1 My son, if you will receive my words, and store up my commandments within you;
2 So as to turn your ear to wisdom, and apply your heart to understanding;
3 Yes, if you call out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding;
4 If you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures:
5 then you will understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.
6 For the LORD gives wisdom. Out of his mouth comes knowledge and understanding.
7 He lays up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity;
8 that he may guard the paths of justice, and preserve the way of his saints.
9 Then you will understand righteousness and justice, equity and every good path.
10 For wisdom will enter into your heart. Knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.
11 Discretion will watch over you. Understanding will keep you,
12 to deliver you from the way of evil, from the men who speak perverse things;
13 who forsake the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness;
14 who rejoice to do evil, and delight in the perverseness of evil;
15 who are crooked in their ways, and wayward in their paths:
16 To deliver you from the strange woman, even from the foreigner who flatters with her words;
17 who forsakes the friend of her youth, and forgets the covenant of her God:
18 for her house leads down to death, her paths to the departed spirits.
19 None who go to her return again, neither do they attain to the paths of life:
20 that you may walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths of the righteous.
21 For the upright will dwell in the land. The perfect will remain in it.
22 But the wicked will be cut off from the land. The treacherous will be rooted out of it.
Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, 1706
Verses 1–9
Those who earnestly seek heavenly wisdom, will never complain that they have lost their labour; and the freeness of the gift does not do away the necessity of our diligence, Joh 6:27 Let them seek, and they shall find it; let them ask, and it shall be given them. Observe who are thus favoured. They are the righteous, on whom the image of God is renewed, which consists in righteousness. If we depend upon God, and seek to him for wisdom, he will enable us to keep the paths of judgment.
Verses 10–22
If we are truly wise, we shall be careful to avoid all evil company and evil practices. When wisdom has dominion over us, then it not only fills the head, but enters into the heart, and will preserve, both against corruptions within and temptations without. The ways of sin are ways of darkness, uncomfortable and unsafe: what fools are those who leave the plain, pleasant, lightsome paths of uprightness, to walk in such ways! They take pleasure in sin; both in committing it, and in seeing others commit it. Every wise man will shun such company. True wisdom will also preserve from those who lead to fleshly lusts, which defile the body, that living temple, and war against the soul. These are evils which excite the sorrow of every serious mind, and cause every reflecting parent to look upon his children with anxiety, lest they should be entangled in such fatal snares. Let the sufferings of others be our warnings. Our Lord Jesus deters from sinful pleasures, by the everlasting torments which follow them. It is very rare that any who are caught in this snare of the devil, recover themselves; so much is the heart hardened, and the mind blinded, by the deceitfulness of this sin. Many think that this caution, besides the literal sense, is to be understood as a caution against idolatry, and subjecting the soul to the body, by seeking any forbidden object. The righteous must leave the earth as well as the wicked; but the earth is a very different thing to them. To the wicked it is all the heaven they ever shall have; to the righteous it is the place of preparation for heaven. And is it all one to us, whether we share with the wicked in the miseries of their latter end, or share those everlasting joys that shall crown believers?