Lecture 14: The Story So Far, the Wisdom of Proverbs, and Futility Under the Sun

The lecture, section by section

1. The story so far

   Biblical theology, as Schreiner practices it, follows the Bible's explicit historical storyline and asks each book's canonical contribution, where systematic theology can work atemporally on a doctrine, fed by biblical theology. The review runs quickly: God creates man and woman as his vice regents; they fall; Genesis 3:15 promises triumph through the woman's offspring; the battle of the seeds runs from Cain and Abel onward; Abraham receives land, seed, and blessing; Genesis and Exodus dwell on offspring and liberation; Joshua plants Israel in the land; Judges declines; the covenant with David narrows the promise to a king whose dynasty will last forever; and from Solomon on the nation declines to the northern exile in 722 BC and the southern in 586 BC. The promises stand, and they are not yet fulfilled.

2. What Proverbs contributes

   Proverbs does not advance the storyline; it reflects on what the storyline is for: living under God's lordship, having God as king. Against the idea that Proverbs is secular wisdom, Schreiner insists Israel knew no realm of life separated from God. The theme is announced at both ends of the opening section: the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom, as fundamental here as in Job 28.

3. Planning hearts and directed steps

   The plans of the heart belong to man, and the answer of the tongue is from the LORD; a person's heart plans his way, and the LORD determines his steps. Proverbs celebrates thinking: plan, reflect, consult many advisers on a weighty decision. Yet all that deliberation never unseats the LORD, who directs his people's steps through their own thinking as they seek to please him. On discerning God's will, Schreiner points students to excellent books by J. I. Packer, Bruce Waltke, and Kevin DeYoung.

4. Wisdom bound on like Torah

   Proverbs tells the son to tie wisdom on his hands and bind it on his heart, the very language Israel used for the law, and Psalm 1 shows the wise man meditating on the law of the LORD day and night. In Proverbs 2 wisdom is not a technique for reading situations from the outside; it enters into who you are and constitutes your character, so that the person, not merely the decision, becomes discerning.

5. The tongue of the wise

   The wise speak healing words and feed others with what they say. The fool speaks without thinking, on the creed of total authenticity: I will say whatever I think whenever I feel it, which Proverbs simply calls folly. Where words are many, sin is not far away; Schreiner passes on, with a smile and the caveat that it is no command of the Lord, John Wesley's counsel against conversations that outlast an hour, since idle talk drifts toward gossip.

6. Riches, poverty, and reading the whole book

   Proverbs is intensely practical about money. Often the poor are poor through laziness, and often the diligent prosper, and discipline is largely handed down through families that teach their children to work. But proverbs are principles, not promises: observations about how life usually runs, not universal guarantees. The same book says some grow rich wickedly by working the system, that some are poor because they have been oppressed, that mocking the poor insults their Maker, that a poor man may have more integrity than a rich one, and, in Agur's prayer, asks for neither poverty nor riches, lest stealing dishonor God or plenty forget him. So the method matters: gather everything Proverbs says on a theme, scattered as it is, before teaching it, or the teaching will be simplistic.

7. The king in Proverbs

   Some sayings run so high they almost sound divine: kings who do not sin in their speech, who hate and remove evil, who love goodness, whose heart is unsearchable, before whom the people rightly stand in fear. But the whole book also knows kings who deal in falsehood, work injustice, and mistreat the poor. Once again the reader must take the whole of the book's witness on a subject.

8. Wise observations for those who speak

   The lecture lingers over sayings a pastor needs. The first case sounds right until the other side is heard, a humbling word for theological debate, and Schreiner owns with a laugh that he has published both sides of one famous dispute. Do not visit the neighbor too often, lest he tire of you. Without oxen the manger stays clean, and there are no crops. Do not meddle in a quarrel not your own, the reason he declines every invitation to theological combat on social media, where the medium is too thin for the matter. Laughter on the outside can cover grief on the inside. And Proverbs is unrelenting about vigilance against sexual sin, the field where so many pastors fall.

9. Refuge in death

   With Bruce Waltke, Schreiner finds indications that the author of Proverbs believed in life after death for the righteous: the righteous finds refuge in his death, and the prudent will not experience Sheol. For study he commends Waltke's two-volume commentary, from which he preached through the book, and Derek Kidner's concise little volume, which says things beautifully.

10. Proverbs 8 and the ancient argument

    Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 8: the LORD created me at the beginning of his ways, before his ancient works. Schreiner argues the disputed verb means created here, on the strength of the parallel verbs, formed, brought forth, established, in what is, after all, poetry. The early church fought over the verse: the orthodox resisted created lest Christ be a creature, and the Arians, whose modern heirs are the Jehovah's Witnesses, seized on it to make him one. Both sides, he argues, were wrong in the same way: in its historical context the passage is about personified wisdom, not a direct statement about Christ. Jesus is indeed the wisdom of God and fulfills what the Old Testament says of wisdom, and he is greater than wisdom. On a related question, Schreiner takes the woman of Proverbs 31 to be an actual godly wife, not another personification; the portrait is too specific.

11. Connecting the Testaments without shortcuts

    Asked how to draw legitimate lines from Proverbs to Christ, Schreiner gives two rules. First, always read the Old Testament in its own historical context; interpreters go astray by jumping to Christ so quickly that the Old Testament's own voice is lost, though never arriving at Christ is a danger too. Second, watch how the New Testament itself appropriates the witness, which is not always a one-to-one correspondence. So the earthly riches and blessings of Proverbs are taken up by the New Testament in terms of eternal riches and blessings.

12. Ecclesiastes through its conclusion

    Ecclesiastes, the last book Schreiner preached as a pastor, is often read as despair, and existentialist philosophers have loved it so. He reads it instead through its conclusion, the hermeneutical lens for the whole: fear God and keep his commandments, for God will bring every act to judgment. Critical scholars call that ending a later addition; he is not persuaded, and he notes that even on that theory the book as it stands still reads through its close. He is generally unimpressed with speculative reconstructions of how books were assembled. Qohelet he takes, with a minority, to be Solomon, and he insists the book belongs: its words are words of truth, words of the wise, the Word of God. Everything the book says is said so that readers will reckon with the judgment to come; its message is not that life is absurd, but that God is sovereign and his ways cannot be calculated.

13. Futility under the sun

    The book's key word, long translated vanity, is better rendered futility or meaninglessness: a striving after wind. Twenty-nine times it considers life under the sun, from an earthly standpoint. Work is futile: a man labors a lifetime and may leave it all to a fool, and much hard work is driven by envy anyway. Pleasure does not satisfy; money can be gone in a day. Schreiner presses the point into the present with the wreckage of pornography, which by every study fails to satisfy and instead shrivels the capacity for the joys God actually gives. Life under the sun is full of injustice and oppression, and, as with Job, nothing can be calculated: the best team does not always win.

1. Proverbs 2 says wisdom enters in and shapes who you are. What are you taking in, week by week, that is actually forming your character, and what would Psalm 1's kind of meditating change about it?

2. Principles, not promises: where have you heard a proverb preached, or preached one to yourself, as a guarantee? What does the whole book's witness on that theme say instead?

3. Ecclesiastes keeps asking where satisfaction under the sun is being sought. Name your current candidate honestly. What does the book's conclusion, fear God and keep his commandments, do with it?