Why Wisdom Literature?
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.
Proverbs 4:7
Because, as David Gibson (Living Life Backwards, Crossway, 2017) often remarks “We all love Romans but we live in Ecclesiastes.”
God gave us the wisdom literature to help us see how to live in the world that he has made. Because often our decisions are not black and white. Who do you marry? Where do you live? What work do you too?
There are moral boundaries to the answers to those questions. You are not to be unequally yoked, should live in a place where you can serve God well, and may not work as a prostitute or a thief, for example.
But within those bounds of law, there is wisdom.
What is right in this situation? What choice lends itself to future flourishing? What way should I go to walk more closely with God?
God hasn’t left us to wonder or wander, he has shown us a way.
Why Gospel Wise?
Well, I confess it’s partly because I had the domain already.
But mostly, because the wisdom literature is given to us so that we can see what the Gospel of Jesus Christ looks like in a messy world. The lesser-known parts of the Bible like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are not abstracted from that Good News, but expressions of it. Yes, you are saved by grace through faith, and this not of your own doing, as Paul so beautifully expounds in Ephesians.
But what does that look like at 11am on Tuesday morning when your boss need a report on the quarterly KPIs?
What does it look like on a rainy Saturday when the children are climbing up the walls?
When you’re sick? Tired or bursting with energy? On top of the world or the bottom of deep depression?
At a risk of overstating the case, God gave us sixty-six books and only four of them are gospels. Yet gospel is woven in every page. Including throughout Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. Books where all the messiness of real life is honestly presented on every page.
We need wisdom more than ever, because our world is way out of whack.
And this is my small way of helping us recover it.
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