Thoughts and Stories

This is several days late, but it is the first of several little snippets of reflection gained from what I read each day. Feel free to comment on what you think.

As I read through the book of proverbs I am struck by the underlying irony of it. First, that wisdom desperately tries to teach those simple people the proper way and laughs when they fail. Proverbs says that wisdom was the first thing created by God and personifies it as a woman (proverbs 8 I believe). There is a distinct personality to wisdom that I think is much more in-depth than we would believe. The second irony is that proverbs describes two paths the path of the wise (the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom) and the path of the fool (the fool scorns knowledge and instruction). Throughout Proverbs these two paths have nothing in common despite a mutual hostility. Viewing my own life and friends through this lens has some interesting results, but more on that at another time. The final irony of Proverbs is how the result of our actions is counterintuitive. Most people view righteousness and sin as an action that has an eventual payment and this is true. Christians hope in Jesus Christ for forgiveness of sins and resurrection when Christ returns, but the temporal results of our actions are often contained in the actions themselves. In Proverbs 1 wisdom says that she laughs when we fail and that we will eat the fruit of our own actions when we fail to listen to her. How might Christians act differently to sin if they realized that the punishment of the sin is the sin itself? Whatever pleasure is to be gained is the punishment for acting contrary to God. That is the crux of proverbs and why we, as Christians, need not to just be forgiven but to live in a way that is God honoring.