Quotes from Peter Enns

Moses is not receiving a new bit of information. Rather, God is leaving no doubt in Moses' mind who it is that is speaking with him. God is saying to him: "I am Yahweh, the 'I AM,' the God of the patriarchs. The one you have heard about is the one speaking with you now.

Wisdom, in other words, was not an add-on, but was always central for obeying any law in the Bible. Laws, once we begin thinking about what they mean and how they are to be obeyed, actually push us to seek wisdom, which goes beyond mechanical obedience. It's not surprising, therefore, that ancient Jews came to think of wisdom and Law as inseparable—they need each other to work, like needing a pin number to access your cash.

The book doesn't limit God.

And here is the bigger point of all this: How the Bible addresses this one topic of child rearing is a window onto how inadequate (and truly unbiblical) a rulebook view of the Bible as a whole is.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

God wants us dead. Or better: God wants us to get used to the need to die, not once, but as a pattern for our lives.

The point is that Proverbs 26:4—5 doesn't tell me what to do. It wasn't designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.

But in resisting, we may actually be missing an invitation to take a sacred journey, where we let go of needing to be right and trust God regardless of what we feel we know or don't know.

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.

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.

Feeling like God is far away, disinterested, or dead to you is part of our Bible and can't be brushed aside. And that feeling—no matter how intense it may be, and even offensive as it may seem—is never judged, shamed, or criticized by God. Worshipping other gods or acting unjustly toward others gets criticized about every three sentences, but not this honest talk of feeling abandoned by God.

Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time.