1 My son, if you receive my words
and treasure up my commandments with you,
2 making your ear attentive to wisdom
and inclining your heart to understanding;
3 yes, if you call out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding,
4 if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
5 then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God.
Proverbs 2:1-5
I have recently been studying Proverbs again with a college student in our church. It began because I felt that maybe she could use a refresher in the basics of how to live a God-honoring life now that she is maturing and venturing out on her own. But it turns out in the simple, but abundantly clear way that God can use, that I needed a bit of a reminder as well. Sometimes I imagine God with a cheeky grin on His face when I start a study of something thinking it’s just what the other person needs, when He knows full well that all Scripture is good for us all the time (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
We didn’t get very far in our study before I was drawn to something I never noticed before. The beginning of Proverbs 2 is easy to overlook; its tone and admonishments are very similar to chapters 1 and 3 but I love that it gives us a call to action in how to begin to gain wisdom and grow closer to our LORD.
Sometimes even if we are in the middle of our journey we don’t know where to start, rebegin, or refresh our faith. It’s hard to admit we’ve grown stagnant, stuck in our ways. But we can begin (or begin again) our search for God’s wisdom in our lives.
Verse one tells us we have to receive, we have to accept His words; we can’t reject them and have them change our lives. We have to open our arms and hearts and be willing to change. This often comes through confession of our sins or admitting our hang-ups and complacency.
Next, we have to treasure these words from God (vs. 1). If we treat them as unwanted or unvalued, how can they change us? How can we show they mean something to others when we depreciate or push them aside? Of course they aren’t going to make a difference.
In verse two we find we are to make our ears listen and incline our hearts to be open. The more we hear the good Word, the more we recognize its truths and the more we turn our hearts to Him, the more we want to learn more and more about the LORD.
The third verse shifts the focus. We are told to call out and raise your voice. These are outward things. When we call out, we recognize our inability to do it all ourselves. Raising our voice requires action, doing something about it.
Lastly, we are told to seek and search for wisdom and the LORD as for something valuable and hidden (vs. 4). This requires movement. Looking for wisdom from the LORD (especially in the pages of our Bible) is where our understanding of the LORD will come from.
There’s a four step process Solomon lays out here for us. Mental, physical, outward action, movement. We start internally, then we move to external. The steps are clear. The reward is clear too. We will gain understanding and wisdom in all that we think and do and gain a deeper relationship with the One Who created us.
