Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 1:1-7

The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel: 

To know wisdom and instruction,
To perceive the words of understanding, 

To receive the instruction of wisdom,
Justice, judgment, and equity;

To give prudence to the simple,
To the young man knowledge and discretion— 

A wise man will hear and increase learning,
And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel,
To understand a proverb and an enigma,
The words of the wise and their riddles. 

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
But fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 1:1-7 (NKJV)

By definition, God is omniscient, or "all-knowing." If you were God, it would be impossible for you to learn anything new. Solomon corroborates this premise in "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." Since none of us mere mortals is God, Solomon can be quite comfortable presuming that everyone reading this will need to start with the correct perspective on their relationship with God.

In a way, you can look at this as "if you aren't humble, you can't learn", which is something that makes sense even in a secular context. While humility is commonly associated with self-deprecation, I would argue it's more accurately about self-awareness. Yes, being humbled will look like deprecation if you're being taken down a few pegs, being removed from the throne of God, admitting your faults and failures and ignorances and so on, but this is not to just put you down, but to put you in your proper place, to strip away the prideful deceit about what you think you are so you can make peace with what you really are.

There is also a danger in the self-deprecation route in the effort to "make much of God", in that if God is not glorious based on who and what God is, thus requiring humanity to be thoroughly diminished, what does that say about our understanding of God? If God's attributes do not communicate superiority over us in every way, even with our greatest achievements, then we simply do not appreciate who God really is. We don't know our place, and the foolish among us resist being placed where we really belong.

To grow, to learn, we have to start by accepting that there is something we don't understand, that we are not God, and that God is worthy of our fear, our reverence, our awe.