536 - 2 WHAT DO YOU KNOW FOR SURE?March 9, 1980
Henry F. Kulp
Proverbs 1: 1 - 8 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel; To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion. A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels: To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:
Last Sunday morning we saw what a proverb was. Webster says it is a wise saying, but it comes from the Hebrew word, MA-SHELL’ – A, and this comes from the Hebrew verb, MA-SHELL’ which means to rule, to govern. So these proverbs are literally sayings or doctrine that rule or govern the believer’s life.
1/ Then we saw a Proverb is Hebrew poetry. And we call it a distich, a pair of verse lines; a couplet, and we find it is doctrine for teenagers, and any doctrine for teenagers is good doctrine for adults. For a teenager is one who is entering into adulthood.
2/ Verse 1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel;
We notice, it is the Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, the King of Israel. Some folks misunderstood last Sunday morning. These are the Proverbs of Solomon, but some of them are Proverbs that David gave to Solomon, and when you read the words, My son, they are always what David taught Solomon, but other than just three different sections, it is Solomon’s proverbs.
3/ We have six different types of Proverbs. And I would like to take a second just to review these six different kinds of proverbs. You will notice in your bulletin, they are listed for you.
4/ There is something I want to drive home to your heart at this point to make you really appreciate Proverbs, and that is the fact of how important doctrine is in your life. I know it is being down-played in many Bible-believing churches today. Experience is being extolled, but turn to Matthew 4: 4 Here Jesus Christ said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Here is a principle that you have to understand if you are a child of God. Now bread is food, and food is necessary for physical survival, but doctrine is more important than food that you eat. Food is a detail of life, doctrine is your life. Health is needed, but it is merely a detail of life. That is true of friends, that is true of pleasure, that is true of clothes, that is true of homes. Everything other than doctrine is a detail of life. You can do without the details of life, but you cannot do without life. It is fine if you have food, but if you don’t have food and have doctrine, you are still in possession of the most important thing in life. Your life does not depend upon details, but it depends upon doctrine first of all.
5/ Verse 2 To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;
TO KNOW
This is an infinitive in the Hebrew, and it means, this is the purpose—it means to learn from something. The greatest thing a teen-ager, or an adult can learn is doctrine.
6/ Than the word, WISDOM. Wisdom in the Hebrew is HACK-MAW’ and it means TO HAVE IT POUNDED IN and this is the way you learn. This is the way all people learn, by repetition, by having something pounded in. If you want a child to learn something, this is the practical way of teaching. Go over it and over it. For example, take manners. Two things my father used to pound into me—
#1 When you walk in front of someone you always said, excuse me, and when a woman came into the room you always stood up. Whatever it is in manners you want to teach your child, you have to tell it to them over and over again. They are by nature reluctant to obey. Then one day you get a call from someone who says, My, your young man or young lady is really very polite, and you just about faint. But they have learned the lesson because you kept repeating it, and repeating it until it became second nature to them, and that is what the Hebrew is teaching here.
7/ You do this with doctrine. You go over and over and over doctrine. That means you yourself have to know doctrine.
8/ INSTRUCTION
This is MOO-SAWR’ it means to TEACH BY DISCIPLINE. There are many things in life you have to learn by discipline. Also, this can be the word, CHASTISEMENT. So this means parents teaching by authority. The word, moo-sawr—instruction—is the key to Proverbs, and it means to train by discipline. No one ever gets trained without authority.
9/ Proverbs show us the family is the basic unit in society. A family without discipline will cause a nation to crumble. For when young folks or adults fail to recognize authority, that family and that nation is going down the tubes.
10/ I want you to see seven different kinds of authority upon which a nation is based.
(1) The authority of God’s Word. Of course this is being ridiculed in our day. Just the other night listening to CBS news, I listened as they brought forth the fact that many educators are trying to bring back creationism, and they, of course, made it seem very foolish.
(2) The authority of God Himself. When you reject His word, you reject the authority of
God, Romans 3: 18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.
This means man does not recognize the authority of God, and it is sad but true that many believers fit into this category.
(3) The authority of the local assembly leaders. Those who are in authority. In other words, the assembly leaders. This means those who teach, and those who rule in the assembly.
(4) The rulers of state. This means the authority at the city level, at the state level, at the national level. It really starts with the traffic light on the corner. You can’t have orderly traffic without the law.
(5) The authority of parents. This of course, is a tremendous break-down.
II Timothy 3: 2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
Disobedient to parents. When you have trouble with children in school, it is usually because they have trouble in the home, so they don’t recognize authority in the school.
(6) Authority of business. A business organization has to have authority. It has to have bosses. Without this, business cannot operate.
(7) Authority of the military. Of course, this is being broken down every day by the politicians.
11/ There are five things every child must learn from his parents before he is being released into society. If he doesn’t learn these five things, Society will suffer from this individual.
(1) RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY. That means parents, teachers, police, any form of authority. But of course we have anarchism today.
(2) SELF-DISCIPLINE. If this is not taught, the individual is on his way to becoming a criminal. Let me give you an example—eat whatever you want, smoke, drink alcoholic beverages, do not want to study, but want to be taken care of. Never wants to sacrifice in any way, and finally does not care to work—no self-discipline. By nature we don’t want to do the things we have to do, but we must learn self-discipline.
(3) RESPECT FOR THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. Certainly I don’t need to talk very much about this.
(4) RESPECT FOR PRIVACY OF OTHERS.
(5) RESPECT FOR THE RIGHT OF OTHERS. So as you go through Proverbs you’ll find these five things are mentioned over and over again and we will take time to point these five things out to you.
12/ Also to understand Proverbs, in the first chapter we have mentioned a gang called the wrong crowd. They violate these five principles and you will notice that those who are lawless usually travel in gangs, so as we go to the first chapter, you must see this wrong crowd.
13/ So instruction means learning these five things. And it is up to the parents to teach these five things to their children, and then carry them out in their own lives. It is a responsibility to keep their children away from the wrong crowd.
14/ Let us go back and look at a few of these distichs to understand them. I think many have had problems with the antithetical which is the second type of Proverb. This proverb is the doctrine as stated in the first line, the second line repeats the doctrine, but in a negative way—so the first line is positive, the second line is negative—or it could be the reverse—the first line negative and the second line positive. Let us get a few illustrations of this.
Proverbs 17: 22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
Here it talks about a merry heart—that means a mind full of doctrine, a mind that is subject to authority. Then it says, doth good like a medicine. The second line has the negative part—but a broken spirit—a broken spirit is a bad mental attitude—not having doctrine or being subject to doctrine, or not accepting authority. This, of course, speaks of the mind. What is a broken spirit? A person, who in their mind is frustrated, upset, bitter, full of worry, full of fear, full of anxiety. It could be a hysterical individual.
15/ Then it says, drieth the bones. This of course, means a loss of health. By their mental attitude they are ruining their health. It means they will crack up. This is first the positive, then the negative. Now let us get an illustration of first the negative and then the positive.
16/ Proverbs 15: 5 A fool despiseth his father’s instruction: but he that regardeth reproof is prudent.
The word reproof, means instruction. It means to be chewed out by your parents. It means to be rebuked by your parents. A child who has learned how to do this has learned self-discipline. He has recognized authority. Then he is prudent—he is a wise person.
17/ Now let us look at the Integral, and this is an important one. The first line gives the thought, the second lines completes it.
Proverbs 22: 6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
The first line is train up a child in the way he should go, and then you need the second line to complete it—and when he is old, he will not depart from it. The thought is, even when he is old, he will not depart from it.
18/ Let us look at another one–and I love this one.
Proverbs 22: 10 Cast out the scorner, and contention shall go out; yea, strife and reproach shall cease.
Cast out the scoffer. The scoffer originally meant one who stammered, one who stutters, but it came to mean a scoffer. Literally what it means is someone has presented a truth, a doctrine, and he goes ya, ya, ya, ya, I know what you mean, and passes over it. In other words he doesn’t accept what is being taught. Then notice the second line—cast him out and you won’t have any trouble.
Anyone who does not accept doctrine is to be cast out for the sake of the assembly. Do you realize Modernism would never have gotten a hold of the church if this had been followed, for the liberals came in and passed over doctrine and finally caused the downfall of the old-line churches.
19/ The first line tells you what to do—get rid of those who do not like doctrine, and then we have the result of the first line, there will be peace and harmony in the assembly.
Literally there are two ways of doing this. You can go to someone and say, you don’t like doctrine—get out. But there is another way, and that is just to teach doctrine, and they can’t take this and they get out, and this is the nicest way as far as I am concerned.
AMEN
Ref: 03/09/1980 / 536-2 WHAT DO YOU KNOW FOR SURE? 01/23/2021
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