The New Man in the Mirror Bible Study

Notice what verse 15 doesn't say. It doesn't say the rich man is safe. It doesn't say his wall is fake. It says he has a city — walls, gates, the whole thing — and it says it flatly, with no comment. Solomon is describing what money feels like from the inside. And then fourteen verses later he builds a second fortress, and this one belongs to somebody else: "The way of the LORD is a refuge for the righteous."

Two...

Last episode left a man standing in the street between two houses, with two women shouting word-for-word identical invitations at him. And then the story just stops.

You turn the page expecting chapter 10 to tell you which door he picked. Instead you get this: "A wise son brings joy to his father, but a foolish son grief to his mother." One line. Then another one. Then another one, about three hundred and seventy-five times....

Two women. Two houses. Two invitations. And the part that should bother you: they say exactly the same thing.

Verse 4 and verse 16 of Proverbs 9 are word for word identical. "Let all who are simple come in here." Wisdom says it. Folly says it. Same sentence, same street corner, same audience, same volume. If you were listening from down the block with your back turned, you could not tell which house it came from.

Host...

Before there were oceans, wisdom was there. Before there were mountains, before there was a single grain of dust on the earth, wisdom was already beside God.

That's the claim in the back half of Proverbs 8, and it is the summit of the whole first section of the book. In this episode Ryan and Brett walk through it — the origin hymn, the controversy it caused, and the surprisingly ordinary place it lands.

Hosts:

Last week a woman worked a street corner at dusk, in the shadows, with a whisper.

This week another woman climbs to the highest point in the city, plants herself at the busiest intersection, and she does not whisper. She shouts. Same city. Same men. Opposite hour, opposite volume, opposite destination.

In this episode Ryan and Brett open Proverbs 8, the high point of the first nine chapters and one of the great poems ...

The father in Proverbs 7 does something he does nowhere else in the book. He walks to the window, pulls back the lattice, and says: let me show you something I watched happen.

Then he narrates it. A young man crosses the street at dusk. He turns at her corner. He takes the road toward her house. Just like a dumb ox.

Hosts:
Ryan Reeves — PhD, Cambridge; historian and theologian
Brett Clemmer — Presid...

Can a man carry fire against his chest and his shirt not burn?

Everybody knows the answer. That's exactly why the father asks it. In Proverbs 6 he doesn't argue that adultery is wrong — he assumes his son already knows. Instead he asks a physics question, and then tells him that sleeping with another man's wife runs on the same law as fire. It isn't that you might get burned. Fire burns. That's what it does.

In ...

Most men have heard that there are seven things God hates. Almost nobody has been told which one He saves for last.

In this episode Ryan and Brett walk Proverbs 6:1–19, where the book breaks off the long warning about temptation and gets strangely practical. Don't guarantee a debt you can't cover. Don't sleep through your life. Don't become the man nobody can trust.

Hosts:
Ryan Reeves — PhD, Cambridge;...

Almost nobody wakes up one morning and decides to blow up his marriage.

That's not how it happens. It starts with a text that runs a little warm. A lunch that runs a little long. A door left open one inch. Proverbs 5 is a father who has watched enough men fall to know exactly how it works, and he walks his son right up to the edge and makes him look all the way down.

In this episode Ryan and Brett work through the who...

Most men are guarding the wrong thing.

There's a camera on the doorbell, a password on the phone, a code on the garage, insurance on everything in the driveway. We are the most guarded generation of men who ever lived. And Proverbs 4 says there is one assignment that outranks all of them, and most of us leave it completely unwatched.

In this episode Ryan and Brett work through the last lecture of Proverbs 4, the passa...

Nobody chooses ruin. No man stands at his front door and announces, "Today I begin destroying my life." And yet lives get destroyed every day. Proverbs 4 explains how: ruin isn't a decision, it's a road. You just keep walking.

Ryan and Brett take the two-paths passage, where the father shows his son both roads all the way to the horizon, because the only honest way to judge a road is by where it ends.

CONNECT WITH MAN...

Ask a man what his father taught him and watch his face. Some can quote him word for word, forty years later. Some go quiet, because the answer is nothing.

Proverbs 4 is the only place in the book where we hear a grandfather, a father quoting his own father to his sons. Three generations, nine verses.

The command at the center gets repeated four times: get wisdom. And the Hebrew word for "get" is the word for buying p...

The same wisdom God used to hang the planets and set the oceans in place is the wisdom meant to teach you how to treat the man who lives next door.

In this episode Ryan and Brett work through the back half of Proverbs 3, and they follow the passage on the strange descent it makes on purpose. It starts at the price of wisdom, worth more than silver, gold, and rubies put together. It climbs to the founding of the cosmos. And t...

Proverbs 3:5 might be the most quoted sentence in the whole Bible. It is on coffee mugs, graduation cards, and the wall of half the gyms in America. Most of us could recite it from memory and still not say what it actually asks of us.

In this episode Ryan and Brett take the third of Solomon's father-to-son talks and slow down on the line everybody knows by heart. Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your ow...

Tell a man there's a hundred thousand dollars buried in his backyard and he'll be out there with a shovel before sunrise. Tell him wisdom is worth more and he'll get to it someday. Proverbs 2 sits on that gap and won't let it go.

In this episode Ryan and Brett walk through the second of Solomon's father-to-son talks, a single long sentence in Hebrew that works like a map of everything coming later in the book. The chapter ma...

Almost every man I know who has wrecked his life has a moment he can name when he heard the warning and ignored it. He didn't miss it. He just thought he had more time.

Dr. Ryan M. Reeves and Brett Clemmer step into Proverbs 1:20–33, the first time Wisdom herself speaks in the book. She isn't whispering. She's standing in the loudest, busiest, most consequential place in town. The city gate. The market. The corner of the nois...

Every man wants to belong to something. The question Proverbs is going to ask, before it asks anything else, is: who's offering you a seat at the table...and what does the table cost?

Dr. Ryan M. Reeves and Brett Clemmer walk into Proverbs 1:8–19 and the warning isn't what you'd expect. Solomon doesn't lead with sex, or money, or even God. He leads with the crew.

Because every man, at every age, gets recruited. The teenager i...

"Most men can solve a problem at work in fifteen minutes that they can't solve at home in fifteen years." That's where this show starts.

Dr. Ryan M. Reeves and Brett Clemmer crack open Proverbs 1:1–7, the seven verses that hold the rest of the book together, and ask the question every grown man eventually has to answer: where does wisdom actually start?

Solomon doesn't bury the lead. He hands it to you in verse 7. "The fear o...