Proverbs – Already Not Yet

Jeff Robinson: God’s book of wisdom contrasts the life of the foolish man with the life of the wise man. It shows us how life works best in a fallen world. And talk is deeply important in recognizing which of those two paths we’re walking. Paul Tripp even argues that Proverbs is most fundamentally a treatise on talk. He summarizes Proverbs’ teaching on talk this way: “words give life; words bring death—you choose.” Every utterance that escapes our lips matters, which means you’ve never spoken a neutral word in your life. Our words are moving either in a direction of life or death. If our words are moving in a life direction, they will be words of encouragement, hope, love, peace, unity, instruction, wisdom, and correction. But the death direction brings forth words of anger, malice, slander, jealousy, gossip, division, contempt, racism, violence, judgment, and condemnation. We don’t give much thought to our talk in mundane times, yet that’s where we tend

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Tim Challies: In recent days the topic of social justice has received much attention within the church and without. As Christians we are committed to living according to God’s Word, and so we have rightly been turning to the Bible to learn how it would guide us. We have been scouring its pages to see what it says about matters of justice. That is well and good, but I have become convinced that even as we’ve done this, we may have overlooked one important resource. In fact, we may have overlooked the one book that is explicitly and specifically intended to give us wisdom for this very topic. We may have skipped over the best place to begin when learning about social justice. The book of Proverbs is about training the mind in order to live a God-honoring life, for right living follows right thinking. It exists so the reader can “know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight”