Proverbs is a fascinating a fun book of the Bible, and I have not done a read-through on it in quite some time.  It is definitely one fo my favorites though, so I thought this would be a fun exercise.  I may stop at some point to do something fun right around Christmas, something specific to Christmas, but we will see.  I am thinking through that now.  In the meantime, we can ready through Proverbs and see how God guides us and meets us in that.

Thinking at a high level about Proverbs, it is really a collection of writing with 31 different chapters that is broken into 3 parts - the intro and setup (chapters 1-9), the main wisdom collection (chapters 10-29), and the conclusion (chapters 30-31).  This is book is written so that the reader would have the Hebrew word Knokhmah (hook-ma), which means wisdom, but it really carries with it an action element; so, like wisdom applied.  It is about what happens when life is lived with wisdom.  To be fair, Proverbs is really BEST understood when taken alongside of Ecclesiastes and Job - where Proverbs provides insights about how to rightly live life, Ecclesiastes provides some perspective in being clear that life doesn’t always work out where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, and Job is like hearing from your grandfather who’s seen it all in his long life.  These 3 collections together really provide depth to the topic of wisdom.  But Proverbs is the guidance portion...it is a cause-effect portion, where we learn how to world generally works.

While we are on the topic, let’s just be clear on this - good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to good people too.  But, if we are all honest, based on everything we’ve read in scripture and that we know about God and Jesus, we are bad people if not for God’s rescue.  In other words, there really isn’t anything that can happen in this world that we don’t really deserve in a general sense.  So, I think we can mostly dispose of this notion that we get a lot that we don’t deserve - that is completely right, and it cuts both ways.  We should be paying the penalty for our sins, and none of us does that in this life.  We already have it good.  We are already blessed.  It is this very fact that we are celebrating in 19 days...the birth of the guy that made that possible!

So, in our reading, we will focus on a set of practice skills that we can apply to live life well, as well as developing a healthy fear of the Lord, which we’ll define.

We should think about Proverbs as Probabilities...we know that doing X in this world doesn’t always guarantee that Y will happen; but we just as easily understand that generally speaking, doing X most likely leads to Y.  That’s what Proverbs is about...it is Ecclesiastes and Job where we hear wisdom about the exceptions to the general rule.

In terms of background, there really isn’t a lot known about Proverbs.  It is assumed that Solomon was the writer of some of these, but not of all of them.  In reality, the author really isn’t super important, because once you’ve lived life longer than about 18 years, you will recognize the reality of these truths and teachings...none of this is off limits to the average person, we all kind of know this stuff intuitively.  That’s what so amazing about this - it is almost a book of reminders and nudges.   So, our reading of this book will be a lot about application; a lot of daily challenges, applying what we are reading.  We can’t apply wisdom without action, so this will be a fun journey of application for us...great for a type A personality like myself!

So, tomorrow, Proverbs chapter 1...here we go!