Proverbs 8:1 Commentary and Bible Study

Wisdom was defined for us in chapter 3 as spiritual shrewdness, cunning in a good sense, insight, the capacity to discern and discriminate between different factors. What is life? What is man? Who is God? Is there a possibility of knowing him? What are his standards? How do we explain human nature? Can we see past all the false promises of this present age? Can we tell when the world is lying to us? This is wisdom in the book of God.The subject has not changed between chapter 7 and chapter 8. Chapter 7 was the illustration of the adulteress seducing a simple, open, young man with no shrewdness. She deceived him. She was artificial. All her overtures and her affections were a playact. She represents this present world, the great sin trap, trying to seduce us with all its charms, but not really interested in us. Chapter 8 is constructed to be a tremendous contrast and is about genuineness. God feels for you. This is the genuineness of God. He wants to make you wise. He wants to enable you to see reality and to be safe. Wisdom is almost calling, inviting us to receive her, and of course, somebody who is going to have wisdom is someone who is going to be ready to listen at the crossroads of life, when there are great decisions to be taken. A person who never says, 'I'm about to do something very significant; the guidance of the Lord is what I want', is someone who will never get wisdom. ‘Doth not wisdom cry?’ Wisdom here is personified, as someone crying out to influence us. It is not essentially a picture of Christ. It is a picture of this spiritual insight, shrewdness and understanding which comes to us when we seek and find the Lord, but wisdom is from Christ and at the end of the day in an indirect sense it is Christ himself, because everything we have, all insight that we need, must come from him. Wisdom is very appealing. ‘Doth not wisdom cry?’ Of course it does – that is the force of the passage. It challenges us and appeals to us constantly in the sense that it warns us. This is a message that is all through life, in a sense on, is on our tail. It is not something which only intellectuals could find, or certain kinds of people who have the patience and the capacity to study. It is something which even from childhood is presenting itself to us: 'Come, this is the sensible way, this is the shrewd way, this is the proper way.' We are endowed with conscience. We know from childhood that many of the things we do are wrong and will injure us and we are uncomfortable about them. Nevertheless, so often we push conscience aside and we go after the sins that are around us in the world. This is why the judgement of God will be so sore upon us if we die unbelieving, never having turned to God. The Lord will say: 'I pressed these things upon you constantly from the dawning of consciousness, right through life. I challenged you, even hounded you, through your conscience. I, bombarded you with messages, whether from preachers, from Scripture, or from friends. We are not here preaching to people about something which is difficult, something which is remote, something which it is not reasonable to expect people to reach or discover. This is something which presses itself upon every one of us.