Proverbs in general (not just the book) has always fascinated me. How a person and take a simple sentence and have is so jam packed with meaning and truth, amazes me. For example: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link [1]. We could apply this to so many different aspects of our life where this is true. When Solomon began compiling these proverbs he explicitly gave it a purpose in Proverbs 1:1-7 (New Living Translation).

¹ These are the proverbs of Solomon, David’s son, king of Israel.

² Their purpose is to teach people wisdom and discipline,
to help them understand the insights of the wise.

³ Their purpose is to teach people to live disciplined and successful lives,
to help them do what is right, just, and fair.

⁴ These proverbs will give insight to the simple,
knowledge and discernment to the young.

⁵ Let the wise listen to these proverbs and become even wiser.
Let those with understanding receive guidance

⁶ by exploring the meaning in these proverbs and parables,
the words of the wise and their riddles.

⁷ Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and discipline.”

How much more clearer does that need to be? Solomon, in tune with God, wants us to be wise and live successful lives.  Not only does he want us to do that, as responsible adults, he wants us to teach the young ones (from young adults, teenagers and children alike) a guild on how to grow up to be wise, right and fair. And for those of you who like the point system, if you are already wise and you listen to these you’ll get bonus wise points!

Now if you are rolling your eye, I’ll forgive you but, you might want to notice what Solomon says at the very end. If you choose to ignore words of wisdom and guidance on what is right, he outright calls you a stupid. If someone tells you that if you go through that red light, the traffic camera will issue you a ticket, will you 1) listen, and will you 2) not go through the red light? If you said no to both than I and your wallet might think you are $50 stupid. This is all that proverbs are. By the end of this series they will tell us where the red lights will be in our life, and give us an idea of what the results will be if we do or do not choose to listen.

Love Peace and Afro Grease,
Ivonne

Have you ever played that silly game where someone whispers something into one person’s ear and then that person whispers that same message in the next person’s ear? Then message passes down the line people and suddenly at the end of the line the 3 sentence messages is one sentence and chances are it isn’t even close to what the originally message was?

We also get this same scenario in nature. If you follow a food chain, the levels of certain nutrients diminish as you go down the chain. In every chain there is a loss of matter and energy at each level, sometimes even as much as 90% [1]. If I were to choose to eat a rabbit meat instead of the green vegetation that it eats, I’m not going to get as much iron as the rabbit got.

You could probably use this as a defense for vegetarianism, but that’s not my point. The point is that the farther you go from the source the more diluted the message will be. The farther you get from the bible’s message the more diluted the message will be. I would like to get my conviction from the bible instead of what some preacher said about what some person wrote about a book in the bible.

No, I don’t have a theology degree and chances are you don’t either. But, I figure, if we go through the bible together we might catch something that the preacher who read the book about some book in the bible might have missed. If you are up for the challenge, with my next post, I’d like to start with the book of Proverbs.

Love Peace and Afro Grease,
Ivonne