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The Nature of Wisdom
00:26:26
Sometimes it’s hard to understand the Wisdom Books of the Bible. Is there a key to help us open these portions of God’s Word and apply them to our lives? Today, R.C. Sproul shares a technique for gaining clarity on these passages. Request What Is...
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R.C. Sproul
We have these little techniques like rhyme and meter that are a part of our poetic expression. But the Jews had another technique that they used in their poetry. And it's very important that we understand what it is and how to recognize it when it comes, because it's almost like a key that unlocks hidden treasures to us, almost an open sesame before the mysterious cave of sacred scripture.
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Host/Announcer
So what is this key to unlocking the poetry or wisdom literature of Scripture? Stay with us on this Wednesday edition of Renewing youg Mind as RC Sproul will walk us through various forms of parallelism. And as you'll hear today, once you learn about this technique, you will see that it is used throughout the Bible. This week's study on wisdom and wisdom literature can be yours when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 435-4343. Your generosity will be used to extend the reach of renewing your mind and fuel the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries. So don't delay. Please give today. And to thank you, we'll unlock this complete study in the free Ligonier app and send you Dr. Sproul's companion book, what is Biblical Wisdom? Thank you. Well, here's R.C. sproul on the nature of wisdom and the use of parallelism.
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R.C. Sproul
Many times I hear people say to me, rc, I would like to read the Bible, but every time I try to read the Bible, I just don't understand it. It's too deep for me. I'm always a little bit distressed when I hear something like that and have a little bit of difficulty believing it, because so much of Scripture is historical narrative, and it reads like an exciting novel. And it's not written, for the most part, in technical, philosophical language that requires some special degree or special education before one can get it. One of the great principles of the Reformation was the view of the basic clarity of Scripture, that is that its central message is set forth so clearly and so simply that a child can understand the rudimentary things that are necessary to live a life in the presence of God. Yet at the same time, we have to recognize that not all of Scripture is equally clear. And there are some profoundly difficult sections to read and to understand in Scripture. And it sometimes can be very helpful for us to learn to recognize certain forms and patterns that are found in the Scripture that will enable us to have an easier time of it in getting the point of the text. Now, I mentioned in passing here that there are all different kinds of forms in the Bible. The Bible is not just a storybook. There is historical narrative, there's poetry, there are parables, there are letters. There's highly imaginative symbolic literature, what we call apocalyptic literature, like the Book of Revelation or the Book of Daniel. And these different styles or forms of Scripture require certain basic rules of interpretation in order to understand them correctly. But what we're interested in now particularly is that genre or that form of literature that we find in the Scripture that we call wisdom literature, that in large measure is communicated to us as a kind of poetry. Now, we're familiar with poetry in our language and in our culture. We have different kinds of poetry. We have short poems, long poems, epic poems, so on. We have poems that rhymes, but not all poetry rhymes. But one of the classic characteristics of our poetry and of poetry found around the world is in its metered structure. There are so many beats to align. Just like a piece of music. There's almost a cadence, almost sing song at times where the accents are established in the words that are used in. In a mathematically proportionate way. Now, sometimes that makes poetry more difficult for us to understand. But we have these little techniques like rhyme and meter that are a part of our poetic expression. But the Jews had another technique that they used in their poetry that's very, very important to. To their poetry. And it's also very important that we understand what it is and how to recognize it when it comes, because it's almost like a key that unlocks hidden treasures to us, almost an open sesame before the mysterious cave of sacred Scripture. And that particular technique or literary device is called parallelisms. Now, something that is parallel is something that goes side by side in the same direction. But there are different kinds of parallelisms to be found in the wisdom literature of the Bible. And I also should add that they're not found exclusively or restrictively in those books that we call wisdom literature. They're found throughout Scripture, in the prophecies of Isaiah, even in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. Now, there are several different forms, specific types of parallelism. I'm not going to go into all of them. I think we just get lost. But let me just mention briefly the three main types of parallelism that we find in the Scriptures, particularly in the wisdom literature. The first one is what is called synonymous parallelism. And you know what something is that's synonymous. Synonymous statements mean virtually the same thing. And where you find a synonymous parallelism in the Bible is when the same idea is expressed in two consecutive lines, or even more than two lines. But the Words are different. The writer uses different words to say exactly the same thing. One of the most familiar of such forms of parallelism is found in the Hebrew benediction. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. Now, actually, there are three lines here, and each line has two things. May the Lord bless and keep. Then the next line has that same couplet, but with different words. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you, which is the same thing as to say, may he bless you and be gracious unto you, which is the same thing as saying, to keep you. And then the final line, may the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. See, we have three stanzas there, all saying the same thing. They are synonymous. Now, why is it important to recognize these things when we see them? Well, sometimes we'll be reading the scripture and we'll see two lines in succession or three lines, and we understand what the first line means, and we understand what the third line means, but we're puzzled by the meaning of the second line. Well, if we recognize that what we're dealing with here is parallelism, that's like the key to unlock the door, we say, well, wait a minute. The second line's obviously intending to say the same thing as the first and the third line, only in different terms. Let me give you an example. I know everybody out there has heard at least sometime in your life. It's found in the Lord's Prayer, where a portion of the Lord's Prayer. When Jesus teaches us how to pray, he makes this statement. We are to pray. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Now, a lot of folks have stumbled over that. They say, well, why would we go to God and say, God, please don't lead us into temptation? Doesn't James tell us in the New Testament, let no man say when he is tempted that he's tempted of God? Because God doesn't tempt anybody in the sense of luring them or enticing them or trying to promote them to sin. That would cast a shadow on the very holiness of God to assume that. So if the Bible looks askance at such an idea, why would Jesus say, lead us not in temptation? Which seemed like it would be an insult to say that to God, God, don't lead me into temptation. Well, if we want to get some relief from the difficulty of that Verse or that line. Just go to the next one, because the next line amplifies the first line. It says, but deliver us from evil. Now, unfortunately, there's a little problem with that line. And the problem is this. When the Bible uses the Greek term for evil in the abstract, the word occurs in the neuter gender. That is, it's neither masculine nor feminine. And the word that is commonly found in the Greek language to refer to evil is the word panaron, which means evil. Well, in the Lord's Prayer, when Jesus says, and deliver us from evil, he doesn't use the neuter gender in the word. He doesn't use the word paneron. He uses the word poneros. What a difference a letter makes at the end of the word in Greek, because now its gender changes from neuter to masculine. So that if we got real technical with the language of the Lord's Prayer, it may be a little bit more cumbersome in our translation. But the more accurate translation would be, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, the poneros, which is a frequent designation in scripture for Satan. Ha. Now the lights are starting to come on. Do you remember how Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for the purpose of being put to the test where God took away the hedge around him and said, jesus, you now have to stand out there alone and be exposed to the full assault of Satan. The ponaros is coming. The evil one will come and attack you. But it is your mission in this experience, in this time of testing, to pass the test and to conquer Satan and to win victory not only for yourself, but for those of whom you are prepared to die and redeem. So what is Jesus saying? He's saying, look, my father put me to the test. My father asked me to go and wrestle for 40 days and 40 nights with the unbridled assault of Satan. Now, when you pray, you pray that you be spared from that. You say, our Father who art in heaven, and so on. And you ask the Father, lead us not into temptation. That is, don't send me to the place of testing. Oh, God, don't ask me to have to bear that kind of difficulty, but instead, deliver me from Pon. From the evil one. Now, we would miss all of that if we didn't recognize the presence of the parallelism there in the text. Let me give another one that I think that everybody's aware of, except just about everybody. Misquotes. Finish this statement for me, please. Pride goes before the fall, she said. Right, wrong. Bazon, thanks for playing. I mean, I had to have somebody here that would fall into my trap, because that's the normal way in which that proverb is finished. But the Bible doesn't say that pride goes before the fall. The actual quote is this. Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before the fall. See, in other words, you have a synonymous parallelism here. Two lines that are saying the same thing. Pride goes before destruction. A haughty spirit, which is the spirit of someone who is proud, goes before. Before the fall. But what we have done is that we've taken those two lines and sort of mashed them together and telescoped them and given a shorthand version of the proverb, taken the two lines and made it one, and say, pride goes before the fall. Now, that's true, and it's certainly the sentiment that is being communicated by this proverb. But it just so happens that the proverb comes to us originally in the form of synonymous parallelism. Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before the fall. But even more common, I think, than synonymous parallelism is what we call antithetical parallelism. Now, you know what an antithesis is. There can be a thesis and then its opposite that challenges it, that contrasts with it, that denies. The thesis is called the antithesis or the antithesis, the thesis that speak the original thesis, and that's called an antithesis. So antithetical parallelism is the kind of parallelism where statements are made together but in direct contrast. Now the same message is being communicated as if it were synonymous parallelism. But the form, the poetic form, is to set it up in terms of a positive statement and then its negative rejection. Let me give you some examples from that, that you can pick up almost any page of the wisdom literature and find it looking carefully now for a second. At the tenth chapter of Proverbs, we read at the very beginning this statement. A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is the grief of his mother. That's an antithesis. That's a contrast. A wise son brings joy and gladness to the parent. A foolish son brings grief to the parents. Verse 2. Treasures of Wickedness profit nothing, but righteousness delivers from death. Do you see the contrast, verse 3? The Lord will not allow the righteous soul to famish, but he casts away the desire of the wicked. See the stark contrast even in the first psalm, where you have this contrast between the godly man who is like a tree planted by rivers of living water, bringing forth his fruit in his season. But The Psalmist says, the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away, which is another form of antithetical parallelism. And chapter 11 of Proverbs begins this. Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord. Isn't that interesting how in this wisdom we learn not just the little cute aphorisms, but we learn principles of righteousness, principles of justice, principles that affect how we do business. Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. We have a saying in our own culture that says, mind your P's and Q's. Have you ever heard that saying? What's it mean? What are P's and Q's? Pints and quarts goes back to the business world where people were buying liquor and rum and so on, because one of the scams that these old merchants would perform would be to sell what they called short pints or short quarts. They would sell a bottle of rum saying that it was a quart of rum in it, but that wasn't quite a quart. There was unjust measures there, unjust weights and measures, which is an abomination to God. And so you have to be careful to mind your P's and your Q's. I'll take a moment now to look at a text that has been extremely problematic, particularly in older translations of the text. And I've had this question raised to me I don't know how many times, from students in the seminary and in college where in chapter 45 of Isaiah's book we read this statement that they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form the light and I create darkness. I bring peace, and I create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. And the student comes and says, Dr. Sproul, here, the Bible says that God is the author of evil. God creates evil. He does evil. I said, be careful. I said, why? I said, well, there's about eight different words that can be translated evil in Hebrew. And I said, you have to be careful to read what you have here that's causing such puzzlement to you that these statements are set up as antithetical parallelisms. Notice the first line. I create the light. I make the darkness. Light and darkness are set in contrast to each other. And then the next verse, if we really were technical about it, what God is saying here is, I bring calamity, or I bring prosperity, and I bring Calamity, that is, I bring good fortune, I bring judgment. It has nothing to do with God's doing something that is morally evil. And that is perfectly clear if you recognize in the text the presence of antithetical parallelism, which can be so helpful. One more that I think is so rich for us. The wicked fleet where no man pursues but the righteous, are bold as a lion. What a contrast. And so often the contrasts in Scripture are contrasts between the wise man and the fool and the righteous person and the godless person, where the difference is seen in strikingly vivid images. I love this image. The unrighteous person flees when no one pursues. The wicked tremble at the rustling of a leaf. This is characteristic of the lifestyle of those who live with a guilty conscience. But the righteous, those who are free from a conscience that's paralyzing them and frightening them, are bold as the lion. It's a marvelous contrast. All right. These are two forms. Another form is called synthetic, where there's a buildup where you just go from one level to the next, and quickly, as my time is running out. I'll try to give one example of that sort of parallelism that we find in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 6. There are six things the Lord hates. Yea, seven are an abomination, a prophecy, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans. You see what's happening. There is a growing crescendo, a listing of things that express the fullness of the measure. Look for these forms as you read your Bible and you'll find a key that unlocks a treasure chest. Already I've asked you to read through the Book of Proverbs this week if you have an opportunity. Now, I want to add to that, that you look carefully and notice as often as you can the presence of parallelisms, that you will look for synonymous parallelisms where two things are stated that say basically the same thing, only using different words. And also notice in your study the presence of antithetical parallelism so that you become familiar with them. You will find it's just like that strange phenomenon where we hear a word for the first time and all of a sudden we'll hear it five times that week. Maybe we'd heard it all our lives and never really registered. But it's like that new word that enters into our vocabulary. Or people say, if you want to keep a word in use, use it yourself five times. And once you use it five times, it's going to be yours forever. That's what I hope this exercise will accomplish for you that as you read the proverbs and note the presence of parallelism, you will suddenly now be aware of something that you'll see all through the Scripture and will make it much easier for you to understand the written word of God.
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Host/Announcer
You're listening to Renewing youg Mind, and that was R.C. sproul, the founder of Ligonier Ministries. Well, parallelism, I'm sure you'll start seeing it everywhere and you can continue studying the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. When you request this week's resource offer to thank you for your donation@renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343 and we'll send you Dr. Sproul's title, what is Biblical Wisdom? And unlock this series in the free Ligonier app. Listen to this series on the go and if you prefer, read the material in the companion book, use the link in the podcast Show Notes or call us at 800-435-4343 and these two resources can be yours when you support the daily outreach of Renewing your Mind with a donation. There is also a global digital offer available@renewingyourmind.org global, but don't delay as this offer ends on Friday. If you struggle with prayer, have you considered turning to the Book of Psalms? Discover how they can help with prayer when you join us tomorrow here on Renewing your Mind.
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R.C. Sproul
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