How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  That is how Proverbs works, and with that, now is as good a time as any to repeat my really big point in all of this about where we are heading: Proverbs models for us how the Bible as a whole works.

  The entire Bible, like Proverbs, is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse. The Bible as a whole demands the same wisdom approach as Proverbs.

  Once we come to see the entire Bible as a book of wisdom, we will come to know a Bible that opens up for us a deeper, more life-affirming, and frankly more captivating journey of faith than one that is preoccupied with coloring inside the lines.

  When reading the Bible—not just Proverbs—we never escape the responsibility of having to ask ourselves, “How does this connect to here and now, to my specific circumstances?” And, as I said, the answer to that question is never simply a matter of reading the book as if following a list of unalterable instructions, but of reading the moment.

  The Bible is a book of wisdom and so funnels us toward taking responsibility to remain open and curious about what it means to live life in the presence of God.

  And an Even Bigger (and Final) Point

  I still understand that seeing the Bible this way might cause some a bit of concern. I get it. After all, if the Bible is God’s word to us but isn’t clear and direct, what good is it? If we see the Bible as a book of wisdom that makes us figure things out rather than dispensing unambiguous divine instruction shaped for our eyes and ears, it may seem like we’re caving in to a “less than” view of the Bible that isn’t of much practical use for anyone—a Plan B because Plan A unraveled.

  But again, nothing could be farther from the truth. Wisdom is Plan A. Is it ever.

  Proverbs goes out of its way to make sure we see that wisdom is worthy of our full attention, deserving of a central place in our approach to faith. Proverbs does this by tying wisdom to creation itself.

  For one thing, Proverbs puts wisdom in the Garden of Eden. Wisdom, we are told, is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her* (3:18).

  In the story of Adam and Eve (Gen. 2–3), we read that God forms Adam out of earth, breathes life into him, and then gives him one and only one command: You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die (2:16–17). As the story goes, Eve is soon tricked by a crafty serpent to take a bite of fruit from the tree. She then gives it to Adam—who apparently had been standing there all along watching this transaction happen—and he takes a bite.

  And so they die. Only they don’t . . . But they do.

  What actually happens is that the unlucky couple is driven out of the garden—exiled, as it were—so that they might be barred from partaking of the tree of life. Having access to the tree of life is symbolic of spiritually being in God’s presence. Death means being alienated from God.

  We see life and death used the same way in other passages in the Bible, which likewise speak of being “driven out” of somewhere—namely, the land of Israel. In Ezekiel 37:1–14, Judah’s exile to Babylon is a “death,” and the nation is depicted as a mass of dry, lifeless human bones that God brings to “life” (brings back to the land). Likewise, Deuteronomy 30:11–20 promises “life” in the land as a blessing for obedience and “death” outside of the land (exile) for disobedience.

  Wisdom as a “tree of life” in Proverbs is the solution to this problem of “death,” of alienation from God. Wisdom opens up the gates of Paradise and gives us back access to life that was lost. Not life literally, but symbolically—a quality of life, a life in harmony with God and creation.

  Now, I know that alert Christian readers may balk a bit at this. Drawing us to God is supposed to be Jesus’s role. He is the Savior. I get it. But the New Testament ties Jesus to wisdom, which we’ll definitely get to later. All I am saying here is that wisdom in the Old Testament is a big deal because of what it is able to do—or better, undo: the curse of “exile” on Adam and Eve.

  Proverbs also ties wisdom farther back to the dawn of time: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he* established the heavens (3:19). What it means for God to have founded the earth by wisdom is hardly obvious, but we don’t need to try to work it all out. It’s enough to observe that wisdom and creation are inseparable—without wisdom, there is no creation.

  Proverbs 8:22–31 has more to say about it. Here wisdom is depicted as a female character who declares that she was beside God in the act of creation, rejoicing when God formed the earth, heavens, oceans, springs, mountains, and fields. Creation—all there is, which we humans cannot fathom—is God’s grand act of wisdom, so to speak.

  And that’s why wisdom for our daily lives is worth seeking and heeding!

  When we seek to live our lives “by wisdom,” we are participating in the “life force” by which God created the universe. You may have a less Star Warsy way of putting it, but it’s the best I can do on short notice.

  When instead of simply reacting to a jerk coworker or an internet troll, we pause and calmly seek wisdom for that moment, even if imperfectly (for surely we are all on the journey of gaining wisdom), we are tapping into something big that created and sustains the cosmos. We are in a sense cocreating with the Creator—not bringing the cosmos into existence (obviously), but creating our own life path by the choices we make.

  That’s why I think of living a life of wisdom as a “sacred responsibility.” It is a responsibility because God is not a helicopter parent. And it is sacred because all of our efforts, big and small, to live wisely are sacred acts of bowing to and seeking alignment with the Wise Creator.

  And so when we do the kinds of things Proverbs goes on and on about, like holding our tongue, refusing to answer back, being patient, speaking tenderly, putting the needs of others before our own, doing a thoughtful and kind deed, we are aligning with the life force that echoes back to the foundation of all there is.

  So, again, wisdom is sort of a big deal.

  In fact, Proverbs 8:22–31 adds quite a remarkable twist to all this. Wisdom seems not to have been created by God, like everything else, but “acquired” by God and “born” of God before the act of creation (see verses 22–24).* Language like this led some ancient Jewish readers (before the time of Jesus) to an interesting possibility. Since wisdom was acquired or born before creation, wisdom would be as close to God as you can get. Of course, we have to remember that this is all metaphorical language, a way of talking about wisdom as a basic characteristic of the Creator. But one Jewish text written near the time of Jesus, the Wisdom of Solomon, took this idea to its logical conclusion.*

  In chapter 10, this author describes wisdom as doing things that the Old Testament attributes to God—like creating Adam, delivering the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, and a number of other things. That doesn’t mean this ancient author actually equated God and wisdom, but, taking his cue from Proverbs 8, God and wisdom are like two peas in a pod. For this author wisdom is God’s breath, the ruler of the world, seated by God’s throne.

  All this is very interesting (to me, at least) but let’s get to why I am taking up a couple of paragraphs talking about it. Building off of Proverbs 8, at least some ancient Jews ascribed to wisdom something approaching divine status to act as a mediator between God and humanity, to make God accessible to us here and now.

  That’s the key point for us: accessible.

  Times had changed for this author. The days of old, when prophets and inspired writers walked among them, was over. But wisdom was still there as she always was, even from the very beginning of creation. And the Wisdom of Solomon goes on to say that wisdom enters human souls and makes them friends of God, . . . for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom (7:27–28).

  This ancient Jewish text is already articulating for us what I’ve been getting at for some pages now: to know God is to live with wisdom, who is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars (Wisd. of Sol. 7:29).

 
Wisdom became a prominent image for Judaism, which sets the stage for how the New Testament writers processed the idea of wisdom through a Jesus lens—the place held by wisdom would now be held by Jesus, “God with us,” who, as Paul put it, became for us wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30). And this divine force by which all things were created, called “the Word” in John’s Gospel, clearly echoes wisdom’s role in Proverbs 8:

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1:1–3)

  We’ll get back to Judaism and Jesus soon enough. I only mention it here briefly to let us glimpse how big a deal wisdom is in Proverbs, in early Judaism, and among the early followers of Jesus. And more important, whether we are talking about wisdom or Jesus, the end benefit is to make humans “friends of God.”

  Living in harmony with God and others amid the complex and changing circumstances of history and how we live in our time and place simply don’t happen according to a script. When we seek to live by wisdom, we will quickly see the need to move beyond the words on the page in order to make them our own. And when we do that, we embrace the mystery of faith by tapping into the life force of creation itself.

  So, once again, wisdom is God’s Plan A. Anything else, which includes thinking of the life of faith as primarily a script to follow verbatim, is settling for something “less than.”

  The Little and Hidden Things

  No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Yes, today I’ll work on greed. I will address that problem between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and noon, and then after lunch I’ll move on to tackle pride between 1:00 and 3:00.” I suppose someone might approach life like this, or at least try, but such a person will soon find out, by about 9:05, that life just happens and you have to be ready to be wise in the moment, whatever is called for: watch what you say to your children; don’t let that compliment go to your head; think carefully how you engage a fool; be careful how you view money.

  Wisdom is about being trained to be ready for the little and hidden things, the unscripted day-to-day moments that sneak up on us, like dealing with a fool, struggling with wealth, or disciplining a child. Other kinds of moments occupy Proverbs, like those having to do with fairness, justice, integrity, self-discipline, family, a work ethic, moderation, humility, truthfulness, friendship, patience, guarding your mouth, letting go of control, living in the moment, not needing to be right—the little things that make up the successive moments of our lives.

  It’s a shame that talking about wisdom takes us into some abstract territory—like a life force or being with God at the beginning—but it is exactly wisdom like this that we need to live well in this unscripted, unpredictable, out-of-our-control, disordered existence of ours.

  Think of it this way: the same wisdom that was with God when God “ordered” creation (Gen. 1) is available to us as we seek to “order” the chaos of our lives. When we seek and follow wisdom in the precious few years given to us, we are truly accepting a sacred responsibility to live intentionally in the Spirit’s presence. And what that looks like will be different for each of us and will likely change through the seasons of our lives.

  My midlife years brought up a lot of things that were off my radar in my twenties and thirties. I’m working on my stuff, and so are you, and that’s the point—we are walking our paths, working through the unique moments of our lives and asking, “What does wisdom look like here and now?” We are doing our best to wing it well, by neither ignoring the Bible nor treating it as a recipe, but by accepting its invitation for something far better: living in the “energy” of the divine creative force, which is another way of saying the more familiar “living in the presence of God’s Spirit.”

  Wisdom like that doesn’t cultivate the worry and hand-wringing that so many experience about whether we can be absolutely sure we are doing the right thing in God’s “perfect will.” God’s perfect will seems to be for us to seek and follow wisdom. This path is a serious one; it requires determination, discipline, humility, and vigilance and is hardly the comfortable and predictable way we might choose for ourselves. But it is not overbearing or burdensome. Wisdom, like a good parent, is patient and supportive, gives us freedom, and encourages and empowers us to work things out as best as we can.

  To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.

  Think of the “stupid little thing” that last set you off, that got you unhinged, that decentered your soul and caused you pain. What was it? Maybe reading this book (ha-ha, I’m hilarious). An unfulfilled want. A harsh word you uttered. Pricked pride and offense taken. A worry over something you can’t control.

  Wisdom means to invade those nooks and crannies of our lives that we aren’t even always aware of, the places our egos fight to keep hidden, the real us behind the facade we work so hard to prop up.

  To live by faith—to live wisely—means living with an ever-increasing awareness of the hidden things, not simply a detached general knowledge that, say, “Money can be harmful,” but a deep knowledge of ourselves, a true self-awareness of what money is doing to me . . . right now.

  One of wisdom’s great rewards is the true, raw, unfiltered, unchecked, honest knowledge of oneself. And this is anything but cheap self-help.

  “Know thyself” might have been coined by Socrates and may sound like “secular” or “humanistic” advice, but it isn’t. To gain honest knowledge of oneself is to see wisdom at work. In fact, one way of stating the goal of the life of faith is entering deeper and deeper into that kind of wisdom.

  Show me a person of faith who knows herself well, and I will show you a true spiritual mentor—a truly wise person.

  To skirt the difficult journey by using, of all things, the Bible as an impersonal one-size-fits-all list of dos and don’ts to shelter oneself in self-deception and a false sense of religious security blunts wisdom’s sharp surgical edge.

  Ironic, isn’t it? What may appear to be the most biblical approach to the life of faith—“Do what the Bible says”—misses how the Bible actually works.

  If we want a faith that is truly vibrant and active, we have to get used to the fact that God’s presence comes not when we find the right passage, but when we embrace with courage—and anticipation—the way of wisdom.

  * * *

  We came to this point mainly (and not surprisingly) by way of the book of Proverbs, though already a few other portions of the Bible have crept in. And to sum up this entire chapter, wisdom is a really big deal in the Bible and if we miss it, we’ll miss how the Bible actually works.

  But now, we move to another part of the Bible to see wisdom at work—a part of the Bible that at first blush does indeed look like God’s helicopter textbook. And yet even here wisdom reigns.

  Especially here.

  Chapter 3

  God’s Laws: Evasive and Fidgety Little Buggers

  Some Details Would Be Nice, O Lord

  If you’ve ever tried reading through the Bible daily from front to back, you may have noticed, besides the fact that it takes forever, that front-loaded are a lot of laws, 613 from what I understand (I never actually counted). After the book of Genesis, which is something of an extended introduction to the story of Israel, the next four books are largely taken up with commands of various sorts that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai, who dutifully relayed them to the Israelites waiting below.

  These laws cover all sorts of scenarios concerning how Israelites are to treat each other and how they are to worship God. They are also, for many readers, hard to get through. You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress and ordain a priest. And so you move on to something that can hold your attention better, like the books of Joshua and Judges, in which—finally—people get impaled, have tent pegs driven into their h
eads, or are just generally dismembered. (Gather the kids and read out loud Joshua 10:26 and Judges 4:21 and 19:29.)

  But here’s the thing. Although we might not see the point of all these laws, God seems awfully intent on making sure the Israelites obey each and every one of them. Regardless of how we might scratch our heads about whether God actually cares about not using a chisel when building a stone altar or decoding exactly which four-legged insects we may eat, these commands aren’t optional—which is what makes them commands.

  In fact, penalties for disobeying some of these laws can get pretty severe, which in an uncomfortably large number of cases means being cut off from the group or executed. And not to pile it on, but Deuteronomy’s warnings against disobedience get rather gruesome, including: drought, famine, blindness, having your children snatched away from you, and being forced to eat them because you’re starving (see 27:11–28:68).

  And yet, given their uncompromising and stern tone, biblical laws have a surprising quality: they tend to be ambiguous, which should be rather disconcerting given what is at stake.

  When my family goes away for a few days and I ask someone to take care of our menagerie of dogs, cats, and rabbits (which at one point numbered as many as seven), I—the family administrator—leave instructions that could be used to illustrate one or more diagnoses in the DSM-V:

  In the morning the dogs need to go out between 6:00 and 8:00, depending on how late you let them out the night before. Give them each 1 cup of dry food mixed with 1½ tablespoons of wet food and a dash of water to create more gravy. Place the bowls on opposite sides of the kitchen, so they don’t get distracted. When you let them out, keep it to five minutes if you’re not outside with them, but make it longer if you are, unless it’s overly humid and/or hot. When they come in, they get a snack: the chicken treats in the morning, biscuits in the afternoon, and those teeth-cleaning things that look like toothbrushes in the evening. All three boxes are on the fridge, in order. Check their water twice a day and if it is less than half full, fill it.