3 Principles for Reading Proverbs
One of the most beloved books of the Bible is the book of Proverbs. Though I have never claimed to be a prophet, I can guess with a certain degree of accuracy that one out of your top five favorite verses in the Bible comes from Proverbs. As one who grew up in church, some of the earliest verses I learned to memorize were from Proverbs. I still remember singing, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and He shall direct your path” (Proverbs 3:5).
I think that what makes this book so popular is that it is radically practical. Whereas we have to think deeply about what Paul’s epistle to the Romans has to do with our daily lives, Proverbs lends itself to immediate application. This book talks about sex, money, marriage, business, and parenting in a very rubber-meets-the-road fashion. It is this fact that makes Proverbs so popular.
However, despite its popularity and immediate applicability, the book of Proverbs is also very easy to misunderstand. Given our distance from the Hebrew culture in which the Proverbs were originally written and our tendency to overlook the genre of Bible books, we can come away from reading this book with unhelpful and harmful conclusions. A basic rule of hermeneutics is that to fully understand a book, you must consider why it was written and what rules/principles govern its genre.
In this article, I want to give you three broad principles for reading Proverbs that will help you understand it better:
1. Proverbs are proverbs: The first thing you must know about the book of proverbs is that it contains proverbs. Are you scratching your head? You’re probably thinking, “Why is he stating the obvious?” Well, it is important to state this obvious fact so that we can answer this simple question: What is a proverb? A proverb is a short pithy saying in general use, stating a general truth or piece of advice.
Read the above definition closely and slowly. You can see that there is repetitive stress on the word “general”. The point is that proverbs are broad principles about how life generally works, they are NOT laws about how life ALWAYS works. Proverbs are generalizations about how life usually is. They are not laws about how things will turn out all the time. Proverbs teach us that it is generally true that hardworking people succeed and lazy people fail. However, this is not an inviolable law that always works. There are exceptions to this proverb. Sometimes hardworking people fail, and lazy people succeed.
The fact that proverbs are generalizations becomes clear when we think of some of the wise sayings that guide our respective cultures. In Nigeria, for instance, we say, “What an elder can see sitting down a child cannot see standing on his/her toes.” The point of this proverb is that with age comes perception and wisdom. However, while it is generally true that age tends to bring wisdom, it is not always true. That’s why other cultures speak of being “a fool at 40.” It is not always true that older people are wiser; there are exceptions to this proverb. Sometimes, younger people are indeed wiser and deeper than some older people.
When we are dealing with the wise sayings of our cultures, we instinctively understand that they have exceptions. However, when we come to Scripture, we treat the proverbs of the Hebrew culture differently. We wrongly over-spiritualize the text and fail to see that the book of Proverbs contains proverbs. The Hebrews who were the first recipients of this book understood this fact: Proverbs state probable outcomes, not guaranteed outcomes.
Of course, the book of Proverbs doesn’t only contain short, pithy statements about life. It also contains instructions about morality and fearing God (Chapters 1–9). But the majority of the book contains generalizations about how life usually works, not how it always works.
2. Proverbs are NOT Promises: This second point flows from the first. If proverbs are general descriptions of how life usually works, then proverbs are not promises from God! I can’t stress this enough. Here’s an example of what I mean. Proverbs 22:29 says, “Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank.” What this proverb teaches is that skill tends to lead to promotion. We see here that a skillful person, who does excellent work, will rise through the ranks and serves before kings.
But you and I know that this is not always the case. Sometimes because of office politics, nepotism, and other factors, those who are skillful never get a promotion. Quite to the contrary, people with no real ability work their way up to the top through different means. You and I know that many times “the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong…” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).
Dear friends, proverbs are not promises! It is wrong to take Proverbs 22:29 and say that God has promised that every skillful person will stand before kings. Many have taken proverbs and turned them into promises and then been disappointed when “God didn’t come through.” The problem is not with God, the problem is you read a promise into a proverb. You are holding God to fulfill a promise He never made. The point of Proverbs 22:29 is “to make the generalization that excellence in our work generally gets recognized by discerning people and leads to great benefits” (John Piper). It is not to promise promotion or guarantee progress.
Another example that illustrates that proverbs are not promises is Proverbs 10:6: “Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.” Is this a promise that if one is righteous, they will never see violence? No! If that were the case then John the Baptist, Jeremiah, Paul, and all the righteous apostles who suffered violent deaths were really wicked. This proverbs simply means that it is generally true that wickedness tends to attract violence. It is also generally true that righteousness attracts blessings. But there are exceptions to these sayings in our broken world.
In an ideal world, these sayings would always hold. In an ideal world, good would always attract positives and evil would attract negatives. But this is not an ideal world. We live in a broken world laced with sin and quirks because of the fall of humanity in the beginning. In this broken world, the proverbs give us a small picture of how life generally works, but they do not provide us with the full picture. For that, we must look elsewhere.
3. Proverbs are not the full picture of wisdom: To get the full picture of what life is like in this broken world, we must read the other wisdom books of the Bible. Proverbs is not the only book that makes up the Hebrew wisdom literature. There is also Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes. If we truly want to be wise people in this world, we must consider what all the wisdom books have to tell us.
When we open Job, we will find that sometimes righteous people suffer. While Proverbs tends to give the idea that righteous people always succeed, Job shows us that in this broken world, pain comes to those who are faithful to God. Similarly, when we read Ecclesiastes, we find the Teacher constantly lamenting the reality of injustice and meaninglessness in this world. He finds that life “under the sun” doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason. The writer of Ecclesiastes wrestles with the fact that life doesn’t always fit into neat patterns and formulas. He intentionally takes a pessimistic view of life in this world to cause us to yearn for another (more on this soon).
For instance, in Ecclesiastes 8:14, the Teacher says, “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.” If we only read Proverbs, we may live with rose-colored glasses that do not give us a real view of life under the sun. That is why all the Wisdom books balance each other out. We need to know how life generally works (as in proverbs) while also being prepared for the times when it doesn’t seem to be working (as in Job and Ecclesiastes). This is true wisdom!
So, why read and obey Proverbs?
I know that for some people, learning that proverbs are not promises can be disconcerting. Why should we obey the admonitions towards hard work, diligence, and righteousness if they do not guarantee success? Shouldn’t we just live as we please? No! This would be folly!
First of all, remember that Proverbs tells us how things generally work on earth. It is still generally true that hard work brings success. It is still generally true that righteousness brings blessings. It will be very foolish to intentionally put yourself on the path of folly since that almost guarantees failure.
But there is another reason why we should obey Proverbs. As those who believe in and love Jesus, we know that this world is not all there is. We know that as Peter says, “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness (justice) dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). We no longer live for this world alone, but we look ahead to a renewed, ideal world where all we have done in this present world will count for something (2 Corinthians 5:10). We know that we will be rewarded eternally for living wise, obedient lives. We know that while hard work may not guarantee worldly success, God delights in our passionate, sacrificial work done for the good of others and His glory (1 Thessalonians 4:10–12). We know that He will reward us with blessings far beyond what we could ever imagine (and the chief blessing is the gift of His unmediated presence). We obey proverbs because we are looking forward to the ideal world that Christ has promised to set up eternally and we are participating in bringing it into reality by His Spirit. Those who have this hope in themselves purify themselves (1 John 3:3).
We obey the proverbs because they are generally true now, but they are always ultimately true (Mark Dever). Those who are righteous in Christ will indeed be blessed in the presence of the King, not in a temporal earthly sense, but an eternal permanent sense. Because we have come to Him, who is our wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30), obedience is not just functional (what is in it for me), it is relational (I love Him, therefore I obey). Furthermore, success is not just material, it is about pleasing Him (2 Corinthians 5:9).
