Papa’s Pearls #2 – My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.
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Here are the comments on this discussion
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Chris Harris These are the opening verses of Proverbs 2. I would really like to post the entire chapter but it is too long to fit into a single post. My questions here are…What is wisdom?What is understanding?Those two words are recurring themes throughout the Book of Proverbs. What do they mean? How do we acquire them? How do we apply them to our lives or how do they apply to our lives? Let the discussion begin!!!!February 8 at 12:13am ·
Stephanie Blackmon Harris hi, i wrote a note below…February 8 at 2:32am ·
Tom Boley I believe the discussion should begin with the understanding of the fear of the Lord. All through this wonderful book you will find this phrase, which is misunderstood. It does NOT mean to Fear the Lord as in AHHHHH! I’m scared!!! It means to abhor evil; to despise it. Solomon ( as Paul did, Peter did and Jesus did) tells us to run from evil to get it out of our lives. Once we do this ( we can never get sin all out of us, not on this earth) we can understand the knowledge of God which is where His mercy, Grace and Love for us resides. If we live our lives in this manner, then we are hurting no one, we are loving everyone, we become servants with the desire to serve everyone and in turn, we are served by doing so! God is good is he not!! Jesus tells us to love God with all our heart and mind and to love our neighbor as ourself; and if we do this then everything else will be taken care of. What is wisdom? Love! What is understanding? Love! What is God? LOVE!!! Man, I am so full of it!! ( Love, I mean!)February 8 at 8:34am ·
Chris Harris Well said Tom. Abhor evil. Despise evil. There is a lot of life application truth here. I want to dig a little deeper into what you said but I have to go to work. Thanks for joining in on the discussion. I am excited about what everyone else has to say.February 8 at 9:24am ·
Crystal Harris I have bunches to say about this one, but no time yet… so I’ve been making little notes here and there as they come to me. Hopefully by the time I have the chance to sit down and write them all out, I can say it in a way that makes sense. LOL 🙂
Our discussion last night and this has really gotten me thinking though.February 8 at 3:34pm ·
Crystal Harris So I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this and the discussion we had last night. My brain keeps linking the two, so we’ll run with that for a while. Hopefully you can keep up. Haha. First off, I’m totally with Uncle Tom in his understanding of the fear of the Lord and what that means. I pulled out my Strong’s concordance and the Hebrew word used there (it also appears in the other places in Proverbs that reference “the fear of the Lord”) is “yirah”, and it means “reverence”. So to me, when I think of passages like this, I think fall on my face out of pure worship and reverence to His power and holiness rather than scared fear as the English language would describe it.
I love how CS Lewis explained it… “wonder and a certain shrinking” That’s exactly it to me. You feel such wonder and awe yet so incredibly inadequate in His perfection that you simply cannot stand your own unworthiness in the presence of His holiness. And that ties into the passage in Proverbs 8 that Tom also mentioned. – “To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.” If you fear Him… revere Him, respect his power and righteousness… you hate evil. Because evil CANNOT live in His presence.
I keep thinking of the point you made last night, dad, (and I hope you don’t mind my bringing it here) when you said that the law shows us God’s wrath but the cross shows us His love. I challenged you on whether the law truly shows His wrath, or does it show our sin and natural consequences for it (death). Here’s why I said that. From day one, God’s desire was only to have perfect fellowship with His creation (us). When evil and sin entered the picture, that fellowship was broken, because it goes against His very nature and cannot be in His presence. So in order to have fellowship with His people, He gave the law. It showed Israel how to live according to His will and how to achieve righteousness. Of course we all know how that worked out… no man could attain righteousness through the law because no man could keep it perfectly. The law showed man’s total depravity and need for Messiah. Jesus fulfilled the law and became our righteousness so through Him we can again have that perfect fellowship with the Father. I don’t see God’s wrath as applied to people. He has wrath for evil and sin. I believe it pained Him then and pains Him now when people break His law and He takes no pleasure when His own creation, which he desperately loves, chases after, and wants fellowship with, feels the effects of His wrath. But sin = death. It HAS to, because sin absolutely cannot live in His presence. So if that makes ANY sense at all, LOL, I think the law is just another showing of His love… because it gave a way for His people to have that fellowship with Him. The law was total love, just like the cross. The wrath is simply the natural consequence for evil.
We have no reason to fear Him or His wrath in the *scared* sense, because His wrath is for evil, and in fearing Him, we also hate evil. 1 John 4 talks about fear and love… how there is no fear in love and perfect love drives away fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. The punishment was poured out on Christ. There’s *nothing* in His character to be afraid of if we are His.
Now back to the Papa’s Pearl #2… the way we get that fear/reverence is to learn His true character. You can’t truly know Him without knowing His character, and it’s revealed to us through his words and His commands. It’s so valuable that we’re told to choose His instruction rather than silver, his knowledge rather than gold and that His wisdom is more precious than rubies (Prov 8:10-11). It’s *the* most important thing, this learning His character. And when we do, the fear/reverence kicks in… we shrink under the weight of His massive power and hate the evil that lurks in us because it goes against His nature and righteousness. It’s in that discovering His character and fearing/revering Him that we are led to sorrow for hurting His heart, and in that Godly sorrow, we are drawn to repentance and turning away from that evil we’ve come to hate.
Those are my thoughts, err, novel. 😛 Hopefully they make sense to someone other than me. :)February 8 at 7:41pm ·
Tom Boley very good!! you are spot on! As christians we should not fear his wrath. We will not see His wrath, we see his chastening, because the scripture says that God chastens whom He loves. I also agree with you on another point; I believe it pains God greatly when He pours His wrath out. I believe in the Day of Judgement He will shed tears when souls are cast in the lake of fire. He did not create hell for humans, that is for satan and his angels. The closer we walk with Him, the more we hate the evil that is in us and around us.February 8 at 9:24pm ·
Chris Harris Crystal those are all excellent points… especially the ones about God law and His wrath. There is so much in your post that I don’t have time tonight to digest it all. But of this I am quite sure, I agree with Tom…. Spot on! Thanks.February 8 at 9:28pm ·
Papa's Pearls 