Proverbs 1:6 Commentary and Bible Study

Also, of course, it serves to understand a proverb and the interpretation. The word translated 'interpretation' literally means 'the figure’ or 'the picture'; to understand the picture. Interpretation is quite accurate but picture is more helpful because it tells you what to expect and the proverbs are very largely picture language. ‘The words of the wise and their dark sayings’, or deep sayings. The word translated dark has to do with the deep sea – it could be dark, it could be deep. Either way it means exactly the same really as you think about it.The first six verses have given us great promises that this area of wisdom can be ours as the result of studying this book. Now let us get this absolutely clear. You may say, ‘You mean to say that by studying a small book, just a tiny fraction of the word of God, this book of disconnected sayings, will give me all these things?’ And the answer is, ‘Yes, it will.’ This book is divinely designed. It is like a person who has serious headaches, and goes to hospital and the next thing they know they are being hung up in a kind of harness which looks as though it was designed for a horse and weights being suspended on their feet. And if they are uninitiated they will ask how in the world can this piece of apparatus help my headaches? You see, if you do not know the rationale and how it is supposed to be doing something for the spinal cord and straightening everything out and stopping things touching, if you cannot imagine these things, well then you will say, ‘Nobody is going to tell me that a cruel piece of apparatus like that could affect my headaches.’ And it is exactly the same. We may not understand how this book of Proverbs works. But this is a kind of therapy. It is specially constructed language to provoke our minds and to train us and stimulate us to bring out these qualities which it promises - divinely designed therapy for the mind to make us think and to get us going so that we learn to be wise. That is what it is about.