¹My son, if you will receive my words and treasure my commandments within you, ²make your ear attentive to wisdom, incline your heart to understanding; ³for if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding; ⁴if you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures; ⁵then you will discern the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God.

Wisdom is not definable in one short, pithy statement. It takes an entire book of the Bible—the Book of Proverbs—to lay it out, describe it, and define it. Those who seek wisdom in humanistic books or limit its application to practical decision making find wisdom elusive. And that is because they want a cheap, easy-to-attain but poor substitute for wisdom, not true wisdom itself.

In the persona of a father teaching his son, Solomon (the author of Proverbs) addresses the heart. As he did in chapter one in picturing wisdom as a woman calling out in the public square, he continues to personify wisdom as feminine and an object of desire for the young man, his son. He expands this metaphor later by picturing foolishness as a temptress wooing the attention of a young man.

A young man can be wooed by a woman of virtue and wisdom into life and blessing, or wooed by an adulterous woman into self-destruction. What powerful imagery for teaching about ordering one’s life!

Like any good teacher, Solomon begins by laying out the path of blessings, outlining the most important life decisions a person can make. He presents three propositional statements, in the form of “If-then” statements. With the word “then” is clearly implied, the sense of these three assertions is, “If this is true for you, then you should do that.”

Let’s first apply Proverbs 2:1-2 to ourselves: if we accept the words of wisdom and genuinely desire wise instructions, then we should listen carefully and make it our heart’s desire to understand wisdom. In other words, our goal is to comprehend the insights of wisdom teaching, not just regurgitate pithy statements. Memorizing proverbial statements (and there are twenty-one chapters full of them) is not enough. We must set our hearts on understanding wisdom conceptually, so that we internalize the wise sayings themselves as examples of wisdom and thereby grow in our sense of wisdom.

Second, in Proverbs 2:3, our emphatic proclamation that we want discernment should be reflected reflect in what we say. Our thirst for discernment should lead us to ask questions, inquire of others, seek the answer to “Why?” This is not just a desire to learn the right proverb to help us discern a given situation, but to internalize discernment by understanding the wisdom behind the proverbs.

Third, Proverbs 2:4-5 declares that if we desire wisdom as much as we desire wealth, we will discover the ultimate discernment and knowledge for life. This isn’t a command as in the first two “If-then” assertions, but a resulting discovery. When we desire wisdom at this level, we attain the universal goal of living life well. People everywhere are motivated by that same desire, but we are sinful beings who have fallen into seeking to live life well in all the wrong ways. Our desire for a life well-lived has become self-centered, leaving out God. “Professing to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:22), writes the apostle Paul of people when they spiral away from faith in God.

But the person who seeks true wisdom and discernment will “discern the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.” So then, the insight, the discernment, the true knowledge of how to live well comes back to understanding the importance of the fear of the Lord, which is rooted in the knowledge of God. It makes perfect sense, then, to live in complete submission to God as our Lord, holding ourselves accountable to Him, living our lives for His pleasure. Then we will find life. Then we will live and grow in wisdom and discernment.

Lord, You are more to me than anything I might acquire here; You are the one I seek, for in You is all wisdom and discernment.