Discernment | Knowable Word

Wisdom Delivers from Evil People

May 23, 2025 By Peter Krol

Wisdom delivers by enabling us to make different choices.

Delivering you from the way of evil,
From men of perverted speech,
Who forsake the paths of uprightness
To walk in the ways of darkness,
Who rejoice in doing evil
And delight in the perverseness of evil,
Men whose paths are crooked,
And who are devious in their ways (Prov 2:12-15).

"Deception Pass" by gemteck1 (2008), shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License — “Deception Pass” by gemteck1 (2008), Creative Commons Attribution

Deliverance FROM evil people. A discerning, godly person will choose not to join evildoers in their evildoing. This lifestyle means rejecting hurtful speech (Prov 2:12), deceitful cover-ups (Prov 2:13), godless delights (Prov 2:14), and devious behavior (Prov 2:15). The wise person knows that the most dangerous of all potential influencers are those who claim to follow God, but who by their actions have forsaken his way (Prov 2:13).

I’ll give an example. We once hired a contractor to upgrade one of the mechanical systems in our house. About a week after the work was completed, we discovered that we should have gotten a permit from the local code office for this work. So I called the contractor to ask if he had gotten one and had just forgotten to communicate with us about it. Now he claimed to believe in God, but his response was something like: “Is the code office after you? Just tell them you had only a little bit of work done, and they’ll leave you alone.”

This course of action was unacceptable to me; I knew that a deceitful cover-up would dishonor God and come back to haunt me someday. I should have researched the local ordinances more carefully, and I had to deal with the consequences. So I contacted the code office and told them of my situation, offering to do whatever I needed to do to make it right. The assistant at the office told me to fill out an application and include a note saying that I wasn’t aware of the permit requirement before the work completion date. Once I did, the permit was issued, and I don’t think they even charged a penalty.

The point is: I had to make a different choice. Part of that choice involved not being influenced by an outwardly godly but inwardly deceptive approach to the situation. Those who have heard and received God’s wisdom are equipped to label “the way of evil” correctly so they can avoid it and its consequences.

This post was first published in 2013 and is part of a series walking through Proverbs 1-9.

Wisdom Delivers

May 16, 2025 By Peter Krol

"Imperial Bodyguard" by Jay Adan (2010), shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License — “Imperial Bodyguard” by Jay Adan (2010), shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License

When we become wise, we receive heavy-duty protection and deliverance, but it’s important to realize how this protection works.

Discretion will watch over you,
Understanding will guard you (Prov 2:11)

It is not as though we may continue in our foolish ways and then hope for a sudden miraculous rescue from their consequences: “Lord, I cheated on my taxes and now the IRS is after me. Deliver me from their persecution!” Wisdom’s threat in Prov 1:28 should have rid us of any such misconception.

In Prov 2:11 it’s clear that the promised deliverance is more mundane than it is miraculous. It goes like this. When we listen to wisdom, God gives us discretion. He changes our hearts so that we desire what he desires. Then, when we act according to God’s desires – employing our God-given discretion to the daily decisions we face – we make different choices that result in different consequences. Instead of racing headfirst toward suffering and pain, we act in a more life-giving way. We will choose not to do evil, harmful things and to do good, stable things.

Over the next two Proverbs posts, we’ll see what such discretion delivers us from. After that, we’ll see what such discretion delivers us for. If you can’t wait, just read the rest of Prov 2:11-22 to see for yourself.

This post was first published in 2012 and is part of a series walking through Proverbs 1-9.

Proverbs Purpose #2: To Recognize Those Who Speak Wisdom

September 20, 2024 By Peter Krol

To understand words of insight (Prov 1:2)

Before we examine this statement further, a brief explanation of Hebrew poetry is in order. The Old Testament poets chiefly relied on a literary device called parallelism, which means that each unit of thought (usually one verse) contains two or more short lines that generally say either a similar thing or a different thing.^[1] The poet’s intention is for the lines to be compared with each other in order to arrive at their meaning. As Waltke states, “Proverbs cannot be interpreted correctly without asking the question: ‘How are the versets [the two lines] related to one another?’”^[2] Thus the reader should be careful not to force the lines apart and interpret them each in isolation (we’ll especially see the impact of this method when we reach verse 7).

So in Proverbs 1:2, we have two parallel lines that say similar things:

To know wisdom and instruction,
To understand words of insight.

The first half of the verse focuses on the abstract concept of wisdom; Solomon wants us to recognize certain facts as containing “wisdom.” The second half of the verse focuses on the concrete communication of wisdom; Solomon wants us to recognize, in any given interaction with other people, whether they are speaking words of wisdom or not.

love is all you need signage — Photo by Jacqueline Smith on Pexels.com

For example, when you see an advertisement on television, is it commending some wise behavior to you, or is it simply playing on your anxiety or passions in order to make a buck? When you speak with a friend, should you take her advice on a matter or respectfully decline it? As you sit in your class, can you tell whether the instructor is speaking truth in line with God’s perspective, or merely soliciting your servile obeisance to folly through bombastically sesquipedalian obfuscation? (In other words, is the prof leading you astray by impressing you with big words?)

In short, Solomon aims to equip us first to know what is wise and what is foolish so we can then identify whether a particular person in a particular situation is communicating wisdom or foolishness to us. In other words, he wants to train people to know wisdom.

Wisdom is: Knowing whether any particular counsel is the right thing to do in any particular situation.

^[1]I intend this as a gross oversimplification to keep things simple. For a far more nuanced discussion of Hebrew parallelism, see this article by Jeff Benner.

^[2]Waltke, Proverbs 1-15, p.45.

This post was first published in 2012.

Wisdom Delivers from Adulterous People

January 2, 2013 By Peter Krol

Yesterday we saw that wisdom delivers from evil people. Proverbs 2 moves on to yet another deliverance that occurs when we make different choices.

So you will be delivered from the forbidden woman,
From the adulteress with her smooth words,
Who forsakes the companion of her youth
And forgets the covenant of her God;
For her house sinks down to death,
And her paths to the departed;
None who go to her come back,
Nor do they regain the paths of life (Prov 2:16-19, ESV).

Deliverance FROM adulterous people. An understanding person will choose not to engage in sexual activity with anyone but a spouse. This lifestyle means avoiding even flirtatious speech (Prov 2:16) and emotional intimacy or companionship (Prov 2:17). God designed erotic activity to build oneness in marriage. Pursuing a sexual relationship outside of marriage results in a type of death (Prov 2:18) that leaves a lasting stain in one’s history and memory (Prov 2:19). A failure to repent of such a lifestyle will ultimately lead to everlasting death in hell.

We must understand that Solomon’s warning is not limited to sexual intercourse with a married person (one overly-literal way to interpret “going to” an “adulteress”). All sexual activity is, well, sexual. Thus, all sexual activity and flirtatious speech with someone other than a spouse is included in Solomon’s warning. The discerning person will stay far from that path, delighting in God’s generous plan for marriage. Solomon gives much more detail on this theme in Proverbs 5 and 7.

Note that, as with the first category, the most dangerous and deceitful relationships can be with those who attend church or who claim to follow the Lord. Some people who would never consider something clearly immoral, like spending the night with a prostitute, will give themselves to various forms of sexual activity with another person who has a smattering of religious commitment. In his perceptive satire Evangellyfish (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2012), Douglas Wilson illustrates such a scene through the eyes of a fictional youth pastor:

Every month or so the stress of youth ministry—dealing with the kids and all their issues—would get to Johnny, and so he would head on over to Brandy’s apartment to have her give him a neck rub, followed by her specialty back rub. But somehow her giving him a back rub always turned into him giving her a front rub, and then they would fall again.

…Brandy gave him a few back rubs back [when she was a student in his youth group] that brought them perilously close to the edge, but honestly, there was no front rubbing until after she graduated… That meant that when they finally followed the manner of all the earth, they were not violating the professional standards of youth ministry, but rather simply the seventh item on an ancient list which was from the Old Testament anyway.

Here in Proverbs 2:16-19, the adulterous woman “forgets the covenant of her God” (Prov 2:17). In chapter 7, she’s someone who offers sacrifices at God’s temple (Prov 7:14), so we can see that in some sense she was indeed a member of the community of God’s people. Such people can be chief among those who offer temptations. We must constantly guard our hearts and set up boundaries for healthy relationships. The wise – whether male or female – will exercise discernment and turn from “the forbidden woman.”