Proverbs 2

CHAPTER 2Let me remind you that the Book of Proverbs is not a haphazard book. It tells a story, a connected story. It is the challenge given to a young man that he be a wise young man. He is exhorted to hear, to increase his learning. He is to start learning from his father and his mother in the home; he gets his basic lesson before he enters school. Even after he gets his Ph.D., that basic lesson will still be good for him. It is this: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” The way to find out about the Lord is through His Word. There are a great many people who say that a person must be very intelligent and have a high I.Q. in order to understand the Word of God. Nothing is further from the truth. God does not say that is essential. However, in this chapter where the young man starts out, it will be made clear that if he is to know the will and Word of God, he will have to study. He can’t just dilly-dally around and pick the daisies along the highway of life; he must apply his heart unto wisdom. Therefore, he must study the Word of God.

Proverbs 2:1

SOURCE OF TRUE WISDOM"My son"obviously, this is advice being given to a young man. He started out as a little boy in the home. Now he has grown up enough to go out and face life, and he is given this advice by some wise person. Perhaps this is his first lesson in schoolunfortunately he would not learn this in our modern schools. “Receive my words (sayings).” The sayings of God are to be received. His commandments are to be hidden or stored up. Store them up with your valuables. I know a man who goes to his safety deposit box regularly each week. He goes to count what he has stored there. He loves to go where his wealth is. He has stored up some stocks and bonds, and he just loves to go and look them over. I know a lady who owns precious jewelry. She loves to take it out often and admire it. She enjoys just looking at it. She keeps it stored up. That is the way the Word of God should be stored up, hidden, laid up. “Hide my comandments with thee.”

Proverbs 2:2

“Incline thine ear"keep your ear open. Something is to enter the head through the ear gate, but its final destination is the heart. When the Word of God gets into the heart, it brings understanding. He still is not through with this injunction, this urging, this challenge.

Proverbs 2:3

The apostle Peter said it this way: “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1Pe_2:2). Have you ever watched a little baby when his mamma is fixing the bottle? He wiggles everything he hashis hands, his mouth, and his feetin anticipation. I tell you, he desires the milk in his bottle. The child of God should be that way about the milk of the Word of God. This is one of the things I have noted about the spiritual movement in our day.

Where it is present, you see a renewed interest in the Word of God. I notice many young people today carrying notebooks and Bibles, and they take notes on everything. I speak around the country in many places, and I can tell if there is a real moving of the spirit of God. It is evidenced by this desire for the Word of God. “If thou criest after knowledge"and remember that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. “Liftest up thy voice.” If students want to have a protest movement in college, I would like to see this kind of protest movement carried on: “We want understanding!” This, you see, is advice for the young man: “Lift up thy voice for understanding.”

Proverbs 2:4

Out here in the desert of California there are quite a few silver mines. Stories are told about the early days when men came all the way across the country for the silver. Silver was found in the area of Death Valley, and many a man died there while trying to get to the silver. That is why it was named Death Valley. Even after the men got to the silver, they had to make all kinds of sacrifices to market it. That is the way we should go after knowledge, knowledge of the Word of God. Seek her as silver, just as if you were out mining, looking for something very valuable.

Proverbs 2:5

This is talking about something that is more than devotional reading, I really don’t believe in devotional reading, because I know individuals and families who have been doing that kind of reading for years, and they are as ignorant of the Bible as the goat grazing on the hillside. You cannot learn the Word of God by getting in a pious frame of mind and then reading a few verses of Scripture. The way to get it is to lay it up, to incline your ear, to apply your heart, to cry after it, to lift up your voice, to seek it as silver, to search for it as if it were a hidden treasure. When you go at it like that, you will learn something. You will understand what is “the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.” I used to teach Bible when we had a Bible Institute here in Southern California, and I had several hundred students. It was always amusing to me to hear the very pious students on the morning before an exam say, “Dr. McGee, we’re not prepared for the exam today. We had a prayer meeting last night.” I would ask them, “What did you pray about?” They would tell how they prayed for China or Africa or some far-off place. I would answer, “You know, the most important thing in the world for you last night was not to pray.” They would look at me in amazement"We’re not to pray?” I said, “Right. There is a time to study.” Then I would show them Proverbs 2 and tell them, “Last night was the time for you to do the digging, the searching it out.

There is nothing here about a prayer meeting.” They were in school to learn the Word of God. I never excused them from an exam on the pretext that they had a prayer meeting instead of study time. There were others who had been brought up on devotional reading. They would read a few verses and then put the Bible under their pillows. I used to tell them, “You can’t learn the kings of Israel and Judah by sticking your Bible under your pillow and expecting that during the night the knowledge will come up through the duck feathers into your brain! You cannot learn the Word of God that way!” I remember in seminary we were assigned a certain theology book. It was a boring bookcertainly not like a mystery story. We had a difficult test coming up, and one of my classmates complained to the professor, “Doctor, this is the driest book I’ve ever read!” The professor’s answer was, “Then dampen it with a little sweat from your brow.” There is no hocus-pocus way of learning the Word of God. There is no easy, pious way of learning it. There is no substitute for just digging it out. And it doesn’t require a high I.Q. Notice the next verse:

Proverbs 2:6

If you want wisdom, ask Him for it. “…Eye hath not seen, not ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Then how are we to know them? “But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (1Co_2:9-10). They are revealed to us by the spirit of God. He is here today to be our Teacher. When I was a young Christian, one of the most wonderful things I learned was this truth that the spirit of God would open up the things of God to me. This is the reason that some folk who don’t have a Ph.D. or a Th.D. degree have a knowledge of the Word of God which others do not have. When I was a young preacher in Nashville, Tennessee, a 6:00 A.M. Radio program was made available to the ministers in town. None of the other ministers wanted it, but I was young and single, so I didn’t mind getting up at that hour. I tried to teach the Word of God, but nobody seemed to be interested in it except one person. She was a black lady who would pass my church every morning. Sometimes I would be out there changing the bulletin board as she would come by on her way to work.

She would say, “Dr. McGee, I heard you this morning,” and she would stand and discuss with me those things that had been on the program. She had real spiritual discernment. She told me that she only finished grade school, but I am here to tell you that that wonderful, black Christian lady knew more theology than the average Christian of any church in that city with whom I had come in contact. She knew how to discuss the Word of God. She had a Bible, and the Lord gave her wisdom.

I have never seen a Bible more worn than the one she carried. She used it. She read it. And she understood it, because she was willing to let the spirit of God be her Teacher. “The LORD giveth wisdom.” Dr. Harry A. Ironside made a statement years ago: “It is to be feared that even among those who hold and value much precious truth, diligent Bible study is on the wane.;; I am afraid this is still true, although at the time I am writing, there is a renewed interest in Bible study. “For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.” How can we hear Him speaking? As I so often say, the Bible is the Word of God. He speaks to us by means of this Book.

Proverbs 2:7

Many Christians are out in the fog today; they wonder where to turn. It is obvious that the problem is that they are so far from the Word of God. The Book gives us what He is saying. The Word of God is like a foghorn. It “preserveth the way of his saints.” That is what He will do, and He will not do it haphazardly. You must come to the Word of God.

Proverbs 2:9

It is sad to see so many men in public office today, guiding the destiny of nations, who are not being guided by the Lord. The Lord wants to guide them. Oh, if only they would go to Him for wisdom! For the man who has a deep-down desire to live in the power of the truth revealed in the Word of God, God will be a “buckler.” He will be a defense for His own, keeping them safely as they tread the paths of judgment, preserving their way. Sometimes folk write me to say, “I see that you told the truth.” I like that, but that is not really the important thing. What is important is that the truth hold me. There is a big difference between those two. We are told that in the last days there will be vain talkers and deceivers. I don’t want to speak with great, swelling words. I don’t want to boast of a great knowledge of prophecy or dispensational teaching or ecclesiastical truth or philosophy or psychology. We have too much of that around already. What we need are people who “understand righteousness, and judgment, and equity; yea, every good path.”

Proverbs 2:10

THE YOUNG MAN’S ENEMIESWhen wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant unto thy soul” you won’t be deceived so easily. You won’t be taken in if you stay close to the Word of God.

Proverbs 2:13

My prayer from the very beginning of my ministry has been: “Lord, don’t let me be taken in by evil men!” They are all around us, friend. We are going to learn here in the Book of Proverbs that the child of God has two enemies: the “evil man” and the “strange woman.” As the young man starts out in life he is warned of the evil man. Associating with him is always a danger for a young man. After my father died, when I was sixteen years old, I went to Detroit, Michigan, to work for Cadillac. I got into the wrong crowd in those bootleg days. We would go over into Windsor, Canada, every Saturday night, and I was introduced to a new world. It was with evil men. After a few weeks of that (and I was under conviction day and night), I got homesick and went back home. There a minister explained to me how I could have peace with God and be justified by faith. But I shall never forget the evil man. The young man should beware of him. Then there is someone else the young man is warned about. She is the “strange woman.” A better translation is the stranger woman.

Proverbs 2:16

Who is the strange woman? In Israel, God had made a law that no Israelite woman was to play the prostitute. I am confident that if any woman did that, she was automatically put outside the bounds of Israel, and she was classed with sinnersand later with publicans. The stranger was the Gentile who came in. She recognized that there would be a place for her to ply her trade. So the “strange woman” would be a foreigner, the stranger, who came into Israel to practice prostitution. The young man is warned about her. He is told what might happen to him. “None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the paths of life.” They will lose their health. An elder in a church back East told me that he almost wrecked his life with just one escapade. He said, “I went out on the town one night with the boys, and that one night I picked up a venereal disease. Back in those days it took years to get rid of the result of that. It almost wrecked my life.” God warns against that. In our contemporary culture when sex without marriage is accepted behavior, we are finding that venereal disease is reaching epidemic proportions. When I was a young fellow, I belonged to an organization whose leader was a very fine doctor. He called in a group of us fellows because he saw that we were doing a great deal of running around. He said he just wanted to have a friendly talk with us. Well, he scared the daylights out of me. People today say that we don’t want to frighten our young people. Well, I thank God for what the doctor told us and for the fact that he did scare us. That is exactly what the writer here in Proverbs is doing. He warns the young man about the evil man and the strange woman.