Proverbs chapter 1, verses 20 through 33, these are God's words. Wisdom calls aloud outside. She raises her voice in the open squares. She cries out in the chief concourses. At the openings of the gates in the city, she speaks her words. How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? for scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge. Turn at my rebuke. Surely I will pour out my spirit on you. I will make my words known to you. Because I have called and you refused, I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded, because you disdained all my counsel and would have none of my rebuke. I also will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your terror comes, when your terror comes like a storm, and your destruction comes like a whirlwind. When distress and anguish come upon you, then they will call on me, but I will not answer. They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me, because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of Yahweh. They would have none of my counsel and despised my every rebuke. Therefore, they shall eat the fruit of their own way and be filled to the full. with their own fancies. For the turning away of the simple will slay them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. But whoever listens to me will dwell safely and will be secure without fear of evil. Amen. This ends this reading of God's inspired and meritorious. We were warned last week in verse 10, my son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. And we spent some time in the following verses studying, noticing the different ways that our own sin tempts us, and recognizing when others are reinforcing that temptation, being also themselves a temptation to us, so that we could get the when part down, when sinners entice you, so that we could get the what to do, in that case, part down. Do not consent. Give that strong no. Say no to sin when it offers itself and when it seems so tempting or desirable for the reasons we won't re-preach that entire sermon now. But now there's another enticer. There's another one trying to get our attention and offering benefits and urging us to hear and to heed and to come along. And this one is wisdom, which is personified at this point or given in metaphor at this point as a lady. Because in a couple chapters, he's going to compare the lady wisdom with the loose woman. Now, the loose woman wants you to come aside in secret and private. And there are many dangers there that we will consider when we get there. But one of the things that we find here first about the good enticement of wisdom is that it's an obvious enticement. It's an open enticement. So we'll consider that first. in verses 20 and 21. Secondly, we'll consider how urgent the enticement of wisdom is, the invitation of wisdom is, if you don't like the negative connotations that may come along with the word enticement. But the urgency. of wisdom's enticement, wisdom's offer, wisdom's invitation, we'll consider in verse 22, and that it's also a personal enticement in verse 23, and that it's a saving enticement in verses 24 through 27, but a limited time enticement in verses 28 through 31. And then finally, the Great Dilemma, meaning two options, and you must pick one of them. And not picking is to pick one of them, is to pick the wrong one. But the Great Dilemma then, the great choice between the two things in verses 32 and 33. First, how obvious it is. Wisdom calls aloud outside. Calls aloud in the street. Just as God has made himself known in all of the things that were made, has shown so much about his own wisdom and power and goodness and so many other aspects of his divine nature in the things that were created and even made his divine nature, made his own reality that God is and that he made us and that in him we live and move and have our being. He made all those things obvious to every one of us so that the ungodly actually have to work. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, they have to work to suppress, to push down on the truth in unrighteousness. If they are going to escape giving God glory, giving God thanks, because we know that He is God. And it is the great condemnation against us in Romans 1 that although we knew him as God, we neither glorify him as God nor give him thanks. So also God has made our need for wisdom obvious. Everywhere we go and everything we do, especially in the streets and the squares in society. Relationships require wisdom. And this is all the more true because we're sinners. And even more true when you are in relationships with unbelievers. Although relationships with believers requires a lot of wisdom. And so wisdom is urging us to pay heed to the word of God. to come aside to where God gives us his instruction, gives us his words. His world announces to us that we need his word. There's much that we can learn about his world, from his world. But we need to know him. We need to fear him. Remember, it was the fear of Yahweh that was the beginning of knowledge. And in verse 29 of our passage this evening, rejecting wisdom is to hate knowledge by not choosing the fear of Yahweh. So what we hear here in this obviousness of wisdom's enticement is that whether it's in society and in the different relationship dynamics, and there's probably economics implied there as well in the street and in the square and in the chief concourses. We're now moving into government. You know, places maybe in the city walls at that point and certainly the openings of the gates in the city is a reference to where governmental decisions, judicial decisions are made. Having to live in society, having to conduct economic transactions and interact with others in that way, having to function in government or under government or some combination of the two, all of these things cry out to us. Don't you see how badly you need the fear of Yahweh? that man by himself with the wisdom that he has in himself, he cannot be effective, he cannot be fruitful, he cannot be joyous, he cannot thrive so far as, so long as he is resisting the instruction of God's word and resisting the knowledge of God himself. You need to know the Lord. How often something has gone awry in one of your relationships, something has gone awry in your productivity, your interaction with others, your interaction with authority. You need the fear of Yahweh, you need his word, you need his salvation, you need his son, communion with him, to know yourself, to be right with God and forgiven and to know that God is for you. You need his instruction. to know what the differences are that his thinking and his word makes in how you live, what pleases him. It is so obvious that we need his word, that we need to listen to him. And this is, in its own way, a sort of proof for total depravity, isn't it? And the need for regeneration, that we would be made spiritually alive, Because God has placated the whole world and our whole lives with our need for him and yet, even those who are believers, even you who know him and long to him and are forgiven and righteous and justified as you're ever going to be in glory. Yet you often find yourself, don't you, coming sluggishly or not at all to this word, private worship or family worship, or maybe even public worship. And so we see how obviously we need God's wisdom. And it's not just an obvious enticement, it's an urgent enticement. That's behind this question at the beginning of verse two, how long How long will you do this? Don't you yet see that it is self-mocking and self-destroying, that it consumes your life instead of making you flourish and thrive and filling you with joy and strength, making you a blessing to others and enjoy blessedness before God? How long are you going to do that? It is as silly and foolish, children, as if you came around the corner wondering what that thudding was and you found a brother or sister or someone else just standing there and smashing their head on the wall. We have an English expression. I was beating my head against the wall. Someone uses that phrase to talk about how he was doing something that wasn't working and couldn't have worked. It was foolish. It was irrational. But he kept doing it until he came to his senses and realized that it was foolish and irrational. Well, it is foolish and irrational to try to live life. apart from listening to the one who made us, apart from listening to the one who offers himself to us, in part through the instrumentality, through the use of his word, which he uses to give us faith in Christ and to grow our faith in Christ. And to try to live apart from listening to him, apart from coming to his word and trusting him by his spirit, to take that word and apply it to our thoughts and apply it to our affections and apply it to our choices and our desires. To try to live apart from that is to beat our head against the wall. And so the question that implies that, that makes that one, how long, you simple one, Sometimes the word simple means, well, sometimes the English word simple, this Hebrew word does not mean this, can mean like single-minded, uncomplicated. by different motivations or priorities. There's a way in which we use the word simple in a positive way. This is not a positive use of the word simple. This is the use of the word simple meaning someone who doesn't understand enough to operate properly. They're naive. They're not taking into account all of the information and all of the ideas that are necessary to walk in a healthy or productive or upright manner. So how long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? So not listening to God, he says, or she in this case, the wisdom personified as a woman at this point, she says, is to love being naive. No one loves to be naive. You know this, you've probably been in a situation where it seemed like everybody else knew some things that you didn't know, and it was kind of painful and embarrassing to think that you were naive, and you maybe didn't even ask some questions that you could have and should have asked if you didn't want people to find out that you were naive. Well, praise God, you don't have to be naive. He's given you his word. He's even given you people in your life that he has sent and appointed to teach you his words so that you can ask the questions. People whom he has designed and commanded to love you and who in most cases, at least for you, you should be grateful to God this isn't true for everyone. They really do love you and you don't need to be embarrassed. You shouldn't, certainly shouldn't love to be naive. to actually desire not to know so that you can continue being ignorant, lacking the information that you need to live wisely, to live well. How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? For scorners to lighten their scorning. They are treating things as small. They are mocking or scorning. the truth about God, and they think that they have something. All that they have is their mocking. All that they have is their scorning. It's self-ridiculing. And fools hate. What do they hate? I hate being taught. I hate being told. I hate having an authority over me. I hate spending time having to learn You make all these complaints in our souls and we grumble against it. It costs effort. It makes me feel small. I am small. It's okay for me to feel small. I am small. And you have all these. But what we really hate, if we fall into any of those ways of thinking, I hate knowledge. And it's not just I hate knowledge, knowing stuff, knowing things. Knowledge is personal. It's really, I hate knowing God more. I hate understanding not just his world more, and his word more, but him more, and myself more, and how to operate according to this word in his world more. So we may think that we don't want any more wisdom at And I have as much as I would like. Thank you very much. But wisdom herself here in the metaphor urges us, how long? How long will you do this? Turn now. Don't spend any more time like that. Don't spend any more time naive. Don't spend any more time being a squirter. Don't spend any more time hating knowledge. Realize that what God offers to you is to understand better who he is, who you are, how to live as one who belongs to him. What he offers to you is to no longer be a scorner or a mocker, thinking that you are putting other things down when you're really just making a display of yourself. and delighting when you're spawning. Don't spend any more time doing that. Don't spend any more time resisting knowledge. Choose the fear of Yahweh. Choose to begin in knowledge. Choose to live as his, to walk with him. And so the enticement is obvious. It's announced in so many different ways everywhere we go. It's urgent, how long. It's also personal. Wisdom now says, turn at my rebuke. Surely I will pour out my spirit on you. I will make my words known to you. Now there's a little bit of a blending here because wisdom is currently being given in the metaphor as a woman, but one of the things that we are going to learn, especially by the time we're done with chapter 8, is that wisdom is also a person and a divine person. A person who creates with God and is the delight of God from all eternity. So that when we get to John chapter 1, in the beginning was the word, the logos, which is a little bit more than what our word means. That Jesus is the wisdom of God. The divine son is the wisdom of God. God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God, is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably wise. It's not like the second person is wise in a way that the first or third person is not. No, God has one wisdom, and yet he especially expresses that wisdom in his son. And there's a personal offer here, where wisdom, which we are going to come to find, is not just an abstract concept, but something inherent to God himself in his character and expressed, especially by God himself in the person of his son, now comes and says, I will pour out my spirit on you. Not just that wisdom will teach us, but that wisdom will take of himself and by his spirit start to make us to be more like himself. I will pour and I will make my words known to you. Now his word is a way in which he reveals himself, he conveys himself. Now his word will be something that we come to know and we come to understand. There's relation here. It's a personal invitation. so that we can't come to the wisdom of God as a way for us to be exalted in ourselves. Many wish for knowledge, many wish for wisdom so that they can feel better about themselves or be more admired by others or get a leg up on others. But here, God offers to us his wisdom, that we may be conformed to him, that we may relate well to him, that our minds may be conformed to his mind, so that our mouths are conformed to, as it were, his mouth. His words start to shape the way we think, and his words start to form even the way that we speak. Oh, how we have wished sometimes that we were a little bit more eloquent. Probably every one of us have desired that in some context. For the Lord comes, he says, I will make my words known to you. You see, there's the eloquence of the super apostles that the Corinthians were so impressed with, and there's the eloquence that learns by the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, to speak plainly the words of God. There's that simplicity, not naivety like we had earlier in that word, there's that simplicity of forthright, plain, upright, wise Bible speech. that the farmer or the janitor or the housewife who's walked with the Lord and been marinated in their Bibles and in faithful preaching for decades, they just have that straight, good speech because God has made His words known to them. It's a personal enticement to be informed to God. One of the places where you may have wished that you were more eloquent is in prayer. We're gathered here tonight, aren't we, to pray. We want God to give us his spirit and we want him to make known to us his words. We even thanked him and asked before we began that his spirit helps us in our weakness when we come to pray because we do not know how to pray for what we are. We don't know what to pray for and whatever we do know to pray for, we don't know how to pray, how best to pray for it. And yet his spirit helps us. And then his spirit also intercedes for us. And here he gives us this personal invitation. And in the school of God's wisdom, you don't get certificates of achievement. You get the personal knowledge of him and to be made more like him, to speak more like he does. It's an obvious enticement, an urgent enticement, a personal enticement, a saving enticement. When verse 26 says, I will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your terror comes, it's still speaking poetically. This isn't turning lady wisdom into a scorner. What it's saying here is that the calamity of verse 26, the terror of verse 26 and verse 27, the destruction and distress and anguish of verse 26. These are all things that God's word would spare you. These are all things out of which God's word would deliver you. He doesn't speak to you to bother you. He doesn't speak to you to burden you. He doesn't speak to you to make you feel more miserable about the wrong ways that you are thinking, and the wrong ways that you are feeling, and the wrong ways that you are living. He speaks to you to deliver you from your misery, to redirect you into that which is safe, and good, and right, and strong, and productive, and glad, and a blessing to others and to yourself. so that this is a kind and generous enticement. Oh, you've learned, because you interact with sinners, that when they try to get you to do something, they urge you to do something, that there's often an ulterior motive, and it's not necessarily what's best for you. There's some cost involved. Now, or some harm, some negatives involved. Put it that way. There is a cost. You have to respond. He calls you to be diligent, to spend time, to give yourself zeal, effort. But there's not a negative. There's not waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's not an ulterior motive in God that is somehow against you. or in his wisdom. No, his wisdom offers you all of these things. He didn't have to give you his word. He didn't have to offer you his word. If you had, by your own foolishness, come into calamity and terror and destruction and distress and anguish, it would be right and it would be just and it would be deserved. But isn't it doubly so? If God, knowing our frame, and we not knowing that we are so foolish and in danger of making these great mistakes with our lives, and we just careen along as if there's no destruction up ahead, and he's urging us, pleading, with us, to listen to him, to slow down, to change our thoughts to more match his and our priorities and the way we evaluate things, the choices that we make and what we enjoy or desire. And he gives us all of that in his word. If we don't listen, if we don't take the time to hear, in the first place, and then we don't heed what we hear in the second place. Do you not see how it's in that way that it says that wisdom will then laugh or mock? The idea is it'll be doubly just. You can think of that in corporate terms and then bring it back down to application to your life. Isn't this something that we instinctively, at least, and maybe a little bit more deliberately as we think about it, isn't it something that we think about our nation? Very few nations in the history of the world have had not just such access to God's word, but such heritage of those who have known it and who have taught it, doctrinal foundations upon which philosophical foundations were built. And yes, corrupted by or intermingled with that which is corrupt at every stage. It's not like America descended from heaven as the morning star. Don't we see what we're doing as a, not just falling into folly, but a rejection of a wisdom that we have had? And say that it is therefore more doubly so and self, doubly just and self-mocking for us to go careening into the disaster. Well, the Lord comes to us, wisdom comes to us in our passage this evening and says, Is it not so for me and for you, who know better even than America, generally speaking, when we have had opportunities to listen and we haven't taken them? Or we have had opportunities in which we heard, but we walked away from the mirror and we forgot our face. We are hearers only and not doers. Oh, it's a saving enticement. Comes out of compassion and generosity. It would spare us the disaster. And it's a limited time, limited time enticement. Then, Lady Wisdom says in verse 28, then they will call on me, but I will not answer them. They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me. There are two things. going on here. One is that God doesn't owe us his word. He doesn't owe us opportunity to read it. He doesn't owe us opportunity to be taught well. Jonathan Edwards, at one point, was two different points. He was ejected from a congregation. But on one of the occasions, he had one last sermon to preach. And he preached from a text on how they would answer each for the other, what they had done with one another at the judgment. That they would not get to sit under his preaching anymore. That there might come a day when, in this life, when they will wish that they had opportunity again, but the Lord will have taken it from them. and that certainly in the next they will give answer. God's servants stood before them, he told them his word, they got upset with him for it. God doesn't owe us the opportunities that we have. And not only might he take them away and we do not know, It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when the hate speech of the Bible, as it is considered by many already in the surrounding culture and even in seats of government above us, is outlawed and the written word is hard to come by. and preaching must be done in secret if a faithful preacher can be found at all, we do not know what opportunity we will have. But not only that, which we see in part in verse 28, but the more we resist his word, the harder we become against it. the more we become abandoned and isolated to ourselves. So in verses 29 and 30, because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of Yahweh, they would have none of my counsel and despised my every rebuke. Okay, so there's an instrumentality here of how they have previously responded to God's word. Therefore, they shall eat the fruit of their own way and be filled to the full with their own fancies. So after they have spent enough time rejecting the word of God and refusing to be corrected and rebuked and shaped and sharpened by the word of God, what's the result of that? Well, they become so full of their own ideas, there's actually no room for any wisdom there. They develop an immunity. to instruction and purview. So that they get to the place where they feel like they need it desperately. They call. They seek. But they're unable to obtain it. I will not answer. They will not find me. Why? Because they're filled to the full with their own fancies. That's frightening. In some ways, that's more frightening than terror and destruction and distress and anguish. It's not a bad prayer for us. Lord, do not let me be filled to the full with my own fancies. Make me soft-hearted. Give me that habit of mind and heart before you that I am correctable and teachable and instructable, that I can grow by your word. that I can be turned out of harm's way by your words. Which brings us at last to the great dilemma. of enticement. So we have the enticement of sin, which we were warned against last week in verse 10, and following, my son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. And then we have this wonderful pleading enticement of wisdom that is obvious and urgent and personal and saving and offered first for a limited time. And then we get in verse 32, the two options, option number one, sounds like two different options of its own, but it's really just the one. Verse 32, for the turning away of the simple will slay them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. To not choose the fear of Yahweh, second part of verse 29, is the same as hating knowledge or the turning away of the naive. So this turning away, just being kind of neutral or ambivalent, is the same, or at least leads to the same end. The complacency of fools will destroy them. We're going to see a couple of places in the Proverbs where the lazy man dies with his hand buried in the dish because he lacks the will, the desire, the diligence to bring the food to his mouth. That's what's happening spiritually, isn't it? The second part of verse 32. The complacency of the fool. The word of God has been presented to him. He has his opportunity to hear it, or maybe he has heard it, and he's just complacent, lacks the gumption to do something about it, to make a change in how he thinks, or his affections, or priorities, desires, pleasures. So that's option number one. That's the one we don't want. That's the one that slays you or destroys you, like the self-destruction we heard about last week. Here's the option you do, verse 33. But whoever listens to me will dwell safely and will be secure without fear of evil. is that wonderful condition to which the Lord is bringing all his own that we had in our Isaiah passage today, or you will have in your Isaiah passage today if you haven't done it yet, where all of the curse is gone, all the sin is gone, all the danger is gone, and there's just the joy, the joy of the Lord himself, the joy of his wonderful new creation, creation over which God rejoices, over which he has especially made us to rejoice because he's rejoicing over us. Oh, whoever listens to me, he says, will dwell safely and will be secure without fear of evil. Oh, listen to him. Take every opportunity you can to listen to him. He proclaims himself to you throughout his word, proclaims himself to you in Christ, says he'll pour his spirit upon you and make his words known to you. Listen to him.