Proverbs 2

1. My son, if thou wilt receive my words, And lay up my commandments with thee; 2 So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, And apply thine heart to understanding; 3 Yea, if thou cry after discernment, And lift up thy voice for understanding; 4 If thou seek her as silver, And search for her as for hid treasures; 5 Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, And find the knowledge of God. 6 For the LORD giveth wisdom; Out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding: 7 He layeth up sound wisdom for the upright, He is a shield to them that walk in integrity; 8 That he may guard the paths of judgment, And preserve the way of his saints. 9 Then shalt thou understand righteousness and judgment, And equity, yea, every good path. 10 For wisdom shall enter into thine heart, And knowledge shall be pleasant unto thy soul; 11 Discretion shall watch over thee, Understanding shall keep thee:

12. To deliver thee from the way of evil, From the men that speak froward things; 13 Who forsake the paths of uprightness, To walk in the ways of darkness; 14 Who rejoice to do evil, And delight in the frowardness of evil; 15 Who are crooked in their ways, And perverse in their paths: 16 To deliver thee from the strange woman, Even from the stranger which flattereth with her words; 17 Which forsaketh the friend of her youth, And forgetteth the covenant of her God: 18 For her house inclineth unto death, And her paths unto the dead: 19 None that go unto her return again, Neither do they attain unto the paths of life: 20 That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, And keep the paths of the righteous. 21 For the upright shall dwell in the land, And the perfect shall remain in it. 22 But the wicked shall be cut off from the land, And they that deal treacherously shall be rooted out of it.

1. To receive is the first thing in a sincere disciple. To lay up or carefully keep shows the value put upon the instruction. M. S.

3. Earthly wisdom is gained by study; heavenly wisdom by prayer. Study may form a biblical scholar; prayer puts the heart under a heavenly pupilage, and therefore forms the wise and spiritual Christian. But prayer must not stand in the stead of diligence. Let it rather give life and energy to it. Bridges.—This is the secret of life—to believe that God is your Father, schooling and training you from your cradle to your grave; and then to please Him and obey Him in all things, lifting up daily your hands and thankful heart, entreating Him to purge the eyes of your soul and give you the true wisdom, which is to see all things as they really are and as God Himself sees them. If you do that, you may believe that God will teach you more and more how to do, in all the affairs of life, that which is right in His sight, and, therefore, good for you. Kingsley.

4. Search as for hidden treasure. Observe the expression; you know jewels do not lie upon the surface of the ground, but they are hid in the receptacles of the earth, you must dig for them before you can enjoy them. Now you must search for the truth of God as for hid treasure. Anon.—Texts from the inexhaustible mine of truth remind us of those singular formations which often occur in rocks, called drusic cavities. You pick up a rough, ordinary-looking stone of somewhat round shape; there is nothing specially attractive or interesting about it. You split it open with a hammer, and what a marvellous sight is displayed! The commonplace boulder is a hollow sphere, lined with the most beautiful crystals, amethysts purple with a dawn that never was on land or sea. Macmillan.

Wisdom is spoken of as a thing that must be labored for; the search is to be the very business of man’s life; there is no point more clearly laid down, none more insisted on than the necessity of exertion in the pursuit of wisdom. There are lessons enough in the Book of God for every day of the longest life. Bishop Goodwin.—The general character of Holy Scripture evinces the necessity of thought and meditation, if we would use it aright; and also shows that such right use of it must involve effort and exertion. E. M. G.

Of all books in the world, the Bible is one which will not yield up its riches and its sweetness except to the diligent and faithful and earnest student. All great works demand long and patient and persevering study. The lesser mind cannot expect to grasp at once the purpose of the greater. Perowne.—Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God’s Word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficiency in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together. Bacon.

I am not half so much afraid that intellectual doubts and the formulated, conscious disbelief of this generation will affect Christian people, as I am afraid of the unconscious drift sweeping them away before they know. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has a solemn figure in regard of this matter. He says: “Let us take the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should drift past them.” And that is exactly what befalls Christian men and women who do not continually renew their familiarity with God’s Word and the Gospel to which they trust. Before they know where they are, the silent-flowing, swift stream has swept them down, and the truths to which they fancied they were anchored are almost invisible on the far horizon. For one man who loses his Christianity by yielding to the arguments of the other side there are ten who lose it by evaporation. “As Thy servant was busy here and there,” was the lame excuse of the man in the Old Testament for letting his prisoner run away, “he was gone!” And God knows how he has gone and where he went. A. M.

1-5. If thou receive . . . cry after . . . seek . . . search for. If God has given men such evidence that a fair, and full, and perfectly candid examination is all that is needed to necessitate belief, then, if men do not believe, it will be in this very law that we shall find the ground of their condemnation. The difficulty will not lie in their mental constitution as related to evidence, nor in the want of evidence, but in that moral condition, that state of the heart, or the will, which prevented a proper examination. “There seems,” says Butler, “no possible reason to be given why we may not be in a state of moral probation with regard to the exercise of our understanding upon the subject of religion, as we are with regard to our behavior in common affairs. The former is a thing as much within our power and choice as the latter.” M. H.—Human consciousness, the judgment of mankind, and God, in all we know of Him, hold man responsible for his belief. Every man has within him an indestructible conviction of possessing a power over his opinions, and a sense of responsibility in reference to his beliefs. All men avow a readiness to change their opinions whenever they are furnished with a sufficient reason for so doing, and this avowal clearly implies the conviction on their part of a power in them to do so. As a matter of fact, all men are very sensitive about the light in which their opinions are regarded by others. They are ever ready to show dissatisfaction when charged with holding unworthy and erroneous opinions, and are prone to resent all such charges. And why, if men are not conscious of possessing a power over their beliefs? Cooper.

5. The fear of Jehovah is the usual Hebrew designation of true piety; not fear in the sense of terror, but in that of reverence. The fear of Jehovah is a treasure (Is. 33:6); it is also a refuge in times of danger and trouble (Prov. 14:26; compare also Psalms 19:10; 115:11). All true wisdom leads to a knowledge of God. M. S.—No seeking for other forms of good is sure of being successful, but such seeking for heavenly wisdom—the greatest and best good men ever can seek—never yet failed to bring the good sought, and never can. So seeking “thou shalt understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.” H. C.

There is one department of knowledge which, like an ample palace, contains within itself mansions for every other knowledge; which deepens and extends the interest of every other, gives it new charms and additional purpose—the study of which, rightly and liberally pursued, is beyond any other entertaining, beyond all others tends at once to tranquillize and enliven, to keep the mind elevated and steadfast, the heart humble and tender; it is biblical theology, the philosophy of religion, and the religion of philosophy. Shedd.—All saving knowledge, including a practice answerable to that knowledge, a uniform, persevering obedience to the commands of God, is founded in humble and devout reverence toward God, in the tender fear of displeasing Him, and the readiness to receive, embrace, and lay up in an honest heart His Word and His grace whenever it shall be revealed and afforded to us. Hammond.—“The fear of the Lord” is almost everywhere in Scripture put for the whole duty of man, for godliness in general; and the reason is that the true fear of God always qualifies and tempers the mind so that a man dares not do otherwise than please and obey God to the utmost of his knowledge and power. Bishop Beveridge.

Wisdom is the knowledge of Divine things, not as mere objects of thought or of theoretical knowledge, but through an inward perception, in which the heart goes along with the reason, making the knowledge at once spiritual and practical. This is always presented in the Scriptures as wisdom in its highest form. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” is one of the most frequent proverbs of the Old Testament. And we read, “the fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom”—i.e., devout obedience to God conducts the soul to the highest wisdom; the obedience of the heart disciplines the mind in heavenly knowledge, upon the principle stated by Christ: “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.” In the New Testament this same wisdom is set forth as the completest form of knowledge. J. P. T.

6. The ground of the preceding assurance is here given. The connection is thus: “Wonder not at the promises made, for Jehovah gives wisdom, and from His mouth cometh knowledge.” What His mouth utters—viz., His words, are the sources of all true wisdom. M. S.—God desires nothing so much as that His intelligent and moral creatures should ask and receive, and so become His trustful, dutiful, and grateful children. Therefore if any man consciously lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men liberally and upbraids not, and it shall be given him. Following the course of thought in our text, we shall see that this must be true of wisdom in the sense of this passage—viz., true piety, “the fear of the Lord.” Knowing God, as thought of here, is that practical and experimental knowledge by which a lost sinner returns penitently from his wanderings and waywardness; finds God ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy, and comes to know Him as an object of love and trust. H. C.—We praise the truth, but forget that “the truth without the search for truth is only half the truth.” It is not truth in the abstract which is mighty, but the personality which is an embodiment of the truth. Not in professed belief but in real believers is the power of the Church. He who is the truth is also the way and the life. Stuckenberg.

7-9. The righteous, who seek and find wisdom in the sense of piety toward God and uprightness toward man, are saved of God, shielded from the moral perils of this sinning world, for God is their buckler; He keeps their upright paths under His guardian care and (v. 9) gives them understanding in all righteous and good ways. To walk uprightly is of course to walk securely. H. C.—If we depend upon God and seek to Him for wisdom, He will uphold us in our integrity, will enable us to keep the paths of judgment, however we may be tempted to turn aside out of them; for He preserves the way of His saints, that it be not perverted, and so preserves them in it safe and blameless to His heavenly kingdom. The assurances God has given us of His grace, if duly improved, will excite and quicken our endeavors in doing our duty. Work out your salvation, for God works in you. H.

9. Path or track here signifies manner of life, pursuit, and so the meaning is, “Every pursuit in which good may be found." M. S.—The essence of Christian conduct is to rise beyond the schoolmastership of rules and commandments into the eager fulfilment of principles and precepts where duty is swallowed up in an understanding choice and all-embracing love. Cable.—Set ever before you, even in temporal matters, the grand spiritual object, and you will be led onward and upward, your course will be a progress and its goal success. Our Lord does not sever the sacred from the secular, but bids us sanctify the secular until that which is secondary and subordinate is wholly dominated by that which is spiritual. “Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.” But he bids us subordinate every desire to the one aim of seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness. T. F. Fotheringham.

We must first, last, and always make our study of the Bible a search for absolute truth back of all assertion; for absolute right back of all will and authority; for absolute duty back of all exigency or commandment, and of supreme, spontaneous goodness back of and above all question of duty. Our Bible study should not always be a short search; but always it should be a search for the shortest, simplest way to our best possible understanding and practical acceptance of these things. Not be strong in the Bible, but “be strong in the Lord.” Cable.—The safe man is who walks in the path of duty, the strong man is he who clothes himself with the strength of principle. The grandest characters have an affinity for right and truth. They succeed because they depend upon something stronger than any mere device of the intellect or any expedient suggested by the exigencies of a moment. They may suffer temporary defeat, but they follow the guiding light of principle with a faith which is wisdom. There is always more or less sophistry in temptations to self-indulgence, and the brighter the intellect the more ingeniously will it plead the cause of error. What we call the faculty of judgment is at its best simply a clear vision of the eternal veracities which persist through all history and finally crush all opposition because they are fundamental and fixed necessities. Anon.

10. Wisdom shall enter into thine heart. Truth itself, God’s pure, eternal truth, simply discovered, observed, and emotionally reverenced, is but treasure still buried. “The kingdom of God cometh not by (mere admiring) observation”—of it. Only as truth melts into our hearts, our lives, our daily conduct, and is there moulded and coined into justice, righteousness, holiness, and universal love, do its latent powers become actual values. Cable.—Only what is really believed is truly faith. Scripture cannot contain the faith of the believer, no more than the Church contains it; but Scripture is the source and nourishment of his faith; what is figuratively called objective faith is to be made literal subjective faith. The Christian consciousness is to grow by the appropriation of Scripture truth. One can believe the Bible only so far as he has personally appropriated the Bible. There is truth above us which is our master; there is a law over us which we are to obey; but that truth and that law are also to be in us, so that they become our truth and our law. Christian truth and Christian faith exist only for him to whom they have become a personal possession and a living power. Stuckenberg.

Knowledge shall be pleasant. The man who walks with God cannot possibly be a man of contracted, paltry views; there is that in Divine truth, there is that in the spirit and habit of devotion, there is that in intercourse with God which must expand the mind. The man of religion can enjoy every other form of truth and knowledge in common with the man of the world: he can traverse the pages of history, he can enter into all the sciences and philosophy, he can appreciate the productions of the poet, he can (like other men) transact the common, commercial business of life, he can comprehend with others the principles of political economy and legislative jurisprudence, he can go in intellectual attainment all the lengths of the men of this world, and when he comes to the termination of all that earth can teach and earth can give, God opens the treasures of religion and the boundless prospect of an eternal life. E. M.—No pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth—a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene—to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below, so always that this prospect be with pity and not with swelling or pride. Bacon.

It should not surprise us when men of acute and powerful understandings more or less reject the Gospel, for this reason that the Christian revelation addresses itself to our hearts, to our love of truth and goodness, our fear of sinning, and our desire to gain God’s favor; and quickness, sagacity, depth of thought, strength of mind, power of comprehension, perception of the beautiful, power of language, and the like, though they are excellent gifts, are clearly quite of a different kind from these excellencies—a man may have the one without having the other. Powers of mind and religious principles and feelings are distinct gifts; and as all the highest spiritual excellence, humility, firmness, patience, would never enable a man to read an unknown tongue, or to enter into the depths of science, so all the most brilliant mental endowments, wit, or imagination, or penetration, or depth will never of themselves make us wise in religion. Newman.—We can reach out after the highest activities, aims, and attainments only by devoting our lives to securing redemption and giving redemption to men. With this as our dominant idea reform moves on, progress hastens, true culture advances apace, and wealth, position, culture, which when made the ends of life bring us only wreck and wretchedness, become the sanctified means for the attainment of grander ends in the larger manhood and the Divine glory. Seeking to have in us this mind that was in Christ Jesus we find Christ-likeness, and with it but without the seeking find true perfection and blessedness—we reach a life that is Christ-crowned, because Christ originated and governed by the true Christian philosophy, which is the only natural philosophy of the moral universe. D. S. G.

11. Discretion. There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but none so useful as discretion. This, indeed, gives value to all the rest, sets them at work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person possessed of them. Without it learning is pedantry and wit impertinence; and even virtue itself looks like weakness, wanting discretion. Addison.—Knowledge hath two pillars, learning and discretion; the greatest scholar without his two eyes of discretion and honesty is like blind Samson—apt to no good, able to much mischief. T. Adams.—Discretion does not only show itself in words, but in all the circumstances of action, and is like an under-agent of providence to guide and direct us in the ordinary concerns of life. Steele.

13. While some among mankind are acting as if right and wrong, life and soul and God, are dread realities, others cleave to the dust like the serpent’s brood; while some devote their lives to the attainment of virtue, the improvement of character, the preparation for death, others eat, drink, live, think, wish as if the earth enclosed and satisfied man. What a difference of character and of main purpose, what a difference of thoughts reigning in the intellect and over the heart! Could two worlds of material substance made by the hand of God differ so widely? If the unbelievers are enlightened, the others are benighted; if the world of spiritual minds are in the light, the other world is blind and in darkness, “and in love with darkness.” T. D. W.

14. Frowardness of evil. “Froward” is fromward. And so man is not so much a wanderer as one who deliberately sets his face in the wrong direction; he is not so much unstable as perverse. He likes to gaze on forbidden sights, he lurks where he may hear unrighteous words, and lingers in the atmosphere of unholy thoughts. S. S. T.

16-22. The discourse takes a new direction. The blessings of wisdom and knowledge, of guidance and protection, have already been set before those addressed, and also deliverance from evil. But there is one special evil that has not yet been brought particularly into view in this address. It is that of incontinence. True wisdom will be certain to deliver those who possess it from all defiling and destructive intercourse with the unchaste. This constitutes the closing theme of warning, and the writer is so much in earnest that he exhibits more than usual fervor and more of poetic energy.

17. The covenant of her God shows that in the ceremony of marriage at that time appeal was made to God, who was called to witness the vows and promises made. The adulterous woman (and such is the one meant here) breaks these vows, or this covenant. She has a double load of guilt, that which respects her husband and that which has respect to God. M. S.—There is a season when youth becomes independent and intolerant of control, when gentle guidance is mistaken for love of interference and of power, when the youth and the maiden think scorn to follow the ways and maxims of the parent, the friend, the teacher, and take pride in forming a code and gathering maxims of their own; in speaking their own words and walking after the light of their own eyes. These are critical days in every man’s life—days which determine whether he is to be a pilgrim to the light, or to drop down into the darkness—days when he is made or marred forever. Alford.

18. Sentiment: “Her habitation will sink into certain destruction and ruin.” There is plainly a reference to the earth as swallowing up Korah and his company; this is, therefore, a loud note of warning to the imprudent and unsuspecting youth, who may be enticed by the adulteress. It is still more fully developed in the next verse. M. S.—“Inclineth” falls far

short of giving the full sense of the Hebrew, for the meaning is not merely that her house is an inclined plane verging down toward death and hell, but that both herself and her house sink down bodily, as it were, into the open jaws of hell. As in the case of Korah and his troop (Num. 16 : 30-34), so underneath her house and all her adulterous household the earth opens and swallows them up alive, and down they sink to the realms of the lost! Of all who go into her house for such guilty purposes, none ever return again; the steps of no one ever again take hold of the paths of life! Alas! what a record is this! Oh, might this awful truth be made to blaze out in glaring light athwart the doorway

of every such house of infamy and crime! No return from these foul precincts to the paths of purity and life! This house sinks down, carrying all its guilty ones to the realms of the dead—to the depths of hell!