Wisdom-Trek / Creating a LegacyWelcome to Day 1351 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Psalms and Proverbs – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1351 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Psalms and ProverbsInsight Forty-Nine: Proverbs Are Neither Prophecies nor PromisesBible interpretation can be a lot like rendering a verdict in a court case. A jury has to have the data, the factual material relevant to the case at hand. It then needs to frame the data in the most coherent way. The goal is to declare guilt or innocence “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is to be convinced that any other interpretation of the evidence is unreasonable.


Jury decisions can go terribly wrong, however, when some crucial point of data is omitted or overlooked in its deliberation. The same thing is accurate for understanding the Bible. A good illustration is the nature of biblical proverbs.


Proverbs are pithy sayings, or statements that are, by and large, accurate in everyday life. The proverb is a well-known literary genre in all cultures because people in all human cultures want to live wisely and to get the most out of life. No one expects a proverb always to be true. That isn’t its nature. Likewise, biblical proverbs are not true in all cases. They are, like all other proverbs, mostly true. They are truisms.


Because a proverb is a condensed piece of wisdom, it cannot address all the contingencies that could occur with respect to the circumstance it addresses. By design, that isn’t its purpose. For example, consider Proverbs 1:33 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+1%3A33&version=NLT) : “But all who listen to me will live in peace, untroubled by fear of harm.” It simply isn’t the case that all godly people live in peace and never have fears. Even when the righteous trust God with the outcome of an awful expectation or event (e.g., physical violence), they cannot cease being human by suppressing a fear reflex.


Put another way; proverbs do not promise guaranteed outcomes. Proverbs are not designed to tell the future. They are designed to describe the present.This is important for correctly understanding a proverb such as Proverbs 22:6 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+22%3A6&version=NLT) : “Direct your children onto the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it.” This is a classic example of a truism. More often than not, a godly, nurturing upbringing will produce a child who wants to know God and follow him. But we all know exceptions. It isn’t a proper response to say that parenting must have gone wrong in some instances since no parent is perfect. Given that reality, there should be no godly children. The retort isn’t...