Proverbs 2

1 My son, if you will receive my words and treasure my commandments within you,

2 Make your ear attentive to wisdom, incline your heart to understanding;

3 For if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding;

4 If you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures;

5 Then you will discern the fear of the LORD and discover the knowledge of God.

I’ve come across a lot of young people who have no interest in acquiring wisdom. I marvel at that!

If I were to stand up in a crowd with a fistful of dollars and begin disseminating them, people would stampede to get some. But if I were to stand up in a university square and dish out wisdom, I would be in danger of getting stoned!

Why is that so? It is because we have an inherent abhorrence towards wisdom. We are blind. We don’t see its value. We don’t have a desire for it.

For this reason, Pr 2:1-5 tells us the importance of wanting wisdom, and of recognizing its value.

If you examine yourself, and do not find in yourself an insatiable thirst for wisdom, understand that there is something wrong with you, and fix it. Look around you at all the foolish people destroying themselves as if you were looking at lepers all around you, and desire to not repeat their mistakes.

Raise the bar on yourself, and desire to become a person of excellence in all things. Why should you settle for anything less?

Consider yourself to be the fool of all fools. Just like how air gets sucked towards a vacuum, if you recognize the vacuum of wisdom within you then you will position yourself to receive wisdom to fill that vacuum. On the other hand, if you think that you’re wise and ‘good enough’ then you will not see your great need for wisdom, and you will not receive wisdom.

6 For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.

7 He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity,

8 Guarding the paths of justice, and He preserves the way of His godly ones.

God has the monopoly on wisdom. You can’t get it from anywhere else. Even if you have wise parents, you can still be foolish if God chooses to not allow the wisdom He gave your parents to flow into you.

So then, what kind of person do you have to be in order to get wisdom from God?

You have to be an upright person – a person who wants to always do what is right in God’s eyes.

You have to be a person of integrity – a person who does what he says he will do.

There are other verses in the Bible where God also mentions what kind of a person you have to be to receive wisdom from Him. I’ll point some of them out along the way. But the bottom line is this: if you have no desire to be the kind of person that God wants you to be, then God will not give you one of His most valuable gifts – wisdom.

The rest of this chapter explains why wisdom is so valuable.

9 Then you will discern righteousness and justice and equity and every good course.

10 For wisdom will enter your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul;

11 Discretion will guard you, understanding will watch over you,

Those who want to be the kind of person that God wants them to be will receive wisdom, and all the benefits that come with it - things like righteousness, justice, equity, knowledge, understanding and discretion.

When you are faced with a decision concerning yourself, righteousness will help you choose the decision that pleases God the most – for example, should I go to this party where they are drinking alcohol? Or, should I (as a young woman) be alone with a young man in his apartment?

A sense of justice will help you make decisions concerning what’s right for others – for example, how should I resolve a dispute between my children?

A sense of equity will help you make decisions concerning what’s right between yourself and others – for example, how should we divide the inheritance?

If knowledge is not pleasant to your soul then you will find it hard to seek it with great desire.

Discretion is the ability to think before you leap. If you jump into something without thinking, you may find that you are in a situation that you are unable to handle, and the outcome could be very painful to you. For example, if a friend who is just learning to drive invites you to drive with him to some place, discretion will stop you from accompanying him because the risk of an accident is higher.

Understanding is the ability to figure out why things are the way they are, and therefore predict what will happen next. For example, if you are able to sense that your friends are about to start backbiting, you can exit their presence and escape participating in their sin.

12 To deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things;

When you have wisdom, you will avoid doing evil and stupid things. You will also avoid getting fooled by people who try to con you with smooth words.

13 From those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness;

14 Who delight in doing evil and rejoice in the perversity of evil;

15 Whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways;

You will not get influenced by people who have bad habits and who enjoy messing up their lives.

16 To deliver you from the strange woman, from the adulteress who flatters with her words;

17 That leaves the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God;

18 For her house sinks down to death and her tracks lead to the dead;

19 None who go to her return again, nor do they reach the paths of life.

20 So you will walk in the way of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous.

You will avoid making mistakes in the sexual realm. God will protect you and keep you safe from all kinds of sexual traps and horrors, including unrecoverable follies.

21 For the upright will live in the land and the blameless will remain in it;

22 but the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be uprooted from it.

As people grow older, their mistakes take their toll. Some mistakes are small, and their toll is minor. You may have said something foolish and lost a good friend. But perhaps you can find another good friend.

Some mistakes are big, and their toll is larger. If you end up with a sexually transmitted disease, you can be stuck with it for life, and it can forever dampen your joy. If you marry the wrong person, you are stuck with them. Even if you divorce them, and remarry, your position before God is never the same again.

Some mistakes are unrecoverable. You can end up in prison, or even die.

In the end, our foolishness can cause us to lose out and be ‘cut off from the land’. The land represents a life of joy and no eternal regrets.

It is so much better to have wisdom right from childhood and live a life of minimal regret than to mess up and repent and live with scars. Yet, even a life of scars is better than a life that is lost.