. Anyway, no, but mostly it's just a whole lot of sayings. Proverbs, if you will. Let's see here. Who was reading James? You did, yeah. Yeah, James is a lot like Proverbs. I love that book. It's my favorite one. James is pretty cool, yeah. I love it. James is a good one. The Bible's in the pew out there. Well, of course it is, because this isn't important to anybody. Anyway. I needed it for this, and I just never left this room. All right. Anyway, well, we're going to. And I sent out, I don't know if you guys noticed, I don't know if anybody ever looks at it. Oh, you do? Wow. You knew I sent it? That's amazing, because lately, nobody has even. They're all like, oh, did you send me something? Oh, yeah, I've got a blue dot here. You read it? You read it? Oh, but it was easy. That's the thing. It was just like six passages. And they were short. They were just a little verse or two. What? It's a good thing you're not going in the water. I'd hold you down. All right. I mean, uh, yes, blessed are they who get baptized today. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'll stop. Okay. Anyway, um, we're, we're talking about Proverbs. We got a specific verse to actually cover, and I'm definitely going to put that off cause that's the specific verse he asked about. So I'm putting that off to next week. I was going to anyway, it's kind of complicated. Oh, you think? Maybe they're going to be late. It's 935. Anyway, all right, never mind. I'm just gonna go ahead if everybody's okay with that. All right. So there's, first of all, I don't know, what do you think about Proverbs? What did you notice about Proverbs when you've ever looked at it? Just off the top of your head. What makes Proverbs kind of different from most of the other books of the Bible? It's like poems. It is, in fact, Hebrew poetry. Yes. It's not as poetic as Psalms or Lamentations or some of those others. But yeah, it has that whole Hebrew poetic feel. And hopefully, if you read it, you can tell by more than just the weird indentations in every single verse. But what's, you know, and again, I'm an English major so you'll have to forgive me because I am kind of nuts about poetry. But what's different about their poetry versus ours? What we think of as poetry. Shakespeare or Byron or Shelley or Wordsworth or, you're just shaking your head at me. Do you know who any of those people are? Shakespeare you've heard. Oh good. You've heard of Shakespeare. Excellent. Welcome to the Western civilization we have. All right. You never what? Who said that? Oh, and it's a good favorite too, but it's not one of the ones I mentioned. John Donne. Oh, yeah. Also quoted at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway in one of his books. But anyway, no man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent. Yeah, never mind. Anyway. Actually, that's a little bit closer to Hebrew poetry than most English poetry. When we think of English poetry, we might think of, I don't know, what's an English poem? Anybody ever memorized a poem in English at all? Even when you were a kid. Not limericks. Well, let's dodge limericks. That's not real. And they're scary. And sometimes they're terrible. No. OK. Well, OK. I don't know if it still counts as you having memorized it if you don't remember it. But OK. He at one time had. OK. Yeah, that's fine. So past perfect. Yeah, but not present perfect. Got it. All right. Well, let's see here. I used to have a lot memorized. But I'm trying to think of a normal one. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips are red. Oh, I can't say the rest of it. It's not nice. Never mind. Haha, I saw something for Sunday school. Darn it, Shakespeare. Oh, he got me. That was the beginning of a sonnet. It's one of his most famous ones because basically it's a very realistic portrait of someone he loves. That's why he says, my mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Because every poet in his day was saying, your eyes are like the sun. They're like the stars at night. And he's like, well, yours aren't. But he's not calling her ugly. He's saying, I have a realistic view of you. And you're my favorite person. You're the one I want to look at. I don't want somebody who people think has the sun in her eyes if it's not you. That's sort of the point. Sonnets tend to rhyme. Hebrew poetry does not. There's almost no rhymes in Hebrew poetry. And if there were, we wouldn't know it because we don't read it in Hebrew. Oh, goody, the people I targeted us for are here. Yay. Oh, and ha-ha, the new guy. Hi. Welcome aboard. Sit anywhere you like. You were forceful. Congratulations. All right. Welcome aboard. We're talking about proverbs. Yes. We already started, but we didn't get very far into it, of course. And I will have you out here around 10. You did? Yes. I would come over and kiss you, but your wife would slap me. All right. So, um, all right. Well, great. Wow. Excellent. All right. So, um, I'll throw this out to you guys, too. What, uh, what's different about Proverbs from the other books in the Bible? Book of Wisdom. Ooh, that's good right there. The other books aren't wise? No, they're wise, but they cover different topics. That's true, that's true, yeah. There's a bit of this in Psalms, and there's a lot of this in James, but for the most part, yeah, wisdom is sort of centered in Proverbs. It's kind of the main point, really. Did you, in your reading, did you notice sort of the style? Anything about the style of this poetry that's used to give out these Proverbs? Just anything that, it seems like they're all like that. nothing anything you know just in the just in the the way that these things are always said well that's true yeah yeah there are certainly yes yeah thematically speaking it does tend to hang together around two or three topics and those three topics are all interwoven and the fear of God and wisdom are two of the like Yeah, two of the things that really, really guide this. To read Hebrew wisdom literature, well, first of all, you have to recognize that most of it's parallelism. There's a lot of parallelism. So I'm going to say, in one verse, two things. And the fact that I'm saying it in two different ways means something. Okay, so here's one. Proverbs 910. I think this might have been on your list. I don't remember. I didn't mark the ones that were on your list, so sorry. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. Two statements joined by an and. That's the parallel. What's the relationship between the two statements? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The knowledge of the Holy One is insight. So you're supposed to get wisdom. From what I understood, you're not going to get insight unless you first get wisdom and fear God. So you're arguing that it builds on, like you get your first statement and your second statement. The second statement is building on the first. It's going into it maybe a little bit deeper or taking you in a certain direction. That's good. That's good. We call that, the more obvious cases, we call those synthetic parallelism because it's building something. It's synthesizing by saying two things. But the one sort of expands on the other. If you didn't see this as synthetic, you could at least see it as synonymous. I mean, it's got a whole bunch of different words, but it ends up in the same general place. The fear of the Lord, the knowledge of the Holy One, beginning of wisdom, insight. There's a clear parallel there. Now, there's another kind of parallel, and it's the one where the second line is the opposite of the first, or not really the opposite. It's not the opposite statement of truth. It's not saying, that's not true, this is. It's more of saying it in a negative way, but it's saying the same thing. Proverbs 1.7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. That's an opposite one. That's antithetic parallelism. You don't have to remember the terms. Just remember the idea that There's a lot of parallelism. All Hebrew poetry is parallelism. Psalms are full of this stuff. Lamentations full of it. James leans into it, which is kind of weird because he was writing in Greek as far as we know, and the feel's a little bit different, but he ends up kind of, I mean, he's almost writing like Proverbs 2 for the New Testament in some ways. Yeah, but except that he goes to longer themes. And Proverbs does that sometimes. Like half of Proverbs 7 is about how some older adulterous woman traps a young man and destroys him in having an affair with her. That's half of the chapter right there. Yeah, so some of these are a little bit more thematically joined, but a lot of them are just, I'm going to say one thing, and then I'm going to say something else. Then I'm going to say something that has nothing to do with that. And it's OK, because this is one book that's clearly stated as having been compiled. This is not one person sitting there writing out each individual line. This is a whole lot of things that were said, and people later put them together. And it's okay because the Holy Spirit works that way too, which is so nice. You know, you can trust that in that compilation, it worked. All right, so we had the synonymous parallelism, where they mean the same exact thing, and so it's emphasizing it. There's antithetic parallelism to show you that this is true, and if you turn this thing false, the whole thing falls apart. And synthetic parallelism is this is true, and this explains it so much more. Genesis 1 has a lot of synthetic parallelism. And it's actually built into the days. Day one is let there be light. And day four is the Lord makes the sun and the moon and the stars and uses those to sort of separate them out. And 2 and 5 and 3 and 6 work exactly the same, oddly enough. So there's poetry in creation. It's very weird. Anyway. All right. Oh, yeah. My main synthetic parallel was Proverbs 3, 5 and 6, which I'm almost certain is on your list. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths. This is not all about how to read it. We are going to get into the actual themes and stuff, but I wanted to start with some people look at Proverbs and they're like, how can you possibly just sit and study this thing? It's just a bunch of, you know, you might as well get, you know, the sayings of Benjamin Franklin and read those. What's the difference, you know? And he had quite a few, too, honestly. But there is a difference. We'll get to it. All right. The next big thing I want to point out is that there are full to the brim with figurative language and imagery. They like to paint pictures with words. Wordplay isn't there for its own sake. They really like to be descriptive in ways that will grab you. It'll just take you and shove your face into a picture that they drew and say, this is that, this is that, did you get that? Psalm 23-1. Psalm 23. Anybody knows Psalm 23? Knows how it starts? The 23rd Psalm. The most well-known Psalm in the world. Thank you. Yes, good job. That's figurative language. That's imagery. Is the Lord an actual man carrying around a stick and, you know, watching actual sheep? Well, not technically, no. But it's figurative language. We're his sheep. And sometimes he does have to, you know, use the stick to guard us. And sometimes he uses the stick to... whack us a little bit because, you know, we're out of line and we need to be reminded. Here's another one at the beginning of Proverbs 8. Proverbs 8, famous for being the call of wisdom. Does not wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand. Beside the gates, in front of the town, At the entrance of the portals, she cries aloud. And the rest of this chapter or half chapter is what she says to people when she's basically saying, I am throwing a huge party. It's a feast. It is free. Please come and partake of wisdom. And I get the feeling that she keeps crying out for people because very few people actually show up. Wisdom? Yeah, not today. I'm busy. That doesn't sound like fun. Anyway, the next thing I want to point out is repetition. And I'm kind of combining some things. Repetition and thinking of the audience as participants. You have to, when the Proverbs are given to you, you have to be kind of actively thinking about, what does that say to me? Most scripture, it's the word of the Lord, and it's not about what it does to you. It's about what it means as the truth in the universe. And how are you going to respond to that thing that's so external from you? But Proverbs are the opposite. Proverbs is very much about what effect does this have on me? What am I supposed to get out of this? How do I respond naturally? The wisdom literature is full of this stuff. I want to point out, this is not on your list, but this is my favorite, absolute favorite chapter of Proverbs. Proverbs 20. I think it's 20. Tell me if I'm wrong. Starting with verse 7, two things I ask of you. Is it 20? Oh shoot, I knew it. Okay, 29 maybe? I knew when I typed that. I was like, no, that's too far back. 29, 7? 30? Must be 30. Oh, that's what I messed up. Two instead of a three. That's what I messed up. That makes sense, actually. Okay. Proverbs 37 through 33. I'm just going to run through them real fast. Two things I ask of you. Deny them not to me before I die. Remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Which is funny because, you know, honestly, the second part of that prayer, if I were praying it, generally speaking, would not be, don't give me riches. You know, it's not, no, neither poverty nor riches. No, I really want one of those and I really don't want the other one. Okay, please. He's saying he'd rather not have either one. He doesn't want Too much of it. Why? Well, now he's going to tell you. He's going to follow up on poverty and riches. And this is sort of the synthetic parallelism. We're starting to build up from there. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. He's like, if I'm rich, I'll forget about you. And if I'm poor, I'll be tempted to do crazy sinful things against you. That's why I don't want either extreme. That makes sense. And then he goes on for some normal proverbs, which we'll just blast right through. Do not slander a servant to his master, lest he curse you and you be held guilty. There are those who curse their fathers and do not bless their mothers. There are those who are clean in their own eyes, but are not washed of their filth. There are those who, how lofty are their eyes, how high their eyelids lift. There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind. You kind of get a sense that there's a theme in that. These may be similar people or the same person. These are all sort of things that go together. But now we're going to get to, I think, the parts that get just really bizarre. I don't know, the things he says here, you're like, why did you even say that sometimes? All right, so, verses 15 and 16. The leech has two daughters named Give and Give. Three things are never satisfied. Four never say enough. Sheol, the barren womb, the land never satisfied with water, and the fire that never says enough. What does that mean? Yes, come on, just throw something out there. Well, the leech, what do you think of when you think of leeches? Are leeches nice? Do people like leeches? Why don't people like leeches? What do leeches do? They take and take and take. Yes, they suck your blood, literally. Yeah. And, you know, he says he says that, you know, the leech has two daughters, Give and Give. I mean, they're, you know, the only You know, the only thing that a leech wants and the only thing that a leech will ever do is just take and take and take. And so, you know, even his daughters go out and tell you, give, give, give, give, give, because we're going to take it all. But then he goes on to say that there are things that will never stop taking. Three things are never satisfied. Four, never say enough. Sheol, which by the way is the Hebrew word for the grave, death, okay? The barren womb, the land never satisfied with water and the fire that never says enough. It's an oblique warning. It's not a direct warning, but it's pretty close to a direct warning. I mean, who didn't get the point of this, right? You need to be somebody who can be satisfied. You have a problem if you are never satisfied. That is an issue. That is something you need to take care of. That's the warning really. Don't treat anything in your life Like you're the open grave that will swallow the world of it. Don't treat anything in life like you're a fire that's just going to rage over it and destroy everything. Or a land that's just going to drink it up with water like a desert and the water's gone the next day and you want more. But it's striking the way he put it, you know? I mean, the way he just sort of throws these things together. Sheol and the barren womb. You know, that's death and life, but Death encompasses all and a barren womb is supposed to be giving forth life and can't. It's, anyway, so, you know, that a woman with a barren womb, especially in ancient days, they thought she was cursed and there must have been something wrong with her or her family because she's not having children. You see it all through the Old Testament. All right. Then we get to really intense, obvious symbolism. He goes from the oblique reference to right in there. Verse 17, the eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures. Gosh, I hope everybody understood what the point was of that verse, right? I mean, see, that's the thing. He sort of, he hung back and he made you think about it a little bit, made you kind of put everything together, and then all of a sudden he throws this on you with this huge, powerful, bam, you know? And then he goes on to say many things, but all of the things in this next list are just leading up to the point he wants to make, which is the last thing on the list. He says, three things are too wonderful for me, for I do not understand the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a virgin. He's not making a statement about birds or serpents or ships, okay? I hope everybody kind of understood that. He's making a statement about you know, what a man does when he's in love basically or when he wants somebody. And sometimes, you know, you see and you have seen this and maybe you have been this guy, I don't know. But, you know, you see other people who just go gaga over somebody and you don't really You're like, what are you doing, man? Do you think that's going to work? Why are you doing this? Is this some sort of pickup strategy that works? What are you doing? Why are you changing everything in your life? And the answer is, well, there almost isn't an answer. It's not understandable, except in the context of, well, that's how men are around women. And he's just being honest about it. Sometimes it's great when the Bible even says, yeah, these wisest people in the world are telling you, yeah, I have no idea what's going on there. I don't get it. And the point is that that's kind of a problem then. Again, it's not a big problem, but it's something you should know, that men will do anything for a girl. Invitation, this next one, this next verse, rings back on me sometimes for strange reasons. This next one, I would call this an invitation to just let this thing simmer. Memorize this first or just read it enough that you have the basic gist of it. And in the months and years that follow, you will see exactly what it means if you don't right away. It's wisdom that only grows in soil, in your heart. This is the way of an adulteress. She eats and wipes her mouth and says, I have done no wrong. What's the point of all that? What does that mean? He does kind of, yeah. That's a little bit like that, yeah. Because he distances himself. But the adulteress is kind of brazen about it. I mean, she's right in there with you. It's like you're at maybe one of the village feasts or whatever, and there she is sitting across from you. And she's just sitting there living her life like she's not sleeping with somebody else's husband. And she eats, and she wipes her mouth, and she says, I haven't done anything wrong. It's funny, you know, this is one of those verses that when I first read it, I'm like, okay, but did it have to be there? What am I going to get out of this? You know, adulterer, adulteress, I don't plan on doing either one. So why, why am I being told this? But it's funny that it's like every year or two since then, I run into somebody who is exactly like this. It's not just about adultery. It's about all kinds of sins. But it's the, it's the sneaky sins that you feel like you can get away with. It's not, you're not even afraid though. There's no shame. I mean, this person is shameless. Somebody who had shame about what she did, she would not be able to just sit there right in front of you and do the normal human things, eat, wipe her mouth. That wouldn't be happening. She's just living her life. And she's oblivious to the fact that she is destroying people. She's a panzer tank of sin rolling across World War II's landscape here. And she doesn't even know it. She's just like, I haven't done anything wrong. What are you laughing about? Panzers? I'm not really a tank guy, but I read some stuff about them once and it was like, wow, dang. Anyway, sorry. I think I'd write a good…no, I don't. All right. The next set, I love the next set. I love them all. None of these seem to have deserved what they got. Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up. A slave when he becomes king, and a fool when he is filled with food. An unloved woman when she gets a husband, and a maidservant when she displaces her mistress. This is not a list that leads up to the last one. Two passages back, we had that. This one, each one of these things, there's something wrong with it. It's like justice is saying, this is wrong. You know that this shouldn't, this isn't the way things are supposed to be. And this passage is kind of commiserating with you a little bit. It's saying, yeah, you're right. That's messed up. It shouldn't be that way. A maidservant when she displaces her mistress. The guy who divorces his wife and marries the nanny. Ew. Right? I mean, yuck. But that's what we're talking about here. A fool is filled with food. This guy is getting rewarded for being an idiot, for being a stupid, sinful, jerk of a guy and he's got plenty. He's doing okay. And you're just like, well, that's not right. You know, that's what all of these are about. It's not telling you that this is ever going to get fixed. I think it will be, but that's other passages. All this is saying is, yeah, sometimes you're sitting there and you're watching Justice just go take a vacation, and it bothers you, and don't become bitter about it. Just recognize that it happens. This is a fallen world, as we talked about a couple weeks ago. All right, one more, and then I'm gonna let you go. Well, two more, sorry. Okay, this, all of these things are comparisons to what you would expect, but you've gotta recognize the wisdom in each one. Four things on earth, this is verse 24, four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer. The rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the cliffs. the locusts have no king yet all of them march in a rank the lizard you can take in your hands yet it is in king's palaces so there's something true about all of those you know they you know it seems like not only is there nothing special about them but You would never think that there was anything special about them, and yet they're everywhere. They're in places you'd never expect them to be. None of these things had to plan to be where they are. They just showed up. This is another list of many things, to make the point of the last one. Three things are stately in their tread. Four are stately in their stride. the lion, which is mightiest among beasts and does not turn back before any, the strutting rooster, the he-goat, and a king whose army is with him. Obviously, the point is the king whose army is with him. He's like these things. He's like a rooster. You know, he's like, he's like a lion. You know, nothing. You know, the lion never sees any animal in ancient Near East and says, oh, I'm not going there. The lion can go wherever he wants. Everybody else is like, oh, crap, a lion, and they run away. It's the mightiest of beasts, and so it's automatic. That's how a king feels when he's got his army behind him. That happens a lot in the Old Testament and doesn't often end well, oddly enough. Let's see here. Okay, one more, sorry. We're just gonna end this part. If you have been foolish, exalting yourself, or if you have been devising evil, put your hand on your mouth. For pressing milk produces curds, pressing the nose produces blood, and pressing anger produces strife. A little pressing for us, it's like, what is this about? What he's saying is sometimes you can do stupid or sinful things and occasionally good results come out of it, but it's probably a little more likely to produce bad results, okay? Good results is pressing milk to get curds. Curds are considered to be a good thing, you know, you make cheese out of them, they're good. So you put pressure on milk and that's what you get. Put pressure on your nose, he means punching in the nose basically, and you get blood and that's not good, that's bad. And anger, if you put pressure on someone with anger, you're gonna produce strife, you're gonna produce an ongoing bitterness and fight between all of you. So two out of three of these things are bad. He's saying, Don't do something stupid or sinful because you think it'll result in good. It's more likely not to. Every once in a while God will use it for good, but you can't count on that. It's more likely you're going to end up with a bloody nose, dude. These are simple ideas. These are things that should be obvious, but that's the thing. You don't carry these obvious ideas in your mind when you're out there in the world faced with the decision. It comes on like this, and you've just got to make a snap decision. And it's a lot easier to make a snap decision if you have a picture in your head that this guy drew than if you have this whole logical argument why I probably shouldn't do that. I probably should be careful. I should probably not press the situation any further. I should probably not be greedy. I probably, you know, it's a lot easier to just say, oh, good heavens, I look like a strutting rooster here. This isn't going to end well. That's the point of all this. You meet somebody, for the couple of you who are single, you meet somebody and it seems like all they want, they just want things out of you. Oh, you're going to do this for me, you're going to do that for me. I need this, I need that. Hey, buy me this, buy me that. Hey, what are we going to eat tonight? No, I want to eat in a better place. And you can sit there every once in a while and look at them and go, oh, your give. You're one of the Leach's daughters. I remember you. Bye. You don't marry, give the leech, OK? You just don't. All right, that's all. I went over, of course I did. But next week, we will. That was my quick thing on that. Next week, we're going to go straight to 2911, because I'm going to run out of time if I don't. But that's a good one, and it kind of gets into stoicism. Think about stoicism, if you ever haven't. It's stoicism thinking of comeback, especially among men. What's the difference between 2911 and stoicism? Worth asking. All right. Dismissed. Go. Be baptized. Or give speeches, or whatever you all have to do. You are giving speeches. I think everybody else is getting wet. Ha, ha, ha. Congratulations, everybody. I am excited.