Proverbs 3b

3: 13-20.            Happy is the man who finds wisdom,

                                           and the man who gets understanding,

for the gain from it is better than gain from silver

                                            and its profit better than gold.

She is more precious than jewels,

                                           and nothing you desire can compare with her.

Long life is in her right hand;

                                           in her left hand are riches and honor.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness,

                                           and all her paths are peace.

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;

                                           those who hold her fast are called happy.

The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;

                                           by understanding he established the heavens;

by his knowledge the deeps broke forth,

                                            and the clouds drop down the dew.

There is no address at the beginning, such as ‘My child’, so this is not a new section, rather it is a continuation of the first 12 verses of Chapter 3. In fact, we will discover that Chapters 1-9 are a literary unit that unfolds ideas that appear early and are repeated often. Later on, we will see that Chapter 10 has a new heading in the original Hebrew that reads, “The Proverbs of Solomon,” which is an introduction to a new section. Still, the topics of wisdom and knowledge still pop up regularly throughout the whole book; as they do every day of our lives.

This passage for today takes us to a new level of understanding wisdom and God. The key phrase is “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth” (v. 19). That’s quite a claim, and it is revisited later in this section, as well as in other apocryphal books (Wisdom 6:22, Sirach 16:24). Some scholars argue, and I agree, that there is a direct conceptual line of thought between personified Wisdom in the Old Testament and the personified Word in the New Testament, the latter found primarily in the Gospel According to John. It takes the whole Bible to understand a verse.  

The connection with Creation, first of all, is that God created by speaking not by doing. For example, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Genesis 1:3-5). So, the Creator God knew what to say (by Wisdom) and spoke the universe into being (by the Word).

Creator God also brought order to his creation (“And God saw that it was good”) by establishing categories (Day, Night, morning, evening, the waters above, the waters below, the Sky, dry land, Earth and Sea). By Wisdom, God brought order out of chaos simply by speaking his Word. Categories name things and establish connections so that all is not confusion. This was something God could be satisfied with and human beings could navigate. Have you ever tried to play a game where suddenly the players change, a different shape of ball is used, and the rules change so that minute by minute you don’t know what to do? Does life seem like that to you?  

Then God spoke again and brought forth life: vegetation, birds, beasts, and humans. God spoke and created a garden, and in that garden was the tree of life. Symbols of the tree of life were common among most of Israel’s neighbors, usually a tree that links this realm to God’s realm.[1] It is, as well, a theme that runs through the Bible from beginning to end (Genesis 2:9, 3:22-24; Proverbs 3:18, 11:30, 13:12, 15:4; Revelation 22:2, 24:14,19).

The ancient Hebrews were concerned with order and immortality; these themes also appear in the apocryphal literature that sought hope in dark times (Wisdom 3:11; II Esdras 2:12, 8:52; IV Maccabees 18:16). Why? The people of those times feared chaos, they sought after the comfort of established order (as long as it wasn’t oppressive), and they had hope for eternal life with God. The tension is that these things are a gift from God, but they can be lost when human sin brings chaos, disturbs the established order, and leads people to untimely and unhopeful deaths, or worse yet, leads people to cause such untimely and unhopeful deaths.

Now, let’s finish today with the question of the connection between Wisdom, Creation, Proverbs, and the Gospel According to John. Here is how that gospel begins:

“In the beginning….” Where have we heard that before? Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning….” So the author of this gospel intends to link his Jesus story with the Creation story. Any Hebrew reading it would immediately make the connection.

“…was the Word…” This link is with Proverbs, and other apocryphal literature that claims that Wisdom was with God during Creation. In Greek, ‘the Word’ is Logos, and it certainly means the kind of Wisdom that is foundational to order in the created universe. That was a concept common to Greek philosophy of the time. The author contextualizes his story so that Greeks who read it will understand that Jesus is equivalent to the foundational Wisdom of the Cosmos.   

“…and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Genesis, God speaks a Word and creation obeys. In Proverbs, God created the world through Wisdom. In the Gospel According to John, the Word was with God in the beginning, and the Word was God. See the progression?

“…He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. The unity between the Word and God is a part of what we now call the unity of the Trinity. God the Father, Jesus the Word, and the Holy Spirit.

“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” Now the link is made to the tree of life. In this gospel, the author will present Jesus’ death on a cross, which is elsewhere called a ‘tree’. “And we are witnesses to all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree…” (Acts 10:39).

Jesus’ resurrection to life is a light to all people, the chance for people to connect to God and obtain immortality. And that is why we celebrate Jesus’ birth; even though we don’t know the real day of his birth, we do know the real Savior.

[1] Craig Keener and John Walton, eds. Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, (2019). Page 1036.