judgment. So that when we read a verse in Proverbs, and I think I said the same thing when we talked about the book of Psalms, we just read a Psalm, we can’t need to read the Psalm before it and the Psalm after it, because sometimes, I think most of the time actually, a good reason that those three psalms come in a there’s row in the order that they were placed next to each other. And the same thing is very often true, in the book of Proverbs. So we look for context. We look at the verses around it and sometimes we will say I see any connection and don’t sometimes there may be no connection. Sometimes it may be simply that the connection is one that been transparent 3,000 years ago but because of would’ve the difference in our cultures and our way of understanding things, or frankly even in our translations, the connection just obvious at all to us. But sometimes it isn’t will be very clear and its always worth pondering and thinking about. Better to assume that there is a connection until you have to conclude that there one isn’t than to just say, this proverb stands on own, and I can ignore everything “Well it’s else around So we talk about context as part of understanding. As part of our it.” trying to understand that we just look at the parallelism or the imagery or don’t unpack the story but we look at the other verses around, see if they give us any help. And we look at all the other verses on the same topic to see how they might help us. Let me mention that, I want to look at one Proverb in particular, I said at the end, of this talk. But before I do that, there is one other question, all this conversation has probably sounded pretty non-theological. Like we really are just reading secular wisdom and all we have to do is run it through the right interpretive process, and come out with the right answer. We do have to do we’ll that as we said, as verse, chapter one verse seven says and as reiterated the end of chapter nine, in the fear of the Lord or else we may come away with some intellectual understanding of the But our ability to actually use proverb’s meaning. it and appropriate it for it to become part of our lives would be very seriously hampered if not eliminated, unless we have an attitude of obedience and
judgment. So that when we read a verse in Proverbs, and I think I said the same thing when we talked about the book of Psalms, we can’t just read a Psalm, we need to read the Psalm before it and the Psalm after it, because sometimes, I think most of the time actually, there’s a good reason that those three psalms come in a row in the order that they were placed next to each other. And the same thing is very often true, in the book of Proverbs. So we look for context. We look at the verses around it and sometimes we will say I don’t see any connection and sometimes there may be no connection. Sometimes it may be simply that the connection is one that would’ve been transparent 3,000 years ago but because of the difference in our cultures and our way of understanding things, or frankly even in our translations, the connection just isn’t obvious at all to us. But sometimes it will be very clear and its always worth pondering and thinking about. Better to assume that there is a connection until you have to conclude that there isn’t one than to just say, “Well this proverb stands on it’s own, and I can ignore everything else around it.” So we talk about context as part of understanding. As part of our trying to understand that we don’t just look at the parallelism or the imagery or unpack the story but we look at the other verses around, see if they give us any help. And we look at all the other verses on the same topic to see how they might help us. Let me mention that, I want to look at one Proverb in particular, I said at the end, of this talk. But before I do that, there is one other question, all this conversation has probably sounded pretty non-theological. Like we really are just reading secular wisdom and all we have to do is run it through the right interpretive process, and we’ll come out with the right answer. We do have to do that as we said, as verse, chapter one verse seven says and as reiterated the end of chapter nine, in the fear of the Lord or else we may come away with some intellectual understanding of the proverb’s meaning. But our ability to actually use it and appropriate it for it to become part of our lives would be very seriously hampered if not eliminated, unless we have an attitude of obedience and