A short preface to the rest of the book.

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I started doing this personal study of the book of Proverbs, going through it chapter by chapter.  I find I can no longer do that as the format of the book changes once we get to Chapter 10.  I started on it a few days ago and quickly got through the first 14 proverbs.  I just scrapped the whole thing as I feel I need to do it justice or else I will be cheating on myself.  

So moving forward, maybe I'll tackle it a few at a time.  Perhaps I'll get stuck on one proverb in a post.  Who knows?  I will have to just keep plugging away at it.  This is going to take a while.   Buckle up.

Maybe at some point I'll find a structure in it, although now I do not.  It seems random and repetitive.  Then again, life is full of random lumps of reality coming at you and we learn in little chunks.  We learn through practice and repetition.  There are so many bumps in the road along the way.  There are so many obstacles to get around.  There are so many temptations to avoid.   Sometimes we make the same mistakes over and over again before it sinks in.  And we need to share the world with other people who don't get any of this so it really gets complicated.    

In Chapters 1-9 we learn that this book is really God's instructions on how to live wisely, or how to live the good life in the world as it is.  The world was created by God and reality follows certain rules and therefore we need to follow those rules in order to live the good life.   If we do that, then things go smoothly.  If we don't, we run into resistance and that resistance can hurt.  The information given in this book, is just as true today as it was 3000 (+/-) years ago when it was written.

In a perfict world, we would all be living like this.  The problem is that sin has crept in and corrupted God's perfect creation.  So even if we live the perfect life, we can still run into the resistance that others are dealing with in their lives.  

We also need to accept that God created those rules, and that Wisdom is the art of knowing them and living them and the realization that we can always learn more.   This book is God's Wisdom being passed on to us.  It's up to us to take it to heart.  It is up to us to learn it.  It is up to us to practice it and to live it.


So moving forward, I'm just going to work my way through it a little bit at a time.  That seems like the most sensible way to do it.

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