The Rooted Podcast

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What does it mean to have wisdom that the Bible talks about?

There are eight different Hebrew words used in Proverbs which are translated as wisdom.

The Bible talks about human wisdom versus godly wisdom. That there seems to be a difference between

Two, the clue is in the name of self-help. It's all about self-improvement.

There's a tendency nowadays to put ourselves at the centre of the universe and to think it's all about me. Wisdom literature says, well no actually it's not. It's really all about God.

(00:35.375) wisdom seems to come with age

I don't think Proverbs are saying, we can only get wisdom from certain people. It does point out a responsibility that we all have within community to pass on wisdom.

You're listening to The Rooted Podcast from Bible Society. In each series, we take a closer look at a theme or book of the Bible and explore its relevance in our lives today. This is our series on Proverbs. All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Rooted Podcast. I'm Noelle and I'm here this week with Mark and Esther and we're starting our series on the book of Proverbs.

If you are listening to this, then the Proverbs edition of Rooted is out and Rooted subscribers are reading all about Proverbs for the next two months. So if you're interested in getting that edition of Rooted, if you are listening to this on the day that this is released and you subscribe to Rooted within the next month, we'll send you the Proverbs edition for free right away. So you can get started reading it and follow along with us as this podcast is released over the next coming weeks.

And you can do that at biblesociety.org.uk forward slash rooted. Before we get started, if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and you'll never miss an episode when we upload and also share it with your friends and family. In this first episode, we really just want to focus on wisdom. Proverbs is part of the wisdom literature in the Bible and we just wanted to spend some time.

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in our first episode, just looking at an overview about Proverbs, but also just about wisdom in the Bible, what it means to be a person of wisdom and to live a wise life. Why don't we just get started with a conversation around wisdom? First, just what does it mean to have wisdom that the Bible talks about? Or what is wisdom that we read about in the Bible?

I've got a big old concordance which gives you the Greek and the Hebrew roots of these English words and tells you where they are in the Bible. So I looked up wisdom in Proverbs and I found that there are eight different Hebrew words used in Proverbs which are translated as wisdom in the authorised version of the Bible. So the same English word.

but translating eight different Hebrew words, which gives you a sense of the richness, if you like, of this whole idea. They are things like intelligence, skill, heart, prudence. So you can tell this is a really rich word. I think one of the main things is that it tends to be quite a practical thing. it's just the ability to cope.

with stuff basically through the way that you react to circumstances. So it's certainly not just a question of head knowledge. It's not just a question of how much you know, though that does come into it. It's a kind of practical ability as much as anything else.

Yeah, I'm interested in what you just said about it being about learning to cope. Because to me that's interesting because it sounds like to me coping with something is like just getting by. Maybe that's just my understanding of the word cope. It does mean that it teaches us how to get through things, but I also feel like it's a bit more than that as well.

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Yeah, maybe a word like navigate. Yeah, how do we navigate through life and all the experiences that we have? And you can cope well and you can cope poorly. So, I mean, I don't know that cope always means just getting by.

No, because if you talk about navigate, for instance, you navigate to a destination. So what is the destination to which wisdom helps you to navigate? And this is where God comes in, I think. It's not just a sort of self-help idea, this biblical idea of wisdom. It's how you align your life with the purposes of God, with the desires of God for how you should live.

in the best possible way. And that's not just living your best life, as the self-help manuals tend to talk about nowadays. That's how you live in accordance with the pattern of life which God has designed for human beings, which is a different sort of thing, it seems to me.

Yeah, it's interesting to talk about self-help because the Bible talks about human wisdom versus godly wisdom. There seems to be a difference between the two. So when we talk about wisdom as Christians who are reading the Bible, we're actually talking about something different, self-help or sort of just practical guidance. Yeah, there does seem to be a difference there, but what is it?

it's God, isn't it? Because I guess the clue is in the name of self-help. It's all about self-improvement. If you think about the popularity of the self-help genre and all those books like Atomic Habits or How to Win Friends and Influence People, it's all about getting something for yourself, succeeding in some way. I'm not saying there's no element at all of that in godly wisdom, but godly wisdom is about

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acknowledging who God is, aligning yourself with him, like Mark said, and it's about flourishing. And if you think of the greatest commandments, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, there's a real community element, community relationship with God, community relationship with people, and you can extend that to creation. So wise living is not just about you, it's about all of creation.

I don't think you necessarily get that from the way we tend to use modern wisdom if we take God out of the equation.

agree with that. I think, you know, there's also the book of Proverbs, for instance, which anybody might read, you know, whether you have a faith or not, you can read that and you think, yeah, well, that really works. it's just a kind of earthy practical, this is the right thing to do. And if you do this, you'll be okay. And if you don't, you're in for a world of trouble basically. But I don't think you can take God out of the equation.

I think the other thing is, of course, that if we're about wisdom in general, then Proverbs isn't the only wisdom book. Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book. I've always found that absolutely fascinating because it's, I mean, you could read it and on the surface it seems terribly gloomy and cynical. Vanity of vanities, is vanity, everything's completely futile. The writer of Ecclesiastes just seems to be saying throughout, well,

don't hope for too much because you're not going to get it. And if you do get it, you'll regret it. It is not an aspirational book, put it that way. think it's encouraging people to seek a middle way, to seek God and to do the right thing, not because you will become rich or famous or powerful if you do the right thing, but just because it's the right thing. And I go back to that book again and again and again.

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just because it is so, it's kind of counterintuitive really that it's in the Bible, but it just makes you think more and more about the good life really and how you live the good life and what are the sort of things that you should be aiming for.

Job is also a wisdom literature book. There's something Job kind of ponders for, how do you navigate suffering? And we have this figure of Job as the righteous sufferer. So it's not saying that suffering is connected to, it's because you've done these things. It's saying suffering is part of life and how do you live wisely or think about that wisely, navigate it wisely without cursing God and rejecting him.

so it's pondering on, it's not just hypothetical, but it's a, an extreme situation. And Ecclesiastes is sort of similar in a way, because it's like, imagine you could have anything you wanted. You can try all of these things. I had all of the wealth in the world. I had all of these things. I did X, Y, Z and I saw that it was empty, you know, or this didn't lead to the fulfillment that I expected. So again, it's this,

It's not just hypothetical, but it's exploring something and saying, where's the wisdom in this situation?

Yeah. In all of this wisdom literature, there is something about recognizing the true position of human beings in the scheme of things. And there's a sense in which we're not that important. There's a tendency nowadays to put ourselves at the center of the universe and to think it's all about me. It's not really a new thing. There's that famous poem, which I think was the 19th century, wasn't it? In Victus.

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It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and all that kind of thing. It's all about me. Wisdom literature says, well, no, actually it's not. It's really all about God and you should know your place.

I don't know, this is a discussion we're coming to in a bit, but I just think those first seven verses of Proverbs, which I think most people have heard verse seven, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction. That kind of comes off the back of actually quite a descriptive piece, gets at what you were saying, Mark, about the richness of the meaning of the word wisdom, because it talks about

wisdom, instruction, understanding, insight, but the beginning of it. So it's not just that it's all about God, but God is the beginning of knowledge. you think of God as creator, going back to that most basic point, He created everything. He created us. He created the world. So the knowledge of how to flourish within that environment and as what we've been created to be is with Him.

It starts with him.

We also see in verse 1 that at least some of the proverbs that were written in this book were written by Solomon. Well, the way that these proverbs are written seem as if they're written to someone older, to someone younger, and often wisdom seems to come in that way, that it seems to come with age. But I wonder a bit what you guys think about that. Do you think that

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It is that wisdom is something that we can only have when we're older because these Proverbs do seem to be an older person trying to help a younger person to have wisdom before they get old. But I guess there's a part of me that wonders if that's actually possible or if you learn wisdom through experience.

I do think that is part of it, that the mention of Solomon, obviously we've got this idea of, some of Proverbs is phrased like a father sharing wise instruction for his sons, his children. But Solomon also, if you read about him elsewhere in the Bible, he's meant to be this wisest, you know, the wisest man of his day and it's God given wisdom. So there's a kind of authority that this is the wisdom of Solomon. It's not just the wisdom of any old person.

He has a kind of special status within like biblical literature, doesn't he, of being incredibly wise. There's also, you know, he was a king. So there's a sort of hierarchy in here as well. If you're maybe at the top of a society and you're responsible for governing and leading a nation, you're meant to do that wisely. And in Solomon's day, Israel was very successful, wasn't it?

implied in here, there's quite a lot of authority that this comes from Solomon. But I do agree, you know, I don't think Proverbs is saying, we can only get wisdom from certain people. And I think it does point out a responsibility that we all have within community to pass on wisdom and what we've learned by experience.

think it comes back to some of different meanings of wisdom actually as well. Some of it's practical, some of it's more sort of head knowledge and that sort of thing. And it just made me think of a time when I was a minister in a small village church in the Midlands. And so I would have been in my early 40s and I had spent an embarrassingly long period in theological education and ministry and things like that.

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I had my head sort of stuffed full of theology and Bible knowledge. But as I look back at that time, the thing that I remember most warmly is an afternoon Bible study that we did, attended mainly by older women, much older than me at the time. And I always came away from that thinking, I know absolutely nothing, because we'd be looking at a Bible text and just because of the

you know, the length of life experience they'd had and many of them, the length of just reading these Bible stories and hearing sermons about them and, you know, trying to apply them and everything. You know, I really felt quite humbled at the insights that they were bringing that I could not have brought because I just didn't know enough. I had stuff full of Greek and stuff, but, you know, in terms of other kinds of wisdom, they just had more than me.

love that actually in, you know, those early verses of Proverbs chapter one, where it says, them hear and increase in learning. The one who understands, let them obtain guidance to understand. So I love the fact that wisdom isn't presented as this finite thing, that you've got it, you've either got it or you haven't. It's a lifelong journey of gaining it. And we should, if we're wise, part of

being wise is our ability to listen to other people who do know more than us or may be much more knowledgeable in a certain area and take that on board.

Yeah. And I think the other thing is, it's contrast between youth and age as well, because in Proverbs, it's certainly the older people who are instructing the younger ones, isn't it? You know, they've had the life experience and they're trying to help younger people avoid falling into the same traps that they did when they were older. And I think this is one of the cases where we run up against the differences between the ancient world and the world of today.

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the questions that were being asked in each generation were pretty much the same. And so the younger people could learn from the older people and probably the younger people had very little to teach the older people. And so there was that relationship. And now it's kind of different. I mean, think those of us who are, you know, I'm the oldest person in the room here and I'm very conscious that I don't know things that younger people know.

And my parents, know, even older than me, obviously, so my dad's 92 at the time of recording. And, you know, he relies on me for technical support for, you know, the iPad and the computer and things like that. And so there's a different relationship in some ways between age and youth. So that, think that can probably make it a bit harder for younger people to accept.

teaching in some ways from older people. I don't know, what do think?

Well, but do you think there's a difference between knowing how to use a tool? Because I see technology as a tool primarily and it can be used well, it can be used very badly for bad ends. So I wouldn't necessarily say, I'm wise in technology. you see what, you know, I might know how to use technology, but wisdom, applying wisdom as I use a tool.

I don't know that they're completely synonymous. So just like I would, you my parents have taught me all kinds of things like how to cook. My dad has tried to teach me how to garden and do DIY and I don't seem to be able to retain that knowledge very well. But those are sort of tools that they're trying to give me.

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And then I can use them wisely. can cook healthy food. I can fix things that are broken, whatever. I might have a tool that they don't have in my toolbox. You know, I can use technology that they can't, but once they've learned that tool, if it's useful to them, I think wisdom comes in then. I don't know if that's a worthwhile distinction. I think I've got so much to learn from older people.

And one thing that I find anytime that I really sit down and ask good questions and listen and get to know older people and ask them for advice. Just what comes home to me is like, they have been through what I'm going through, probably. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but just because they're older doesn't mean that they lived in a different world and they, humanity was different when they were young. think humanity.

When you go back and read ancient writings, you talked about people wrestling with similar questions. Well, they really were. They had the same kind of struggles that we have. They weren't so different. It's not. I think that's what always surprises me and then opens my ears to hear, well, actually, how can they then speak into my life today?

Yeah, I think too, the thing I think about is like you can tell a young person as an older person can tell a young person something that is wise, but they're not necessarily going to follow it. So they, but you can tell them all the wise things you want. Like an 18 year old can read Proverbs, but that doesn't necessarily make them wise. So the passing on of wisdom, like I get it, but it has to be something more than you just.

verbally tell someone what is the wise thing to do because I don't think that makes people wise. So it's something more, it's something about like, because you can have all of that knowledge about wisdom, but if wisdom is almost you being able to actually use it, like being able to apply all of that good stuff you know, that is wisdom. But it has, it must be learned in a different way, if that makes sense.

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It probably has to be modeled, doesn't it? You have to see it being used around you. was it, Esther, can't remember, somebody was talking about community. And so you see it being applied in community. And these pithy proverbs in the book of Proverbs are basically expressions of what people have learned through lifetimes of seeing it worked out. it's distilled wisdom.

do think it's that? think we do need to see wisdom modelled. And actually I think that's something that's lovely about Proverbs because it tries to paint these pictures that illustrate an example, a model, and you can look at it and say, I'd rather be like this person in that illustration than that person. But I also think that in Proverbs, so the very well-known verses in Proverbs chapter three,

Verses five and six, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight. think the train of thought there is not just that, well, it has to be modeled to you. You have to have experienced this and you learn from experience. Obviously we do learn in that way. But if we're going to live wisely, sometimes we don't have to go and make those mistakes. We might just trust in the Lord.

Yeah. So let's talk a bit as well about wisdom in the New Testament. There is the wisdom literature in the Bible, the books we've just talked about, but actually the whole Bible really is a book that is pointing us towards wisdom and there's lots in the New Testament about wisdom as well.

I think wisdom in the New Testament appears in different ways and sometimes it is this wisdom in the standard sense of the word. So, a wise person is somebody who just knows stuff. That's the origin incidentally of our word wisdom, which is an old Germanic word meaning to know. So, a wise person is somebody who knows stuff and Jesus knows stuff. Jesus is a wisdom teacher.

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You know, some of his parables are quite like other parables that were going around at the same time. So in Matthew 12 42, for instance, it talks about Queen of the South, the Queen of Sheba came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom and now one greater than Solomon is here. Jesus is saying, well, I am greater than Solomon, I am wiser than Solomon. So he's definitely in that tradition of wisdom teaching.

Sometimes wisdom is personified. So wisdom is almost a person. And that's also there in the New Testament. For instance, in Matthew 11, Jesus says that wisdom is vindicated by her children. So he is imagining wisdom as a woman. Her children are those who sort of her, follow wisdom, sort of inherit wisdom. And by the way they live, they show the truth of the teachings of wisdom.

The other place where wisdom appears, and it's not actually mentioned, but the other place where wisdom appears is in the prologue to John's Gospel, so John chapter one, and the word used there is logos. So, in the beginning was the Word, the logos of God, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And that relates to a Jewish idea of the time, which was all about wisdom. And again, this is a sort of personification of wisdom. So, wisdom is a sort of creative agent of God.

God creates the world through his wisdom. But John's Gospel goes one further because John's Gospel says, the beginning was the Word, was the logos, was the wisdom, and the Word was God. So it's identifying Jesus as the wisdom of God, but also as God himself. So that goes one stage further than any of the Jewish thinkers at the time had ever imagined, basically.

and wisdom became flesh, the Word became flesh, the logos became flesh. So there's the incarnation of Jesus.

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Yeah, I love that point you just made about the word being made flesh and how Jesus embodies wisdom because we know he's the image of the invisible God as we kind of discussed right back at the beginning of our Hebrews series. as I was preparing for this, I was thinking, yeah, not just about his teaching, for example, the Sermon on the Mount and the wisdom that he tries to teach there, but even just

sort of in the gospel accounts where he's in the wilderness and he's being tempted by the devil and how he resists those temptations is applied wisdom, isn't it, in a way? He's quoting from the scriptures, the wisdom that's there, and he's saying, no, I'm not going to do this thing because I'm applying this wisdom. I'm aligning myself with God. And he said not to do that or whatever, you know, the specific examples. So he embodies it.

in more than just what he taught, but it's how he lived. And we were talking earlier about modeling, well, he models wisdom to his disciples, doesn't he? And he's trying, he's hoping that they will then model that to the people that come after. So it's not just about sharing the gospel, but it is about embodying, living a godly life.

I like too that I think it's in 1 Corinthians 130 as well. says that God has been made wisdom for us. I'll read it actually. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. And I like that because it means that if I'm seeking wisdom, I'm seeking Jesus' way really or Jesus and their

I don't know, I can be safe knowing that in him is wisdom and that I'm gaining it the more that I spend time with them and get to know him, that those two are interconnected. I really like that.

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Well that passage from Corinthians, so not just that verse, but it's part of a longer discourse really that's comparing the wisdom of the world with God's wisdom. Because I think Paul's argument was, well, some people say it's foolish that God would send his son to die. How can God die? All those kinds of questions that people have around that. But he's saying God's wisdom is greater than

Like the wisest, where of the wise people of the age, I think he says something like that compared to God's wisdom in what he's done. You know, it's just so far beyond.

It's so interesting though, isn't it? That the whole idea of wisdom has something to do with communication, it seems to me. you you've got God over here who is unknowable, you know, beyond our thoughts, imaginings, conceptions and all that sort of thing. But wisdom is much more of a human thing. And, you know, it's about how we, you know, as we were saying earlier, it's about how you navigate through life, how we relate to each other, how we learn to do the right thing.

And so if we talk about God's wisdom, that is about him communicating to us something of himself and something of how he wants us to live and to understand and to be. And so the whole idea of wisdom is almost as though incarnation is built into it. And we see that at the beginning, towards the beginning of the Bible with Proverbs and the idea of wisdom personified as a woman.

and then we see it in its actuality in Jesus where he is actually incarnated. So that the whole idea from the beginning of talking about wisdom in the Bible is about God communicating himself.

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Let's go back to talking a bit about proverbs as well. One of the things that I find really interesting about the proverbs is the idea that when you read proverbs, they kind of sound like if you do this thing, this thing will happen. But that's not actually the case, right? Or is it? What do you guys think? Do you think proverbs are telling us the way that things will definitely work out or are they

or are they doing something else? We had a devotional like this in the journal actually, and it was called Proverb or Promise. What do you guys think?

and

Yeah, I see what you mean. And I think sometimes I've heard people quote a proverb almost sort of saying, so I expect it to work out exactly this way as though it were a promise. And that can lead people to be very upset with God. I thought you promised me this, but why hasn't it worked out? And I mean, we can even see sort of people in the Bible grappling with questions like that in Psalms when they say, why did the wicked prosper?

That doesn't seem to fit with the pattern we see in Proverbs, but I think that's what it is. It's a pattern. So it's like general basic principles for living that should lead to flourishing and most of the time they will. But I guess we live in a fallen world as well, don't we? So here's a pattern, but we know that things aren't perfect.

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Thank

Yeah, I agree with that. I I've just opened Proverbs at random and just looking at a few Proverbs, it says, kings detest wrongdoing for a throne is established through righteousness. Well, you know, some kings, some rulers absolutely love wrongdoing and, you know, they live very happy and successful lives as tyrants and oppressors. So, you know, that's not always true.

Kings take pleasure in honest lips, they value a man who speaks the truth? Meh, not always.

I feel like we're missing a qualifier, a good king.

Yes, well, absolutely, It says the highway of the upright avoids evil. He who guards his way, guards his life. But doing good things doesn't always lead to a good end, you know, and sometimes people really do suffer. It's just what you were saying, Esther, really. And I agree, it's not like cause and effect. It's not like if you do X, then Y will inevitably follow. It's more about doing the right thing. And generally speaking,

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things will work out better if you do the right thing, but it's not a guarantee.

Yeah, I found this in Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5. says, this is verse 4, do not answer a fool according to his folly or you yourself will be just like him. And then verse 5, answer a fool according to his folly or he will be wise in his own eyes. And so you're like, well, which one? But it depends. And so I think that's the whole point is that being wise means I'm able to apply what I've learned at the right time.

It makes me think of Jesus, who a lot of the time in the gospel, someone will come to Jesus with a question and he'll immediately have a wise answer for them. it's not as if he just is storing up all the answers, I don't think, but as a human, he knew what to say in the right moment because he was connected to God and he had wisdom to be able to speak into situations at the right time. So yeah, I agree.

Proverbs are necessarily trying to tell us always what to do, but trying to form us into, help us become wise people.

I love that idea of forming us into wise people because if you focus always on the outcome and you feel that the outcome of you doing something that was biblically wise was disappointing, then obviously that leads to discouragement. if we focus on God, know, so that Proverbs 1 verse the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Well, so the way that

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we've translated that word fear, it's meant, I think the original meaning is something like reverence and awe for who God is. So everything, he's your orientation point. So if you live wisely, not for the outcome, but to honor God, who is God and he's worthy of us relating, know, responding to him in a correct way, then you can't ever be disappointed because you

You've always met that most important element of like, have honored God in this.

Yeah. I was listening to something from Tim Mackey from the Bible Project, I think it was brilliant. And he was talking about wisdom and he was talking about how in the times of the Old Testament, if there was ever something that was taken to court, like in the time of the judges or people who were in court, although they had the law, we never have an example of someone citing the Mosaic law in court to use it. And he was saying that

people who came to represent others, so guess lawyers at that time, judges, it was more important that to them that the person had wisdom. That was what decided whether the person was going to represent someone else, not necessarily that they could cite the law and that there actually is no citing. Like we don't have any ancient documents that can be found where someone has cited the Jewish law to say, to defend someone. And I thought that was really interesting that the

To them, the importance was on wisdom, not on head knowledge and how much I can cite about the Bible or how much I know about it, but that I can apply it in the right places. I thought that was a really interesting example.

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Now that's absolutely fascinating. I did not know that. And that just, it runs completely counter, doesn't it, to our idea of law today, where it's all about precedence and knowing the letter of the law. But from what you're saying, it sounds as though they were more interested in character. One of the things that I thought was related to that really is the interest that there is nowadays in

You can dismiss it as self-help and that sort of thing. there really seems to be a movement among younger people in particular about how to be a better person. There's a lot of interest in Stoicism, for instance, as the ancient philosophy, which is having a bit of a moment, having a bit of a comeback. It's all about living a disciplined sort of life. I think about people like Jordan Peterson.

as well and his 12 rules for life book. Some of it's just standard good advice and some of it's quite demanding actually, but that was a tremendously successful book. It's just though people are really looking for these character building opportunities, these character building resources and maybe that comes back to wisdom as well. They're seeking wisdom for life. I don't know what you think about that.

Yeah, I think so. It reminds me of something that my husband says. We work with youth in our church, and my husband is the youth leader at our church. And he said to me a while back, he was saying, when I was growing up, the question was, is God real? And that's what everyone was sort of grappling with. But today, the question he thinks for youth especially is less, God real? Because so many of them are so more

open to spirituality that I think they were in past generations, but the question is, is God good? And that's what they want to be convinced of. Like, is this authentic? Is this good? Is this real? Like, should I really follow this? And I think that's sort of what you're getting at a bit. It's like people want to grow in maybe having 12 rules for life because they want

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like something that is good and they want to be upstanding citizens. And I think that has become more of a thing of like living an authentic life where you're really kind to the planet and you stick up for people who are being marginalized in society and you fight for social rights and things like that. I think that's become so much more thing in this generation that people are interested in.

I see that. And I think though, so as Christians, we have a really encouraging message, whether people are ready to hear it now or whether it maybe will come later. So I think there's lots of good that can come from this pursuit of being responsible, being a better person. I guess that's the way you put it Mark. But if you only have that...

It can lead to sort of, you know, a kind of legalism. It's exhausting. If you think that you have to be a better person and the goal is like, well, I've been perfect in all these ways because I wanted to be successful. I wanted to have all these things. I think we can see from the Bible story, the big story of the Bible that if it's just about being a good person, we will fall short or we will burn out.

So what is the Christian message to people that have tried this? Yeah, they're trying stoicism right now. They're completely diving into it. They're trying to be wise in every situation. Whatever their goal, their real motivation is underpinning that aside from just being a good person. There's a message that, you know, yes, we can't be perfect. But we have someone who, you know, who

covers that for us, who saves us and forgives us. There's self-help that's very spiritual and it's about finding peace and harmony and all of that. I think you find that ultimately in Jesus too. There's a lot of self-help that's about being successful, about living longer, being wealthy, healthy and all of that. But all of them kind of are missing something without Christ. And I think we have such an encouraging message beyond.

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what is promised in a lot of self-help stuff.

I guess this is where we come back to Proverbs, isn't it? Because as we were saying at the beginning, it's not just about self-help, it's also about God.

So that'll be the end of our conversation for this episode. Thanks Mark and thanks Esther. We will be back next week with another episode and we're going to look more at this topic of wisdom. And if you love the podcast, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and you can leave us a review or rating, share it with your friends and we would love that. If you have any questions, you can send them in to biblesociety.org.uk forward slash rooted questions. Thank you so much for listening.

and we will see you next week.