“Doth not wisdom cry?” Oh, you have no idea how many tears she has shed.
“She standeth in the top of high places.” Yep, like atop kitchen chairs, crying out for someone to just listen to me.
“She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors.” Those doors people leave wide open when the heat is on? Every drawer and cupboard left ajar as if someone had just ransacked your house? Those doors?
Sorry, this Proverbs thang is now starting to trigger my post traumatic mothering distress. I keep telling everyone I’m in recovery from motherhood, wifedom, work, marriage, life, a few close encounters with the enemy, whatever you want to call it, stick a fork in her, she’s come undone.
I jest a bit. It’s all good because in the process I’ve actually learned to empathize with God Himself. As frustrated and exhausted as I often am from attempting to impart just a tiny bit of wisdom to assorted family members, God has been doing this for thousands of years, times millions of people all over the earth. Stubborn, uncooperative, know it all people.
That is why wisdom cries out in the street. Who will listen?
Proverbs 8 is a very interesting chapter and we begin to see why some people see prophecy in there, a prediction of who Jesus Christ is, of the Lord’s heart for us. I too hear echoes of that throughout this chapter. The metaphor, the analogy is “wisdom,” the value, the significance, why it matters, but also within the poetry of those words we begin to see some things that call Jesus Christ to mind, especially around verse 22-31, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was…..When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth….Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him….”
Jesus Christ is often called Truth, also The Word, and “Truth and The Word” are pretty good synonyms for “wisdom.” John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Or as it says in Proverbs 8:22, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.”
I can see a whole lot lurking within Proverbs 8, a better understanding of who our Lord and Savior is, a tantalizing peek into the nature of the trinity perhaps. “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.”
Myself, I love to explore the harmony and the mystery within that trinitarian relationship, one that exists outside the context of human hierarchies. There are many things in the bible that lead me to that conclusion, that validate and support the concept of the trinity, but the words “by him, brought up with him, daily his delight, and rejoicing always before him,” make me think of harmonious, other- centered, other-worldly love, of the sort that is hard to wrap our brains around, having nothing earthly really to compare it too. Perfect love without fear, hierarchies, power imbalances, authority structures, and of course without the need for a complaint dept in case things go wrong.
As if to seal the prophetic deal, Proverbs 8:35 reminds us, “For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord.”
And as Jesus said, “….I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14:6
See, there's this thing called biology... 
We cannot begin to become wise until we strive to put ourselves in the shoes of others. Until we seek to seek God’s point of point, we cannot be trusted. We cannot even trust ourselves.
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Amen, Tom! We cannot be trusted, we cannot even trust ourselves. Peter is a good example of that, he has no idea he’s going to deny Christ 3 times. He is forgiven, Jesus says “Peter do you love me” 3 times too, but Peter demonstrates how we don’t always know ourselves and exactly how we are going to react in any given situation.
Many of us have a lot of compassion for other people,respect for human life, and would never think to cause an atrocity like this, but threaten our families or attack us, and suddenly all moral bets tend to go out the window.
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Excellent. When I think of Proverbs 8, I also think of the prophecy of John the Baptist: the voice crying in the wilderness. JB had to go into the wilderness and get away from the traps of civilization in order to hear God. Sometimes wisdom is like that, like the Shekinah glory departing from the Temple in Ezekiel. It gets driven out because no one is listening. With Ezekiel, it was the ancient ones embracing the images of their minds instead of the glory of God. Much good thoughts, IB. I’m enjoying this series.
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