Fundamentals for Preaching the Book of Proverbs, Part 1

By Bruce K. Waltke

[Bruce K. Waltke is Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, Florida.

This is the first article in a four-part series, delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectureship at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 6-9, 2007.]

Promise For And Difficulties In Preaching Proverbs

In a world bombarded by inane clichés, trivial catchwords, and godless sound bites, the expression of true wisdom is in short supply today. The church stands alone as the receptacle and repository of the inspired traditions that carry a mandate for a holy life from ancient sages. As the course and bulk of biblical wisdom, the Book of Proverbs remains the model of a curriculum for humanity to learn how to live under God and before humankind. As a result it beckons the church to diligent study and application. To uncommitted youth it serves as a stumbling stone, but to committed youth it is a foundation stone.

But Proverbs is a briar patch for its expositors. One student confessed that before taking a course on Proverbs he thought some proverbs and sayings were banal and others wrong. For sober theologians the book’s heavenly promises of health, wealth, and prosperity seem detached from reality. Some proverbs seem to contradict each other: “Do not answer fools according to their folly” (26:4) is followed by, “Answer fools according to their folly” (v. 5).[1] More-over, whereas the Book of Proverbs affirms a righteous order, the books of Job and Ecclesiastes deny that reality. How does a preacher preach what seems banal, wrong, or contradictory?

The book seems to be a hodgepodge collection with no rhyme or reason in its grouping of sayings. They jump from one topic to another like scatterbrains in a living-room conversation. Nevertheless from such an apparent mishmash the expositor is expected to prepare a logically developed and emotionally escalating sermon. No wonder expositors are hesitant to touch the book.

Three Types Of Sermons

Preachers of Proverbs can justly and profitably employ the three most common sermonic forms: textual, topical, and expository. In textual preaching the preacher devotes his entire message to preaching one proverb. This is feasible and is arguably a form of expository preaching because each proverb has a distinct message.

In topical preaching the preacher designs his own message, consistent with the book’s teachings, by selecting wisdom sayings from various groupings to support his message and then arranging them according to his own logic. Topical preaching is especially feasible in Proverbs because the composition of the book differs so radically from the composition of a sermon that even the expository preacher must translate the original organization of a grouping of proverbs into the quite different form of a homily.

In expository preaching the expositor discerns by form and rhetorical criticism an author’s abstract message embedded in a grouping of several proverbs. This abstract meaning serendipitously enriches the meaning of the individual proverbs and protects the vulnerable proverb against abuse. Expository preaching is the queen of sermonic forms.

Exegetical Substance And Sermonic Style

Expository preaching consists of at least seven fundamental components. Four of them pertain to exegetical substance, and three to sermonic style. They are (a) demarcating the textual units by form and rhetorical criticism and selecting which of them to preach, (b) deciding the English version to be used in the pulpit, (c) exegeting the selected text according to the accredited grammatical-historical method of hermeneutics, (d) abstracting the big idea that unifies the grouping of proverbs, (e) translating the big idea into a message in light of its place in the progress of redemption and of the congregation’s need, (f) translating the text’s structure for which the audience has no reading strategy into the structure of the homily, which the audience intuitively understands, and (g) motivating the congregation to apply the message to concrete situations.

Fundamental Steps In Preaching Proverbs

Demarcating And Selecting Texts

The first fundamental step in preaching the book is demarcating the groupings and selecting the texts to be preached. The present writer’s two-volume commentary on Proverbs demarcates the units in Proverbs by form criticism and rhetorical analysis.[2]

Four series of thirteen sermons per year on four biblical books have worked well for the writer because they give the congregation a sense of stable consistency and of appealing variety. For a series of sermons on Proverbs thirteen texts or topics are chosen on the basis of their importance for contemporary issues, their representative character of the book, their display of God’s attributes, and their potential to empower the congregation to use the book in their personal or family devotions.[3]

The Book of Proverbs has seven sections, marked by editorial notices at 1:1; 10:1; 22:17; 24:23; 25:1; 30:1; and 31:1. Although 22:17 lacks a clear editorial marker, most scholars demarcate 22:17–24:22 as a distinct section in the book.

Collection I: Introduction to the Book (chaps. 1–9)

Collection II: Proverbs of King Solomon (10:1–22:16)

Collection III: Thirty Sayings of the Wise Adapted by Solomon (22:17–24:22)

Collection IV: Further Sayings of the Wise (24:23–34)

Collection V: Further Proverbs by Solomon, Collected by Hezekiah’s Men (chaps. 25–29)

Collection VI: Sayings of Agur, son of Jakeh (chap. 30)

Collection VII: Sayings of King Lemuel (chap. 31)

The groupings of sayings within these sections, however, lack clear editorial jackets. These groupings embedded with the collections are like sermons and lectures in a preacher’s file without file folders to separate them. Unlike the psalms that are separated by superscripts and subscripts, the textual units within Proverbs must be isolated, as already noted, by form and rhetorical criticism. Chapter divisions in English Bibles are not reliable indicators of the author’s groupings, for the chapters were demarcated before form and rhetorical criticism had become a science.

Collection I (chaps. 1–9). This collection includes a preamble (1:1–7), prologue (1:8–8:36), and epilogue (chap. 9). The epilogue functions as a transition between collections I and II.

The book’s preamble functions well as the first of thirteen sermons because it sets forth the fundamental information for understanding and preaching the Book of Proverbs. Five sermons from the prologue are proportionate to the book’s own proportions. Also the prologue’s encomiums to wisdom lay the spiritual foundation for the teachings in the remaining collections.

The importance of the prologue (1:8–8:36) can be inferred from its ruling metaphor, “the way.” This metaphor refers to a person’s “course of life” (i.e, the character and context of life), “conduct of life” (i.e., specific choices and behavior), and “consequences of that conduct” (i.e., the inevitable destiny of such a lifestyle). Fundamental to conduct is character. To live out the explicit or implicit admonitions of the proverbial sayings in the collections, a person must first prepare his or her heart. As Moses in his three valedictory addresses in Deuteronomy first spiritually prepared the hearts of his audience to trust and love God in Deuteronomy 6–11 before giving the statutes and commandments in Deuteronomy 12–26, so also the lectures and sermons in Collection I in Proverbs spiritually prepare the catechumens to trust and love God before instructing them on behavior in the remaining six collections.

Moreover, the poems of the prologue are highly relevant. The lectures and sermons of Collection I aim to safeguard Israel’s youth from the seductive appeals both of wicked men to make easy money and of the femme fatale to indulge in easy sex.

It is prudent to select several sermons from this collection because the poems in this collection come packaged for the preacher and shoehorn the church’s foot into the shoe of Proverbs.

Here are six suggested sermons from Proverbs 1–9.

Sermon 1: Unlocking the Book of Life (preamble, 1:1–7).

Sermon 2: Safeguards against wicked men and wicked women (chap. 2). This sermon presents the spiritual essentials to develop the godly mind as defense against the temptations of easy money and easy sex.

Sermon 3: Does Proverbs promise too much (3:1–12)? The sermon sets forth the covenant obligations of God and of the son. The obligations on God’s part are promises, not probabilities. But that raises the question of whether the book promises too much and of the wrong thing, namely, health, wealth, and prosperity. The writer’s commentary discusses this tension.[4]

Sermon 4: Why bother (3:13–26)? Of the prologue’s twelve motivating lectures and sermons, this text offers the most comprehensive argument.

Sermon 5: What’s wrong with adultery (chaps. 4–7)? A sermon on the femme fatale, who plays a larger role in the prologue than even woman wisdom, can combine the three warnings of the parents in chapters 5–7 into three points of a sermon. The sermon is essential in contemporary culture, in which liberty is desired without law, freedom without form, and lovemaking without marriage.

Sermon 6: Woman wisdom’s final appeal to uncommitted youth (chap. 8). Woman wisdom addresses her two sermons in 1:20–33 and chapter 8 to simpletons, that is, to children who have passed puberty without making a commitment to the catechism. The preceding four selected texts are the parents’ lectures in the home. Of wisdom’s two sermons to simpletons, the second is most famous because in the history of Christian teaching the identification of woman wisdom with Jesus Christ wrongly became an established doctrine.

Collection II (10:1–22:16). Selecting texts and sermons from this collection is more difficult because the proverbs function on two levels of meaning: individually and collectively. Individually each proverb explicitly or implicitly admonishes the audience toward specific expressions of pious and/or ethical behavior. Collectively they communicate a message greater than the parts. The groupings, however, depend almost entirely on rhetoric, not grammar. Unlike prose and longer poems, they are not held together by syntactic links such as conjunctions and particles.

Not all agree that in Collection II there are meaningful groupings, each of which has a message. If they are right, then the preacher should preach either textual or topical sermons from this section. Expository preaching would be wrong because it would impose messages not intended by the inspired author.

Good reasons exist, however, for recognizing larger textual units in Collection II, and pastors have found the groupings useful. Nevertheless topical preaching from less clearly demarcated units has its place in a healthy diet of sermons. Congregations respond well to a topical sermon that includes a short exposition of one textual unit at some point in the sermon. If one opts for topical sermons from Collection II, then there are two important topical sermons to represent the teachings of this collection:

Sermon 7: Being money wise (using the grouping of 10:1–5 as one of the texts).

Sermon 8: Wise speech (using 10:6–14 as one of its texts).

Collection III (22:17–24:22). Grouping the sayings in Collection III, the Thirty Sayings of the Wise, is also challenging, but not as challenging as Collection II. After its own preamble (22:17–21), the collection essentially consists of three decalogues of sayings. Since the first decalogue, which is about money, and the second dialogue, which is about being an obedient son, are about topics already dealt with in the series, the congregation will find a healthy variety in the third decalogue.

Sermon 9: Strength in distress (24:3–12). This sermon is especially applicable to awaken the church to its social responsibilities.

Collection IV (24:23–34). Collection IV is too short to call for representation in a separate sermon.

Collection V (chaps. 25–29). Collection V can be analyzed fairly readily with respect to its macro-groupings and micro-groupings. One grouping amenable to expository preaching and relevant to help safeguard youth against the entertainment industry is this:

Sermon 10: How to deal with fools (26:1–12).

Collection VI (30:1–33). Though the prophet Agur intended his collection of inspired sayings to be treated holistically, a sermon can be limited to his autobiographical confession in 30:1–6. That biography is especially applicable to a culture that believes in relative evaluations, not absolute values.

Sermon 11: Christian values versus postmodern evaluations (30:1–6).

Collection VII (chap. 31). The sayings of King Lemuel place two distinct poems together: the noble king (vv. 1–9) and the noble wife (vv. 10–33). Though both are challenging, the preacher is better advised to choose the second of the two because it draws the series to a conclusion with the book’s own conclusion. Although most speak well of the noble woman, few will emulate her.

Sermon 12: A noble woman as a paradigm of wisdom (vv. 10–33).

Sermon 13: (A thirteenth sermon on a text or topic from Proverbs can be chosen by the expositor for a concluding message.)

Deciding The Translation

A pastor must wisely choose his translation for all his sermons. All translations (other than the Jehovah’s Witnesses New World Bible) are faithful and adequate. “Faithful and adequate” means that all translations lead their audience to faith in Jesus Christ, into sound doctrine and never into heresy. A congregation can respond to any message in the Book of Proverbs using any English translation.

However, translations are not equal with regard to exegetical accuracy, their targeted audiences, and fluency. In the writer’s opinion the best translation that satisfies these three criteria is Today’s New International Version (TNlV), a revision of the New International Version (NIV).

Unlike the as-much-as-possible word-for-word translation of the New American Standard Bible and of the English Standard Version (ESV), the TNIV follows the translation philosophy of Chrysoloras, a Byzantine scholar who arrived in Florence, Italy, in 1397. His roster of pupils reads like a who's who of early Renaissance humanism. Prior to Chrysoloras, medieval Scholastic scholars, when they translated from Greek into Latin, practiced a method called verbum ad verbum (“word for word”). At its best, this resulted in clumsy, graceless Latin. At its worst, as Chrysoloras pointed out, it could change the meaning of the original completely. So Chrysoloras abandoned the old method. Instead, he taught his students to stick as closely as possible to the sense of the Greek, but to convert it into Latin that was as elegant, fluent, and idiomatic as the original. Chrysoloras’s philosophy is true translation.

Having spent forty years in helping produce English translations of the Bible, the writer is amazed at the cavalier manner in which pastors revise a translation on the basis of their own exegesis. If a preacher corrects the TNIV, he implies that he, with his one or two years of studying the Hebrew language, is more competent than a committee of professional exegetes.

Exegeting The Text

Having selected the text and version, the preacher should then exegete the original Hebrew text in order to be authentic. He is God’s voice, mediating God’s Word to God’s people. Knowing the Bible’s original languages is essential to being an authentic theologian and preacher. “(1) Language is the means for all discernment and linguistics is the means for all investigation and wisdom; (2) the fulfillment of the commandments depends upon the understanding of the written word, and in turn, the proper knowledge of the language is impossible without the aid of linguistics.”[5] Knowing the original languages can help a pastor become a skilled exegete rather than a sloppy theologian and/or preacher.

Proper exegesis includes the following disciplines: (a) establishing the Hebrew text by textual criticism, (b) establishing the literary genre by form criticism, (c) defining significant terms by the use of a concordance, a lexicon, and a theological word book, (d) parsing and deciding the sense of all grammatical forms, (e) identifying and interpreting figures of speech, (f) decoding the author’s rhetoric, (g) abstracting the biblical writer’s thesis, and (h) locating the text’s teaching within the contexts of the progress of redemptive history and of the history of Christian doctrine. A good expositor will involve himself in all these exegetical tasks to the extent of his available time and competence, for these academic disciplines internalize the text in his soul and help it flow from his lips. These fundamental disciplines are learned in seminary, and a seminary that sends forth preachers incompetent to exegete the original text fails Christ and His church and shortchanges its students.

Occasionally, however, one hears of a teacher or an exegete who denies himself the use of a commentary. This is foolhardy. No unaided preacher has the time or competence to give authoritative answers to exegetical questions under the gun of a weekly clock. He may fool his congregation and even himself about his own authority, but this is wrong. To speak competently a preacher must use a good commentary intelligently.

Abstracting The Big Idea

The expositor is now in a position to abstract the big idea of the text. He is concerned primarily with the vital central concept of his text, with the interrelationship of the idea of each proverb that links them to each other, and with the deep underlying convictions that inspired the texts and united them as a composite and yet unitary “witness” to theological truth.[6] To put it another way the expositor is looking for the groupings’ “system” or “structure,” a sort of inner grid that can be placed within the material and can be seen to provide some degree of order and coherence.[7] Simply stated, the big idea, as Robinson suggests, consists of both a subject and its complement. The subject answers the question, What is the writer talking about? And the complement answers the question, What is he saying about what he is talking about? The two together form the idea.[8]

Translating The Idea Into A Message

W. A. Criswell, the late pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, said that he considered having a sermon’s purpose the most important fundamental step in preaching. He said he kept his purpose in mind throughout the entire sermon, from the attention-grabbing introduction, to its logical development in the body of the sermon, to its climactic emotional appeal and practical application to real and concrete life situations.

What Criswell called a sermon’s purpose may also be called its message. The big idea abstracted by exegesis from the text must be translated into a message, for the textual units of the Bible have a character that makes them suitable and able to provide direction to what the human mind brings into relationship with it. The notion of a big idea, though good, is inadequate. The Bible is not interested in impersonal “ideas” and ethical principles. Moreover, the Bible is not simply about divine matters.[9] The Bible is more than concepts about God or ethical principles or Israel’s witness to God. The Bible is God’s address to His people and He encounters them through Spirit-filled communicators of His Word. Since the inspired author’s “ideas” and “principles” are true, they contain a moral imperative that demands a response. In other words an “idea” in the Bible is a message to be believed and acted on, not merely a notion and/or a guide to proper behavior. A message, then, is not an idea but the expected response to the idea.

The ancient message must be expressed in a way appropriate to the Christian gospel. A faithful Christian today is both similar and dissimilar to an ancient Israelite. Both share in Israel’s covenants, and both share the same spirit of faith, love, and hope. But the Christian now understands those covenants in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ—of His life, death, and resurrection—and he focuses his faith, love, and hope on the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The expositor must formulate his message in the light of that more complete theological knowledge.

Developing The Message

The wisdom literature for the most part does not come packaged for the preacher. Its literary genres differ more radically from the genre of the homily than any of the other literary genres attested in the Bible, making more difficult the expositor’s job of translating the messages as packaged in Proverbs to the homily. The Book of Proverbs was composed to be memorized, sung, and meditated on by children in the home under the tutelage of parents, not to be preached as homilies in a church. A word-for-word translation of the Hebrew into English, as in an interlinear, is frustrating and not intelligible to the reader. Likewise retaining the literary styles of the Book of Proverbs to develop the sermon often does not yield a sensible message. Congregations intuitively know the appropriate strategy for hearing a sermon, but they are mostly ignorant of the literary strategies for reading Proverbs. Just as the Hebrew of the original Book of Proverbs must be translated into smooth English, so also the literary forms of Proverbs must be translated into a flowing homily.

Applying The Message

The response to a message can be actualized and measured only by concrete actions. What does the preacher expect the congregation to do with the message when they step out of the church door back into the world? How will they incarnate his message? Without a clear notion of how to apply the sermon, the congregants will quickly forget the message and not transform it into action. They will have enjoyed the sermon, but little more than that will have been accomplished.

Conclusion

Six steps are essential in preaching the Book of Proverbs. First, by form and rhetorical criticism identify a textual unit within the anthology of proverbs and sayings and select thirteen texts that best represent and communicate the message of the book. Second, use a translation that best represents the text to the average reader of the congregation. Third, exegete the text and then consult a good commentary. Fourth, extract from the text the dynamic idea that explains the relationship of the proverbs in a grouping, including their continuities and discontinuities with each other, and that explains their place in God’s progressive revelation.[10] Fifth, translate the text’s abstract idea into a relevant Christian message. Sixth, for the development of the message translate the unfamiliar compositional form of the original text into the familiar form of the homily. Seventh, draw the message to conclusion by applying it to real-life situations.

Notes

1. Unless noted otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from Today’s New International Version.
2. Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and idem, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 15–31 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
3. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15, 67–75.
4. Ibid., 107-8.
5. Bruce K. Waltke and M. P. O’Connor, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 32.
6. James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 7.
7. Ibid., 334.
8. See Haddon Robinson, Biblical Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), chapter 2.
9. Gerhard von Rad, cited by Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 47.
10. Gerhard F. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 112.