Verse of the day · September 2
If God gives wisdom, why does Proverbs 2 tell a man to search for it?
A man is ordered to search hard for wisdom, and warned in advance not to credit the search.
For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.
Proverbs 2:6
The chapter is addressed to a son, and for four verses everything in it is something the son has to do. He is to receive the words and then retain them, lodging them in his heart so that they are always ready to him. He is to incline his ear, taking hold of every opportunity of hearing and listening like a man afraid of letting something slip. He is to apply his heart, because inclining the ear without that will stand him in no stead. He is to cry out, and to keep crying. Then the sixth verse opens with the word For.
That conjunction carries the weight of everything the chapter has asked for. The encouragement for the whole pursuit is to be taken from God only, Matthew Henry writes, and the ground for hoping the labour comes to anything lies outside the man doing it. JFB read the For as an assurance that God is ready.
The Lord is not only wise himself. He gives wisdom, which is more than the wisest men in the world can do, because opening the understanding is his own prerogative. All the wisdom there is in any creature is his gift, his free gift, and Henry has him giving it liberally — having given it to many, and still giving it. John Gill runs the giving from natural wisdom in all its branches down to the spiritual sort: a man's knowledge of his own folly and impotence and misery, of Christ as the only way of salvation, of the doctrines of the Gospel known experimentally, and of how to walk circumspectly. Christ himself is counted into the gift, a very large comprehensive one, given freely and never taken away again.
Gill reads three purposes into the clause. It cautions the man who searches after wisdom, and finds it, not to attribute it to his own diligence and industry, but to the grace of God. It gives him a direction where to go for it. And it encourages him to hope he will have it, since the Lord gives freely, and a man who lacks wisdom is told he may ask God for it. So a man can do every single thing the first four verses require, find what he went after, and be told in advance not to put it down to his diligence. The diligence was real.
Then there is a mouth. The prophets came with a Thus saith the Lord and were the mouth of the Lord to the people, and out of it flowed the knowledge of divine things — of God's will, of the Messiah, of his coming and his death, and of salvation by him. In these last days God has spoken by his Son and declared all his mind through him, and grace and truth came fully and clearly that way. The Scriptures of both Testaments are breathed by him and come out of his mouth, and are able to make a man wise unto salvation. Gospel ministers speak in his name and he speaks by them, so that the mouth of a preacher speaketh wisdom. Henry keeps the list shorter: the law and the prophets, the written word, and his ministers, which he calls God's mouth to the children of men. Reading the promise a verse above, that the son will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God, the Geneva Notes say this is the true wisdom, to know and fear God.
Because that is where it comes from, the orders three verses earlier are about a voice. Crying after knowledge means begging hard, the way one ready to perish for hunger begs for bread. Faint desires will not prevail. Henry wants importunity, from men who know the worth of the thing and their own want of it. Lifting up the voice means lifting it to heaven, where these good and perfect gifts must be expected from. The phrase reads, literally, give thy voice to understanding — speak for it, vote for it, submit the tongue to the command of wisdom.
None of that leaves a man sitting still. Gill has the clause added to encourage a search after wisdom in the use of means, by attending on the word and the ministry of it.
Nothing in the orders is cancelled by the sentence that follows them. The ear still inclines, the heart still applies, the voice still goes up, and the diligence in the means stands. What none of it can do is produce the thing it is after. The labour walks him to where the giving happens and stands him under an open mouth, and what he carries home from it will still be a gift, handed over free, and never taken back.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes.
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