Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job

and all these books are addressing the same set of questions

What kind of world are we living in

and what does it look like to live well in this world?

so how to be good at life?

Yeah! So each of these books tackles these questions from a unique perspective

and it's important to understand all of them to get a fully biblical perspective on the good life

So as a thought experiment, you could actually imagine each of these books as a person

So Proverbs would be like this brilliant young teacher

and Ecclesiastes the sharp middle-aged critic

and Job would be the weathered old man who seen a lot in his day

We're gonna start by meeting the book of Proverbs the brilliant teacher

And she's not just smart she's smart about everything, work, relationships, sex, spirituality

She has incredible insights things you would see on your own

Yeah! She would be the perfect friend have around when you need really specific advice

So what makes her so smart?

Well! Proverbs can see things that most people don't see

She believes that there is an invisible creative force in the universe that can guide people and how they should live

You can't see it just like you can't see the gravity but it affects everything that we do

So what's this force?

In Hebrew, it's called chokma and it's usually gets translated into English as a wisdom

It's an attribute of God that God used to create the world

and hokmah has been woven into the fabric of thing and how they work

So wherever people are making good or just or wise decisions they are tapping into chokma

and whenever someone is making a bad decision they're working against chokma

Right! Or as it says in Proverbs chapter one

the waywardness of fools will destroy them but the one who listens to wisdom lives in security

So it's like a moral law of the universe

Yeah! It's a cause-effect pattern and no one can escape

and Proverbs personifies all of this as a woman

Yeah! Lady wisdom

Right! She runs around the earth calling out making herself available to anyone who's willing to listen to her and to learn

which leads to the second thing Proverbs believes that anyone can access

and interact with wisdom and use it to make the beautiful life for yourself or others

you can create with it like a designer

Yes, in fact, chokma in hebrew isn't simply intellectual knowledge

The word is also used to describe the skilled artisan who excels at their craft like woodworking or stonemason

so you show you possess chokma when you put it to work and develop the skill of making a Good Life

OK! That makes sense. So let's do this. Let's go find some wisdom

Before you do, Proverbs has one more really important thing to consider

chokma isn't some impersonal force it's an attribute of God himself

and so in Hebrew thought, your journey to becoming wise has to begin with what Proverbs called the Fear of the Lord

It's this healthy respect for God's definition of good and evil

and true wisdom means learning those boundary lines and not crossing them

Now all those ideas you just unpacked are in chapters one through nine in Proverbs

but when I think of the book of Proverbs, I think of the collection of sayings

the Proverbs themselves. Tell me about those

Yeah! Those are what you find in chapters ten onto the end of the book

it's a collection of hundreds and hundreds of Proverbs about any and all aspects of life

and chokma gets applied to them resulting in this wise guidance

to help you find a path toward success and no matter what you do

if I designed my life with these sayings, life is gonna be good

Yeah! or if proverbs puts it, it'll give health to your bones, prosperity, a long rich life

which is a really big claim

but you can see how it's often the case

wise people, they tend to do better, things usually work out well for them in life

and so that is the promise and the wisdom of the book of Proverbs

The book of Proverbs is really beautiful but if we take a step back

some people would argue it's a little too simplistic

cause sometimes horrible things happened to really wise people

and sometimes foolish people get rewarded

it doesn't always work the way we think it should work

that's right which is why we need to go and listen to our next wise friend ecclesiastes the critic

because he's wrestled with that very problem

and he's going to push us further in our journey to find the Good Life

Hey guys! Thank you for watching the Bible project

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looking at its literary structure, the themes of that book kind of like the one you just watched on Proverbs

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