 Thank you, Kimberly, and before I forget, I wanted to mention that she has written not one book on wisdom but four, and she has lived it out as a wife. We're going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary next month, and so I thank God for what a gift she is. But that one chapter in wisdom literature, Proverbs 31, written by the Queen Mother of King Lemuel, or written for the king, she's written four books on that one chapter after giving Bible studies for women for over 20 years. So chosen and cherished, beloved and blessed, graced and gifted, and finally legacy of love. She began when she was a wife and a mom. She continued with the second and third volume when she became a mother-in-law, and by the time she'd got to the fourth volume, she'd become a grandmother, too, living out all of this. So thank you for introducing me, but this is my revenge. What a joy it is to be with you and to focus together on this important theme of divine wisdom, because I think we all sense that we stand in need of divine wisdom now, perhaps more than ever before. And so what I'd like to do is to open up the Word of God, and I'd like to do it in a way that starts off in a personal note, because wisdom for me was something I encountered for the very first time at the age of 14. I had just been through my third round trip in the Allegheny County juvenile court system. I won't go into all of the crimes, misdemeanors, and felonies for the sake of my beloved mother's memory, but it had been about two or three years of torment for my parents, and I had been busted again and again, and I'd narrowly escaped a sentence to Warrandale, a detention center where our next-door neighbor had been raped his first night, and he hung himself the next morning. It was like hell on earth for me. And so to avoid that was of the utmost importance. And so when I heard that I was invited to a retreat one weekend, I wasn't interested in religion, but I was in Cathy, and so I went. And I never connected with her, but our Lord connected with me the very first night, because this speaker kept speaking words of wisdom about Jesus Christ, and how he had given his life for me, and how he was inviting me to do the same, and how he had paid a debt he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay, and I sat there squirming because I owed probably a bigger debt than all of the other 200 high school kids put together. By the time that weekend retreat was over, I had returned the favor and given my life to our Lord like he had done for me. About a week later, all of my friends figured it out, and I stopped getting invited to all of the parties that I probably shouldn't have been going to anyway. And I went and I tried to read the Bible, and I must admit it wasn't easy. I was falling asleep, and then I was asking our Lord for the gift of the Holy Spirit to awaken in me something that I didn't have on my own. And I remember vividly reading the book of James, and in the first chapter I found something that I seized upon. Let me share it with you. Here's chapter one, beginning in verse three. Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials. I'm like, seriously? How do you even think that way? For you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, and let perseverance be perfect so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing, but the next verse of the key. But if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and he will be given it. I read it again. What's the catch? It seemed to be a kind of unconditional promise. If any of you lacks wisdom, if any of you lacks wisdom, well I would be the one who lacked wisdom at that point in my life, and I knew it. I had made every dumb mistake in the books, and I basically was responding to God because I was tired of getting caught, and I was afraid of being punished. But I recognized that wasn't enough because I could see on the faces of my mother and father that I had broken their hearts, time and again. And I didn't even know how to get my life right. If any of you lacks wisdom, that would be me. He should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, without reproach, without finding fault, you know, and it just struck me that if God had heard me say, please give me wisdom, I think I pictured God saying, you? You've got to be kidding. You wouldn't know what to do with it, because I didn't know what to do with it. I wasn't even sure what wisdom was. If it had come up and shook my hand or bit me or, I mean, what is wisdom? All I knew is that I needed it. All I read is that God promised it, and it was an unconditional pledge. But he should ask in faith, not doubting, since he is a man of two minds and unstable in his ways. And so I took my prayer journal that I'd just begun, and I began praying every day for wisdom and insight, along with discipline and diligence to live out whatever God gave me in the form of wisdom and insight. I'm not sure how many days have gone by since then, way back around 1973. But most days I have continued to ask for wisdom, because wisdom I have found is a lot like humility. You can't wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, finally. I have it, because it's always something you need more of. And the saints show us that as they grow in wisdom and humility and sanctity, they become more and more aware of their weakness and their ignorance. So throughout high school, I read through the Bible, and I must admit, it caught fire. It became something that was the most important treasure for me. By the time I was graduating, some two and a half years later, I was on my third round trip through Sacred Scripture. The Old Testament I found rather daunting, especially Leviticus. But when I got to wisdom literature, as I was taught, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Canicle of Canicles, the song of Solomon, I found material that I could really understand. It was personal. It was practical. It helped me in my relationships with my parents, my brothers and sister. And at the same time, it also showed me as an adolescent teenager what to do with my hormones by entrusting them to our Lord. You read in Proverbs 5, 6, and 7 all about loose women, and I knew some of them. And I also recognized the weakness of adolescent males because I was one. And so the invitation that you read about in Proverbs 8 where lady wisdom, divine wisdom is calling to young men to recognize their need. This is something that I latched on to again and again. In fact, if you have a Bible, turn with me to Proverbs chapter 9. And if you don't have a Bible, ask yourself why. So in chapter 9, we read in verse 1, wisdom has built her house. She has set up her seven pillars. Now wisdom is the personification of a divine attribute, but it's even more. Wisdom is the power of God and the intelligence that brought order to the whole universe. But what is this house that has been built on seven pillars? Wisdom proposed that it's actually the book of Proverbs, which is easily and neatly divisible into a seven-fold structure. But I think it probably pertains to two other things, to creation itself as well as to the temple, more on that later. But the very fact that Proverbs is attributed to Solomon in its compositional origin and in its canonical form indicates that there's a lot here. Wisdom has built her house. She has set up her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beast. She has mixed her wine. She has also set her table. That's what I'd like to do with you this evening. I can't really build the house. I can barely have enough time to lay the foundation, but I can set the table for all of my teammates who are going to be speaking beginning tomorrow morning on different aspects of divine wisdom in the Old Testament as well as the new. And by the way, just for those of you who keep track, Gregor the Great in the Moralia actually suggests that the seven pillars whereby divine wisdom builds the house pertain to the seven sacraments. Interesting. But it shows us that the literal sense of Scripture is often a figurative expression. So we've got to be open not only to the historical meaning and antiquity, but to what the Holy Spirit wants to say to us today. So I want to set the table about wisdom by starting off looking at wisdom that is there outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. You find it, for example, in the philosophers. In fact, the notion of philosophy is what? The love of wisdom. And so when you read Plato and especially Aristotle, you discover that wisdom is an intellectual virtue that pagans recognize. And what is a virtue? Well, a virtue is to the soul what muscles are to the body that give us life and strength. They enable us to do more and more good more and more easily. And so for Aristotle in the Nicomachean ethics book six, you have in wisdom something of an intellectual virtue that needs to be cultivated in order to bring order to your life. This is something that all of us need. We need a way to bring order to our life. And so for Aristotle, wisdom is that. At the same time, we recognize from the wisdom literature that it's not simply an intellectual virtue. It's also one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. You can read all about that in Isaiah 11, where we hear about the servant who is anointed by the Spirit and given what? Wisdom along with all of the other gifts of the Spirit. So it's not just an intellectual virtue which we cultivate. It is also a spiritual gift that we receive. And for Augustine, this great saint tells us that wisdom as a gift enables us to judge things according to divine truth. How can I direct all of my thoughts, my actions according to the Word of God, according to Christ himself who wants to exercise his Lordship in my life? Actually how do I coordinate all of these conflicting desires, these competing loves? And in fact, St. Thomas Aquinas in the second part of the, second part of the summa, question 45, shows us how this gift of the Holy Spirit is crucial for us to live a spiritual life because it is the means by which we order our loves. As you heard from Kimberly's introduction, I've got a lot of loves in my life beginning with her, and then our six kids, and our 18 grandkids, and the in-laws too. Not to mention my colleagues and our neighbors, as well as pizza and guitar and books and more books, 50,000 and counting. This guy's got issues, all right? And so I've got loves, but there is one love that is more highly ordered than all the others and that is what? The love of God. I mean, even in the natural moral law, we have by natural reason the capacity to recognize through natural theology that there is a God and that He is the source of our existence and He is the end of my life as well. And so wisdom orders my life to recognize that I should love God more than I love myself whereas I should love my neighbors as I love myself. So in questions 44 and 45, St. Thomas unpacks how this works because you've got to love God more than you love self. You've got to love all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and He breaks down the heart as being the will, but the mind is the higher power of the soul. The soul as the lower part, but then even the physical, the exterior actions, everything we do ought to be ordered to God. That's the first principle in the order of love. And what's the second? Well, the love of self. And then of course the love of neighbor as self, but we should love God more than self because goodness is the object of our love and God is infinite goodness and we have life and that is good and so we should love ourselves and our neighbors as ourselves. But as we assess our lives and try to determine our direction and make decisions, we have to see, well, that I have to love God more than self. I have to love myself. I have to love my neighbor as myself as Augustine points out, I've got to be willing to lay my life down for my friends because giving my body for my loved ones is something utterly reasonable, although surrendering my soul through sin would never be reasonable. That's not love of self or love of neighbor. And so just getting a mental map on the spiritual terrain of life, as we call it, as reality as we live it, this is what the spiritual gift of wisdom does and it builds upon the intellectual virtue just as grace builds upon nature. So the supernatural gift of wisdom builds upon this natural virtue that we should still be striving for and all of that is great. And I was an undergraduate at Grove City College and I got to study Aristotle and the Nippon Nicomachean Ethics as well as Aquinas and it was an evangelical Presbyterian College. But I learned a lot about that and I appreciated it, but not nearly as much as the sources for what I read in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and that is sacred scripture. And so when you go back to the Bible and look at this part of the Tanakh as Jewish readers call it, that's what we call the Hebrew Bible. The Torah, Tanakh is an acronym so you have the Torah, then you have the Neveim and the Ketuvim. And the Ketuvim, so you have the law, the prophets and the writings. And the Ketuvim includes this section that we call wisdom literature. And this is where we learn all about the gift of God in wisdom and how it's traceable back to creation, but how it orders our relationships, especially in the family. And how ultimately it is a gift that God confers upon the King of Israel, the Son of David. Solomon himself becomes the font of wisdom and all of those layers are important for our consideration of what it means to read the Word of God and receive the gift of divine wisdom. As Kimberly mentioned, we hear in Proverbs again and again that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So if the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, what kind of fear are we talking about? Well, we distinguish between two kinds of fear. One kind is servile fear, which is the fear of getting punished, the fear of getting caught, and it's a fear that is proper to us as creatures, because as creatures of God we are servants and we are to serve Him, and if we refuse to, we will pay the consequences. And so the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and it starts with that kind of servile fear because let's admit it, we're weak. We don't always do things out of pure love. Our love of self is often greater than our love of God. And that is dangerous. Saint Augustine points out that there are two cities, two kingdoms, the city of God and the city of man. The city of God is defined by the love of God even to the point of the contempt of self where we offer ourselves, where we lay down our lives for the love of God. On the other hand, the city of man, which is really diabolical, is based upon the love of self even to the point of contempt of God. Not that we have any evidence of that in our world today. But it's not just in our world, it's in our hearts. And so we've got to uproot the weeds of this sort of disordered selfishness. We are in a certain sense miserable self-worship, worshiping wretches at times. So servile fear is where it begins. But the other kind of fear, the real fear that we want to cultivate is called the filial fear, because it's not just the fear of a slave, a servant, a creature. It's the fear of a child, of offending the parents. At one level in high school, I discovered that fear when I saw the faces of my parents and I realized how often I had lied to them, how often they were humiliated by me, how often they were ashamed of what I had done. And they didn't even know how to half of it. But when I saw their faces, I recognized they don't deserve this. And so out of love for them, I began a slow comeback. Well, if Fred and Molly Lujan deserve that kind of filial fear at the natural human level as their son whom they loved, how much more should we cultivate that supernatural filial fear, because we are children of God? God is our Father through the gift of Christ, who bestows the spirit of adoption upon us so that we become children of God, even more than a child of my natural parents, both of whom have been called to the Lord. And so, servile fear as creatures, filial fear as beloved children. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But we also hear in the New Testament that perfect love casts out all fear. And that's a wonderful thought. But how many of us can really claim in all honesty that our love has now been perfected? I'm going to put my hand down. Far from it. So perfect love casts out all fear, but our fear of the Lord is what opens us to the gift of love and that love is going to perfect us as children of God. And so we hear in the scriptures all about how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But we also hear in Proverbs 3, as well as in Proverbs 11, that to those who attain wisdom, it is the tree of life. That's a remarkable claim, especially when you recognize that the phrase tree of life isn't found anywhere else except for where? In Genesis. Turn with me to Genesis and we'll see the two trees, the two kinds of wisdom. As you know, in Genesis 2, God breathed in the atom's nostrils, the breath of life, and so he became a living being, a nephish. Genesis 2, verse 7. Then 10 verses later, he gives this command to Adam saying, basically, you can eat from all of the trees except for one. And then besides the warning, there is that punitive threat. And what is it? For the day you eat of it, you will surely die. And why is that so significant? Because for alert readers, when they turn the page and they look at the next chapter, they discover that the serpent has entered the garden as an intruder and as a tempter for the purpose of targeting their life. And what does this liar from the beginning say? You will not die. In fact, he goes so far as to say, God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And so what do they do? They go ahead and eat. And why? Because the next verse reads, when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, wait a minute, it wasn't poisonous? No. She saw that it was good for food. This wasn't an optical illusion. And that it was desirable, it was a light to the eyes, so it was not only good to the taste, it was a delight to the eyes. And then to top it off, it was to be desired to make one wise. Hachma. Whoa, the Hebrew word for wisdom. So what does she do? She took of its fruit and she ate. And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Notice that's not in the English translations. It is in the Hebrew. It's also in the Greek. It's in the Latin, but over half of the English translations I have don't bother to add, and he was with her. So you've got to ask the question, why didn't he speak up? Well, I would say whatever the reason for that silence was, it was damnable. He should have been speaking up on behalf of his bride. But in any case, they both ate. And what happened? Well, what did God tell them that would happen? The day you eat of it, you'll surely. Die. And God is not in the business of issuing idle threats or going back on his word, but as soon as they ate what happened, they both dropped dead. They hit the ground, stirred up the dust. No, they didn't. But wait, rewind the tape, go back to Genesis 2.17, the day you eat of it, you'll deserve to die. Is that what he said? No. You'll begin that long, slow and painful process of dying. No. You'll be sentenced to die to be carried out at some later day. No, the day when you eat of it, you will surely die. You won't die. And guess what? They didn't die. Or did they? Professor Moberly writes an article entitled, did the serpent get it right? Because on the surface, it looks that way. But when you go back and you listen more carefully to what we hear in Genesis 2, verse 7, God breathed into Adam's nostrils, the breath of life, and that's how man became a living being. So the first breath that the first man draws is not just oxygen like the other animals that were made on the sixth day. The first breath that man draws, he's breathing the breath of God. This is the spirit of God. This is the spirit of divine adoption. He had received life that was human, natural and physical, but he'd also received simultaneously life that wasn't just human, but divine. It wasn't just natural. It was supernatural. It wasn't just finite and earthly, but infinite and heavenly. There's life and then there's life. Well, if that's the case, what else is true? Then there is death and then there is death. And so what does it take to protect natural human life? Well, you've got to be careful of serpents and other things. But what's the only way you can lose divine life? By giving consent to what we read in 1 John 5.17 is what? Mortal sin, the sin unto death, Thanatos, the same term in 1 John that you find in the Septuagint there in Genesis 2, verse 7. So guess what? The day they ate, they died. They lost divine life, which isn't less of a death, but infinitely more than if a serpent elatched onto them and bit them with lethal poison. And so if there is life and then there's life, there's death. And then there is death. And they entered into a kind of suicide pact committing spiritual suicide. Why? Because they wanted the natural life that's physical in their honeymoon suite called Eden. And so she saw that it was desirable to make one wise. You see, there's wisdom and then there is wisdom. There is the wisdom that is natural and human that protects human life and then orders it. But there's also a divine wisdom that comes with the spirit of God. And all you got to do to stuff that divine wisdom out is to prefer the creature to the Creator who is blessed forever. Would you call that idolatry? And what is idolatry? Well, it is overvaluing something relative and relativizing and undervaluing that which is absolute and divine. And so idolatry is there at the root of our sin. And so there is a wisdom that is worldly wisdom. And we also read about this in the New Testament as well. Because in James chapter three, we read who is wise and understanding among you by his good life, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, don't boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above. This wisdom is earthly. It's unspiritual. It's devilish. Where does James get the idea of tracing this sort of wisdom back to the devil? Because this is the wisdom that he was appealing to. Natural wisdom, worldly wisdom to preserve natural life in this worldly existence. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder in every vile practice, whereas the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits without uncertainty or insincerity, and the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And so we recognize a wisdom that is divine as well as a wisdom that is human, but that which is not only natural, but kind of contrary to nature as well. And so the devil weaponizes temporal goods to keep us from the everlasting ones, and he appeals to our lower wisdom and to our lower appetites to bring about this love of self, even to the point of the contempt of God. So what does God do to overcome it? Well, obviously there's a punishment involved, but it's not vindictive. It's not divine revenge. It's not just a punishment that fits the crime. It's a penance that is meant to uproot the sin at its source, which is pride. And what is it suffering? And what we'll discover is that suffering is not just punitive. It is also penitential, and therefore it is pedagogical. It is able to teach us to value that which is infinite over that which is finite. And so what we have in the punishment of the curse is a discipline that comes from God as a father to his prodigal son and daughter. But what we have to recognize is that this punishment itself needs to be understood in the greater light of a divine wisdom, because God hasn't stopped loving them. God hasn't started loving them any less. When I punished my kids in just last week, Kimberly and I became, for the first time in a quarter of a century, the proud parents of no more teenagers. And so in their preteens and in their teen years, there were lots of punishments that had to be meted out. But why did I punish my kids and not the neighbor's kids? It wasn't because the neighbor's kids were so good. It's because they were the neighbor's kids. And I punished my kids not because I stopped loving them or started loving them any less, but because I couldn't stop loving them, but I had to express that love in disciplinary ways. And they sometimes felt the love and it didn't feel like love. And so wisdom has to be restored and grow in order to move from the creaturely fear that is servile to that regenerate fear that comes back to us as we are reconciled to God as a father through the covenant. And this is the interesting thing about wisdom literature, because when you see the books of wisdom, such as the proverbs that are attributed to Solomon, such as Koheleth, the preacher, which is also attributed to the son of David, the king of Israel, Solomon himself. And then the song of Solomon as well. We're not going to get into all of the critical questions as to what did the original composition look like? But the process from the original composition to the canonical inclusion is something that God, the Holy Spirit is overseen. And in the process, we can see that there is something going on in salvation history, something of a breakthrough, something that pertains to the covenant, even though many scholars say, oh, wisdom literature, oh, that pertains to creation, not covenant. It pertains to, you know, nature, not really salvation history. No, the attribution to Solomon, I think, shows us why it was that ancient Jews knew better. So you think about the sequence of covenants whereby God is renewing his bond to the people. The original form of that covenant was marital in the garden. Keep your eyes on that because marriage is going to figure largely in wisdom literature. But not just marriage, but parenthood and not just parenthood, but brotherhood and sisterhood. Family life is rooted in creation and a little wisdom goes a long way. But so does a little folly. And disobedience. And so we see what happens with the disobedience and the judgment of the flood and the need to regroup and renew that covenant with one family, not just one married couple, but four couples aboard the ark. And then we call that the covenant with Noah. And we were reminded of that a couple of hours ago with the blue sky and the sunshine and the deluge in the rainbow too. And so God is renewing his covenant with that household and when they disembark, they settle down and they continue to expand until God renews the covenant again in Genesis 12 with Abraham. And at that point, God is fathering a family that is no longer one married couple or four married couples aboard the ark, but now it's a tribe. God's tribal family is under the leadership of Abraham and then Isaac and then Jacob. And Jacob has 12 sons. They become all husbands and they have 12 families that become the 12 tribes of Israel. And God brings those 12 tribes out of Egyptian slavery to Mount Sinai, to build the tabernacle, to renew the covenant, to give the law of the covenant, which we call Torah. And according to the rabbis, there are 613 commandments, 10 of which are the most prominent we call the decalogue. And God through Moses promises Israel in Deuteronomy chapters 4 through 6 that if you keep these commandments, if you fulfill the Torah, the nations are going to see your wisdom and recognize that you are a people that is special, that there is no people who has one God who is so close, but what do they do with those commandments? Typically they broke them. They violated the Torah. And so that fourth covenant in salvation history that is so decisive, Moses at Sinai creating a nation of 12 tribes, giving them the Torah, building the tabernacle, installing the Levites to conduct the liturgy whereby you renew that covenant so that they break camp and they march across the wilderness. But that takes 40 years because of their ongoing disobedience to the commandments. They keep breaking Torah, which is more than law. It is instruction, but it's clearly given to someone who is willful, rebellious, disobedient. And so where do we find ourselves when we get to wisdom literature? We don't find ourselves with Moses and the Torah. We find ourselves with David, not at Sinai, but at Zion, not where the tabernacle was built in the wilderness, but where the son of David, King Solomon, builds what? The temple, which becomes the architectural sacrament of the Davidic covenant. And what is the Davidic covenant compared to the Mosaic covenant? They're often blurred. They're often confused. They're often collapsed one into the other. And I'm not suggesting that they're opposed. I'm just suggesting that we distinguish the Mosaic and the Davidic covenant in order to show how they're united, but also to show how the Davidic covenant marks a significant divine advance in the covenant plan for the people of God. Because the move from Sinai to Zion is the move from one nation to a kingdom, the kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of David. And what's the difference between one nation and one kingdom? We'll ask the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Canadians about the English, the United Kingdom, one nation ruling all these other nations, and that's what God does with the king of Israel, with David in establishing a covenant through the prophet Nathan. In 2 Samuel 7, you see a breakthrough that nowadays goes largely unnoticed. The move from Sinai to Zion, from a nation to a kingdom, to a nation of 12 tribes that excludes all the other nations. Now you have a kingdom, not only consisting of the 12 tribes, but there you have a kingdom that is drawing the other nations. The Edomites, the Moabites, and all of these others into this covenant family bond, as it were, with the Son of David. And another huge breakthrough is that the Son of David is the first human person in salvation history to be called, guess what, the Son of God. Now Israel was called the Son of God at the burning bush, but that's a collective reference to the entire nation. No Israelite was ever called the Son of God until the king of Israel, the Son of David. Through the Oracle of the prophet Nathan, where God pledges to David, I will be his father and he will be my son. So how does the Son of David become the Son of God? Is it through some extra Davidic DNA? No. It's through the holy oil of anointing that makes him the Messiah, the Mashiach, the Christos, the Christ. So with the holy oil, Zedok, the high priest anoints King Solomon on the day of his coronation in 1 Kings 2, and he doesn't just receive oil, that becomes a sacramental sign that points to the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that's the spirit of sonship that makes this king priestly. So he's not just building a palace for himself, he's building a temple for God. And that temple at Zion surpasses the tabernacle at Sinai. That tent was barely big enough for the 12 tribes to gather for a liturgical assembly, but the temple that Solomon builds as the architectural sacrament of the kingdom is not only big enough by far for the 12 tribes, but what was the largest precinct in the temple of Solomon, the court of the Gentiles? Because this was national at Sinai, this is international, this excluded the Gentiles, this not only includes them, it invites all of them to come up. Here we have the Torah, the law of the Mosaic covenant, which was hard for the 12 tribes to obey, at least according to the historical narrative. But the Torah of Moses would not have been hard for the Gentiles to obey, it would have been impossible, because how could you come from Asia or Africa to Jerusalem three times a year when it was hard enough to come down from Galilee up north 100 miles three times a year in those caravans, one of which involved the loss of a beloved child at 12. So the Torah of Moses was good for a nation. So how will Solomon ever rule Israel and establish them as a light to the nations? It won't be through Torah, law, it will be through hakmah, wisdom. And so here we find what it was like for Solomon to realize, wow, the Lord God has made a covenant with me, and what am I going to do about that? Well, we read about it in Second Chronicles, chapter one. When Solomon becomes king, he's still young. He knows he's not ready, he knows he's inadequate. What is he going to do? It's a kind of vigil. All night, Solomon went up to the bronze altar before the Lord, which is at the tent of meeting and offered a thousand burnt offerings upon it, and then spent the night before the Lord in prayer. In that night, God appeared to Solomon and said to him, ask what I shall give you. And Solomon said to God, you have given me great and steadfast love to David my father, you have made me king in his stead. Oh Lord God, let your promise to David my father be now fulfilled. You have made a covenant with David that goes beyond the covenant you made with Moses. There at Sinai, 12 tribes became your national family. But here at Zion, you are intent upon forming an international family. I feel a tangent coming on. In 2 Samuel 7, where you have Nathan giving the prophetic oracle to David concerning his son, and the meaning of the house that the Lord will build. House means family, bai'it in Hebrew. So you're going to have a son. Your line will continue. But house also means dynasty, because it's the house of David. And that son Solomon will be royal successor. But the house that the Lord will build through Solomon will be more than the family. It'll be more than the dynasty. It will be the temple that the son of David builds for the name of the Lord as the Son of God. I will be his son and he will be my father. David, who has spent his life meditating upon the Torah day and night, seeing the plan of God the father through the covenants in salvation history. How he's taken one family and called Israel to be my first born son, a holy nation, a kingdom of priests, a light to the Gentiles. Now that I have finished the conquest, God has made a pledge, a solemn covenant oath he has sworn with me regarding my family, my dynasty, to build his house through my son and make my son his son. Who am I? I am just a lowly servant that you have brought me so far. And then in second Samuel 719, and this is the point of the tangent, David says, you have shown me what the R.S.V. mistranslates as future generations. And how do you know it's a mistranslation? Because you look it up and the word tolidot isn't occurring there. What David says is you've shown me the Torah for Adam, which is confusing to translators because you associate Torah with Moses at Sinai. Whereas this is Zion. This is David, not Moses. This is a kingdom, not a nation. But David says this covenant that you have just revealed to me that you will establish through my son in this kingly line, this is nothing less than the Torah, the covenant law, for Adam, for all humanity. And this is what Solomon recognizes. How in the world am I going to succeed my father who is a man after God's own heart, who taught the world to pray, who wrote all those Psalms, who was so faithful and humble and penitent, what am I going to do? Give me now wisdom and knowledge to go out and come in before this people. For who can rule this, your people, that is so great? And God answered Solomon because this was in your heart, and you have not asked for possessions, wealth, or honor, or the life of those who hate you, and have not even asked for long life, but have asked for wisdom and knowledge for yourself, that you may rule my people over whom I have made you king. Wisdom and knowledge are granted to you. I will also give you riches, possessions, and honor, like none of the kings have ever had before you, nor will any have after you. And so Solomon came from the high place at Gibeon, returned to Jerusalem, and reigned over all of Israel, and he did so many things right. But what is the literary expression of the Mosaic covenant, Torah? What is the literary expression of the Davidic covenant through the Son of David, who becomes a Son of God, who not only has human wisdom, but divine wisdom, we call it wisdom literature. And as a Protestant, I read those three primary books, which were Machalene Proverbs, Koheleth Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. And I can't get into it because all I'm doing tonight is setting the table, but I want to propose to you that the fathers and the doctors of the church are right in pointing out how true wisdom is imparted. In the book of Proverbs, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And you learn basic virtue. You learn to listen to the instruction of your mother and father. You learn to avoid the loose woman. You learn to look for a godly wife. You open your heart to divine wisdom. And your whole life is shaped in a way that is not only virtuous as you acquire these virtues, these moral muscles, these spiritual capacities, you will succeed. You will prosper. Wow! Like Solomon, all I want is wisdom. Yeah, but you can have your cake and eat it. Because if you seek first the kingdom, like Solomon did, all these things will be added unto you, and they were. And so you have this book of Proverbs that is like the cornerstone of wisdom to find our way back to God. And then the second book is Coeleth, the preacher, Ecclesiastes. And what is the theme of that? It's not the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The theme is vanity of vanities. And why? Because the first age of the interior life is what we call the purgative, where you have to be purged of all of your disordered appetites, your bad habits. If virtues are the muscles of the soul, then vices are what happens when that soul atrophies. And so get rid of the vices, practice the virtue, grow in the fear of the Lord, attain wisdom and virtue. And you'll succeed. But in Ecclesiastes what do you learn? Vanity of vanities. Havel havelim. Vapor of vapors. In other words, when you get long life, when you get riches, when you get famous, and when you get reputable, and all of that, guess what? In the end you die. So what is the end of it all? Fear God and keep His commandments, but you can't take it with you. And so this is the illuminative stage of this spiritual life. The purgative where you try to break all of the ties with sin. The illuminative where you realize I'm not doing this just to be more popular, more wealthy, more successful. I'm doing this because it is the true, the good, the beautiful. And none of this that I get for being good can I take with me. Vanity of vanities. With much knowledge comes much vexation or my least favorite passages of the making of many books there is no end. No matter what you look for, no matter what you love, you've got to recognize that it all must be subordinated to God, the supreme love. And then we have the song of Solomon. And we have a couple of presenters who are going to be talking about that in the in the plenary sessions as well as in the workshops. I am convinced that this is one of the most important of the books of wisdom literature. You know a lot of people say just ancient and eastern erotic love poetry. And it's true in the ancient and the east nations cherished wisdom and they also collected erotic love poems. But the dissimilarities between the song of songs and all of that erotic ancient and eastern love poetry far exceeds the similarities. And so what you learn in the song of songs is that there is a love that is strong as death. It's a love for God. It's a love that God has for us as his bride. Again the literal sense gives us a figural meaning where it's not just a Solomonic wedding in Jerusalem. Perhaps with Pharaoh's daughter we don't know although Psalm 45 celebrates that perhaps. But regardless you have in the song of songs the power of love that we know so well between male and female that is ordered to marriage. But that ultimately becomes a sign of God's love for us. In the middle section of the song you actually hear about how Solomon's mother crowns her son just as you read about it in 1 Kings 2. But ultimately this is more than a human family. It is divine. It is more than human love that is an erotic attraction between male and female that is ordered to marriage. It is the covenant love of God for us. That marriage is designed for from the beginning because of all of the covenants this one is not only permanent it's also exclusive. But of all of the covenants this covenant marriage is life-giving. The two become one and the one they become is so real that nine months later you might have to come up with a name like we did six times. And that child is the incarnation of the love the embodiment of the oneness that the two have become. The marital covenant is the most profound earthly sign of a heavenly mystery of a human love that points beyond itself to a love that is stronger than death to the love of God for us that he loves us more than any bond of marriage even the happiest. And that his longing for us is such that we can never fulfill it. He wants to fill us with this life with this wisdom. And Solomon got it. He gave it. This Hakama this wisdom in proverbs in Ecclesiastes and in a song of Solomon. And then of course we have the wisdom of Solomon that we'll be talking about later. And we have Sirach which traces us through salvation history. In Sirach 44 through 50 my favorite section you go back and look at all of the mediators of all of the covenants whereby God renews the family bond in creation with Noah with Abraham with Isaac and Jacob and all the way down the ages. So wisdom literature applies to salvation history. It applies the covenant to our lives but it gives us this sense that God loves us more than we can imagine. And that he wants to give his life to us in the form of wisdom so that we can take all of our loves for our bride for our kids for our grandkids for our neighbors for our colleagues for pizza and for books and everything else and order them under the one supreme love which is God who is the giver of all of these gifts that we are to use but ultimately the giver of the gifts wants to make himself the ultimate gift. And he alone is the one we will enjoy forever. Solomon got it for a while and then of course we know that he violates the law of Deuteronomy 17 regarding the king by multiplying horses and chariots going back to Egypt by multiplying gold and silver and by also multiplying wives because how many did he end up with? 700 wives and 300 concubines. Now that might just sound perverse and I would say it probably was but it was also diplomacy because all of those marriages are covenant treaties, alliances like we read about with Pharaoh and his daughter and so he did the right thing in the wrong way and he falls because ultimately he's pointing beyond himself because there is another son of David who will be the true son of God who will come as the Christ not simply anointed by a Levite like Zadok anointed Solomon but anointed by the Father with the Holy Spirit. So the Son of God becomes the Son of David, he becomes the Christ, he becomes the Messiah to make us Christians, to endow us with the Spirit of adoption, to make us little Christs, to enable us to enter into the family of God, to share the life of God, to know the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit as our home. This is who we are, this is why we're here, and this is why wisdom matters so much. It's not just for professional advancement, it's not just for specialized academic understanding, it's not just for a degree, it is to achieve holiness which is love. I remember this point being driven home to me two different times when I first got here in 1990 I was hired by Father Michael Scanlon, talk about a man of wisdom, a man of the Spirit. God used him as the instrument to really renew this school in so many ways for so many people. When I was interviewing with him it went for more than two hours. I was a new Catholic and I wanted to share the excitement of conversion and studying the Bible and all of these things, and he shared my excitement but it could also see the intellectualism behind it. And so citing the New Testament book of wisdom, James and a few other passages, he just said in passing you've got to remember that God opposes the proud even when they're right, and then he went on, but it was like an arrow piercing my heart, yeah that would be me, you know, and I remember thinking about it and saying to him you know what God opposes the proud especially when they're right about mercy and grace because what is there for me to be proud of when it was all gift from the age of 14 until this evening? Wisdom is what God died on the cross to give me, and the word of the cross which is foolishness to the Greeks, a stumbling block to the Jews, is the power of God and the wisdom of God and the life of God in my soul and yours. The other episode that brought this home was another holy person I spent time with and that was Mother Angelica, and it was the fourth or fifth time I was on her show, but it was the first time I was on her show after getting my PhD, and so they wanted to get my name right on the screen, but not as bad as I wanted them to get it right. Okay doctor, yeah DR period right, Dr. Scott Hahn, yeah go ahead add a PhD you know it's like bookends sure, you know I could see in the corner of my eye, you know, Mother Angelica rolling her eyes, oh gee, okay drop the doctor, okay just PhD you know, and then when we broke for a commercial she looked at me and she said you know Sonny, it doesn't matter how many letters you have after your name, the only thing that really matters is whether you die will you end up with two letters in front of your name, ST. I'm like give that girl an honorary doctorate, this is what wisdom is for, it's to make us holy, to enable us to fall in love with the one who loved us into existence and loved us out of spiritual suicide and has brought us to this day and is intent upon bringing us home. So we are here as family to grow in wisdom, to form a kingdom, to become a temple that couldn't have been built by Solomon at Zion and the earthly Jerusalem apart from divine wisdom, apart from the spirit of God and likewise we want to build the temple in our hearts, the sanctuary where God's word can dwell in our hearts in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Almighty God, our Father in heaven we thank you for the gift of wisdom, for giving us your word by having that word become flesh, incarnating your wisdom, revealing a love that is stronger than death, that transformed death into prayer, prayer into sacrifice and not just for him but also for us, that through the gift of divine wisdom and the word of the cross and the Holy Eucharist we might not only live for you but die for you and in so doing we won't lose our lives, we will fully return them and give them back to you as you have lavished your life and love upon us and so hear us as we pray our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen holy Mary our hope seed of wisdom pray for us st. Francis of Assisi in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen before you clap or anything like that i wanted to say two things first i didn't get through like 60 percent of the material but like i said i was only setting the table got some of the plates some of the utensils out there also i wanted to recommend again these four books that kimberley wrote especially for catholic women's bible studies also and finally i wanted to recommend this book that came out since last year this is a game changer this is a breakthrough it's also really dangerous you could weaponize a book this big what is it a catholic introduction to the bible the old testament written by my dear friends dr john bergma and brant patry it's over a thousand pages but as i said this is a game changer it's written for seminarians but it's written so clearly so well that my college students can pick it up and get through it because that's what john does he teaches here at the university but i even know some high school teachers who've used sections of this for high school classes and also dres who've used it in parish bible studies the section on wisdom literature is worth its weight in gold i have never read anything quite like it i only wish i could have covered more of it but i don't need to because this book wasn't out two years ago now that it's out i am so excited grateful and proud of these two colleagues i'm also excited because our first born son michael who just completed his doctorate at noterdame almost exactly one year ago just moved to emitsburg to begin teaching scripture at mount san mary's seminary and he's going to be using this book and so i'm excited for them as well thank you all and god bless you