I hear a lot of Hollywood tag lines these days, but not many proverbs. Short memorable phrases that recall the whole flavor of a movie, like the Terminator’s “I’ll be back,” or the Ghostbusters’ “Who you gonna call?”, seem to have replaced the more folkloric expressions of popular wisdom which seemed to be always dropping from the mouths of previous generations.
Many of those once popular proverbs came from Scripture or else from Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Of course they haven’t wholly disappeared. Even younger generations have likely heard, “Pride goeth before a fall,” or “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” However, my impression is that there is a general decline in the espousing of proverbial wisdom. The big exception may be in the popular maxims of business where lines like “Good is the enemy of great,” are repeated often. Yet even in business we have Dilbert cartoons regularly debunking trite managerial maxims and little genuine respect for what can be learned via a single well-turned phrase.
Still and all, the Bible speaks often of wisdom, and the single book of the Bible which is most fully focused on the exposition of wisdom is Proverbs, a compendium of those short, memorable phrases, so many of which, at least until the last couple decades, have been part of everyday conversation and common sense.
So I felt inspired last fall while on my annual prayer retreat to commit to preach through the book of Proverbs this year, starting this coming Sunday. The opening verses, Proverbs 1:1-9, are in themselves a defense of paying attention to, learning from, and even committing to memory some proverbial wisdom. There is good instruction to be had here, say verses 4 and 5, for both the simple and the wise.
Verse 7 includes the bookmark phrase of the whole book, occurring here at the beginning and again at the end in Proverbs 31:30, “the fear of the Lord.” That attitude of respectful, humble reverence for God is the both the “beginning of knowledge” here at the outset and the capstone of a beautiful life at the close of the book. This by itself is worth a lifetime of reflection and internalization of how such “fear” works out in practical terms. It’s my hope we can gain some such wisdom this spring, summer and fall as we look together at the wisdom collected in this now neglected book.
And since it’s also Mother’s Day this Sunday, we will note that, as Solomon begins to expound his proverbs, it’s to parents in verses 8 and 9 that he first points as sources of instruction in this sort of wisdom.