Lesson from Sunday March 7th, 2010
Today we will focus on the book of Proverbs from which we read two days this last week. Proverbs is a particular type of writing in the Bible, referred to as Wisdom Literature. This includes the book of Ecclesiastes and parts of Job and the book of James in the New Testament. Proverbs are concise statements which capture key insights about life in a memorable manner. Key features include this memorableness, the way they work with word pictures (one commentator calls the book of Proverbs the photo album of the Bible), their poetic form (particularly the use of metaphor and parallelism), and their focus on experience. There is an interesting twist on this last point, however, in that even as proverbs focus on concrete human experience, they also teach profound truths. This combination of simplicity and complexity is a hallmark. For example, “he who loves money will not be satisfied with money” is a profound statement based on a very understandable first premise (Ecclesiastes 5:10).