Proverbs 1:8 Commentary and Bible Study

This does not mean necessarily that what your father and your mother say is always right and must be followed life-long. Your father and your mother may have got their lives totally wrong; they may not have ever given you an ounce of worthwhile instruction. On the other hand they may have done. This is not the meaning. The meaning here is clearly this: that to be wise we are dependent upon the proven knowledge and principles of the past, whether it was my particular father or my particular mother is not relevant. Every succeeding generation must learn from the previous generation, must owe a great deal to it, and must take the things which are established and proven and learn from them and respect them. That is the principle. If we are totally new and totally novel, well we are bound to be wrong and for this obvious reason: human nature does not change. The moral principles of the universe do not change – love, hate, success and failure – none of these things change. And if like Freud and his friends we say all my thinking is going to owe nothing to the past, we become fools and all our theories and ideas and our whole way of thinking becomes completely idiotic because the world has been going on for centuries and things do not change. There is a great store of experience and understanding and learning and if we would be wise, we will have a tremendous respect for the past, we will have a great interest in biographies of people who were wise, who handled things well, who produced fruit, because the things which have been established in the past, those unchanging things are the foundation we shall build on.