Why is Proverbs so random?
How the chaos of Proverbs prepares us for the chaos of life.
Has it ever bothered you that the book of Proverbs seems so scattered?
Our church is finishing up a preaching series through Proverbs. If you’re unfamiliar, the first nine chapters have a series of organized discourses on the pursuit of wisdom or folly. But at chapter ten, that structure vanishes. The rest of the book is made up of mostly scattered, Tweet-like proverbs on wisdom applied to dozens of areas of life.
Once we hit chapter ten in our preaching rotation, our approach was to take the primary topics addressed in Proverbs and preach a sermon on things like speech, conflict, lust, parenting, etc. Preaching through the entirety of Proverbs any other way would be quite difficult.
As I was studying several of these topics, I often wished ole’ Solomon would’ve done us all a favor and just organized it for us. I mean, he was the wisest guy on the planet (apart from that whole 700 wives/300 concubines business). He could have easily put together these nuggets of wisdom in tidy little sections and saved us all a bunch of time. So why didn’t he?
Tidy little categories make for clean structure and organized sermons, but life is anything but clean and organized. To quote the great Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast.” From sunup to sundown we’re faced with hundreds of problems and decisions that require hundreds of quick and wise responses. It’s impossible to anticipate what the next moment will demand. One minute we need to know how to handle criticism. The next we have to consider whether or not to take that new job. Then we need to consider how to discipline our children. So on and so on.
Proverbs may not have the organization of our favorite systematic theology text, but it does have the structure of life: chaotic, jumbled, and random. We’d like the book (and life) to be tidy, structured, and predictable, but Solomon knows all too well that’s not how it works. He understood how life unfolds and organized his collection of Proverbs accordingly.
Proverbs is not a sloppy buffet of fortune cookie sayings. It’s the very wisdom of God delivered to us in real-time as we need it. It turns out that Solomon knew what he was doing after all. Embracing the chaotic structure of Proverbs helps us to appreciate and live wisely in the chaotic structure of life.