My son, eat honey, for it is good,
and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.
Know that wisdom is such to your soul;
if you find it, there will be a future,
and your hope will not be cut off.

Proverbs 24:13-14 ESV

The book of Proverbs is divided into two large sections. Chapters 1-9 serve as the extended prologue, where the importance and nature of wisdom is set forth in the form of a series of paternal addresses. Chapters 10-31 are a collection of proverbs, which are mostly bite-sized sayings of wisdom meant to be quickly memorized and meditated upon continuously. Of course, within this broader collection, there are also smaller units. Chapter 31, for instance, also serves as an epilogue to the whole book, and chapter 30 is filled with sayings of a man named Agur. Our verses are found within a group of proverbs often called the Word of the Wise because of their introduction in 22:17, and these proverbs are typically longer than the single verse proverbs that dominate chapters 10-22.

As is common among nearly all of the proverbs in this book, the saying before us is simple enough to immediately understand yet profound enough to meditate upon without end. Let us, therefore, unfold this proverb piece by piece.

We begin with the two words my son. You may recognize this common phrase from the opening nine chapters, which begin all of their main sections with a fatherly appeal for his son to listen to his words of wisdom. But this paternal motif continues throughout the book, except for chapter 31 which is wisdom of a mother to her son. Thus, whenever we read, 23:22-25 say,

Listen to your father who gave you life,
    and do not despise your mother when she is old.
Buy truth, and do not sell it.
    buy wisdom, instruction, and understanding.
The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice;
    he who fathers a wise son will be glad in him.
Let your father and mother be glad;
    let her who bore you rejoice.

We should obviously take those words at face value. Honoring our father and mother is Fifth of the Ten Commandments, after all. But on a spiritual level, they are summoning us to listen and pay attention to the paternal and maternal wisdom that the Holy Spirit has penned in this very book. Indeed, although God used for each of us a father and mother to give us life, He leads us to life everlasting through His written Word. As we submit to the Scriptures, we follow after our heavenly Father but also after the multitude of our ancestors in the faith who have gone before us.

Of course, the challenge before all godly parents should be to merge the two realities. Yes, our children are explicitly commanded in Scripture to obey us, but let our commands to them be the discipline, instruction, and wisdom of the Lord. There is no shortage of parenting books available, and many of them have decent advice to give. However, we would do eternally better (and I mean that literally) to saturate ourselves in God’s Word as our guide for parenting. Indeed, it is all too easy to forget that our children are our most immediate neighbors, second only to our spouse. For instance, we typically read Ephesians 4:32 (“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”) as how we should treat our fellow church members, and we certainly should! Yet verses like that one provide far better parenting advice than any book you might read. Or more to our present topic, saturate yourself in the Proverbs, praying for the Lord to give you wisdom that you might impart it to your children. We should long for our children to obey us not simply because we are their father or mother but because we are raising them according to God’s Word.

Now that we know that this proverb is appealing us to as a father instructs his beloved son, what is the appeal that is being made? Eat honey. This is one of Eowyn’s favorite verses in the Bible and for good reason. The Almighty Creator of heaven and earth inspired His Scriptures over the course of hundreds of years so that we might know Him and what He has commanded us, His creatures, to do. And this is one of the commands that He has given to us: eat honey. This is a command along the same lines as the Fourth Commandment or Proverbs 5:19; it is explicitly for our good and for our pleasure.

Indeed, note the reasons given for this command: for it is good. We certainly know that to be true. Raw honey is a superfood. It has antibacterial and antiviral properties, which is why it can be stored almost indefinitely. It is also anti-inflammatory, which makes it a natural balm for burns and light infections on the skin. It boosts the immune system. Eating local honey (again, raw) honey can naturally build allergy resistance, working somewhat like an inoculation. Although honey is sweet, it has a low glycemic index, which means that it can be used a sweetener for helping to regulate blood sugar levels. Raw honey has enzymes that aid in digesting food, which is probably why many cultures drink hot tea with honey after large meals. It is also seems to have cardiovascular benefits as well as promoting better sleep by helping the body to release melatonin.

So, honey is very much good for you, but is that the goodness of honey that the proverb intends? The second half of verse 13 clarifies: and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Honey is good because it is sweet. God here is commanding us to eat honey because He designed it to taste really good for us. That is why you should eat honey because it tastes pleasant.

Because we live in a world of pleasures run amuck, we can easily succumb to the danger of over-correcting by viewing pleasure itself as the enemy. Such over-correction is easy to do. This example from Thomas Watson has always stuck with me:

Beard, in his Theatre, speaks of one who had a room richly hung with fair pictures, he had most delicious music, he had the rarest beauties, he had all the candies, and curious preserves of the confectioner, to gratify his senses with pleasure, and swore he would live one week as a god, though he were sure to damned to hell the next day.

Lord’s Prayer, 116.

That dream of living like a god for a week is less than our present reality. We not only have fair pictures; we have moving pictures which we set in the place traditional reserved for household gods as the focal point of the home. And rightly do we give them such a place of honor, for they give us access to more entertainment than we can possibly consume in our lifetime. When it comes to music, we no longer need to go to the orchestra or hire a string quartet; we can play anything we want on Spotify. And we won’t even go into the candies that we have. The point is that that man’s dream of pleasures for which he would gladly be eternally damned are now our daily life. So, we are right to be skeptical of pleasure. Eve was deceived in part because the fruit “was a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6), and the very next chapter of Proverbs will warn us twice. “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it” (25:16). “It is not good to eat much honey…” (25:27).

However, pleasure itself is not the problem. Consider the following section of Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, remembering that Lewis is writing from the perspective of the demonic, meaning that the Enemy is God:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

Pg. 44

I think Lewis is right. Satan and his demons have never been able to create a single pleasure; they can only tempt us into abusing the pleasures that God has created for our good enjoyment. Indeed, let us remember that David says that only at God’s “right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:1), which is, not by coincidence but by providence, where our Lord Jesus now sits enthroned. As we will see in just a moment, the ultimate purpose of all physical pleasures is to set our gaze upon their Author. Indeed, to quote Lewis once more, I think he is right to note that our problem is not going far enough with pleasure:

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The Weight of Glory, 26.

Or perhaps we can change up the metaphor. We are like children who pass by a perfectly cooked ribeye because we only have a taste for chicken strips or are bored by a symphony because we only enjoy Baby Shark. The problem is not with the steak or the symphony; it is with us. We do not go far enough with pleasure.

That is exactly what verse 14 summons us to do. As good and sweet as honey is to our physical tastebuds, wisdom is good and sweet to the soul. In order to properly understand this point, we must begin by defining wisdom. I think the best definition is that wisdom is the skill of living life well. The fact that wisdom is a skill emphasizes that it is inherently practical. Knowledge and understanding are crucial components of wisdom, as is teachability, but wisdom goes beyond the intellect and into the hands, feet, and tongue. In fact, we could also call wisdom the application of knowledge and understanding. Either way, the practical nature of wisdom is why education alone is never the answer to the world’s problems. Some of the wisest people on earth are what we would call “uneducated,” while some of the greatest fools possess very fancy degrees, certificates, and titles. Of course, the educated may also be wise and the uneducated may be foolish. Wisdom is a skill, not a set of facts.

Indeed, wisdom is the skill of living life well. But who gets to define what living life well looks like? According to Proverbs, God does. Why does He get to define how life ought to be lived? Because He is the Author of life. He is the Creator of all things; therefore, He has the exclusive right to dictate how life ought to be lived. Wisdom is following His design, fearing Him and walking in His ways. Proverbs 3:5-7 makes this clear:

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 straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes;
    fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.

Fearing God is the beginning of wisdom (9:10) because it means acknowledging that true wisdom can only be found in God the Creator.

Wisdom is good for the soul because it puts us in line with God’s design for living. Indeed, throughout the book of Proverbs, we repeatedly find that life will generally go better for us if we walk in God’s wisdom, if we do what He commands rather than whatever we want. I say generally because we do live in a world that has been broken by sin.

Take Proverbs 22:29 as an example: “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.” Our saying that cream rises expresses the same idea as that proverb, and it is generally true. A person who strives for excellence in their work will generally find their work regarded and rewarded as such. Yet because we live in a world that groans under the curse of sin, we could find numerous examples of exceptions to that principle.

We can use the analogy of swimming in the river to describe following God’s wisdom. Going against God’s wisdom is like trying to swim upstream. It is not only difficult but dangerous. Following God’s wisdom, however, is like swimming downstream. It is not a guarantee that you will not get bit by a snake or cut your foot on a rock, but it is entirely superior to fighting the current.

But the greatest evidence of wisdom’s sweetness is found by walking in it. Yes, evidence can be given, but experience is the only way to taste its sweetness. Indeed, that is how honey works. There is plenty of evidence to support the goodness of honey, but the best evidence is to simply taste it.

But is living a good life the only benefit to wisdom? Notice the remainder of verse 14: if you find it, there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off. To determine what exactly this means it might be helpful to note that this is the second of three references to one’s future in chapters 23-24. First, in 23:17-18, we read:

Let not your heart envy sinners,
    but continue in the fear of the LORD all the day.
Surely there is a future,
    and your hope will not be cut off.

Second, in 24:19-20, we read:

Fret not yourself because of evildoers,
     and be not envious of the wicked,
for the evil man has no future;
    the lamp of the wicked will be put out.

Clearly this refers to the future beyond this life entirely and to a hope that transcends the ups and downs of each day. Those who are wicked and reject God’s wisdom, choosing to follow their own ways, may appear to prosper, but we should not envy them. However prosperous the wicked may seem, death comes for everyone and then comes judgment. This is why Proverbs 10:2 says, “Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.” It is undeniably true that the wicked accumulate much treasure in this life, and though they would call those treasures profit, the Bible says otherwise. Real profit is whatever transcends death. True treasures are those that not even death can take from us.

So if we love wisdom even more than we enjoy honey, we will live life the way that God designed for it to be lived and even after death we will still have life with Him. Quick question: Do you? Do you actually love wisdom more than the physical pleasures of this life, and you actually practice God’s wisdom? If you are a Christian, hopefully you try to live according to God’s wisdom and have a desire to desire wisdom as sweeter than honey. But the honest answer is that you do not, at least not consistently. The same goes for me.

If we are honest with ourselves, we read Proverbs longing to be wise, but if we use its wisdom as a gauge, we are consistently shown to be fools, which is synonymous with the wicked in Scripture.  Just using Proverbs 3:5-7, do you truly acknowledge the LORD in all your ways, in everything that you do, no matter how big or small? Do you fully walk in the fear of the LORD, or is it more common for you to do what is wise in your own eyes? Whenever we read Proverbs as guide for how God actually expects us to live rather than a fun collection of platitudes, it testifies to our wickedness just as much as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. And that is by design. Reading the wisdom within Proverbs should confront us with our own sinful foolishness and cause us to cry out to God for His wisdom. As James 1:5 notes, God is faithful to give wisdom abundantly to those who ask Him for it.

And we know this to be true because God has already given to us the fullness of His wisdom. In 1 Corinthians 1:24, Paul calls Jesus “the wisdom of God.” It is true that Jesus is the only human to ever obey the entirety of God’s law perfectly, but we should also note that He lived as the walking incarnation of Proverbs. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s wisdom. But even though He alone is truly wise and righteousness, shunning evil and walking continuously in the fear of the LORD, He died the death of the wicked and the fool upon the cross. He took the fullness of God’s judgment, being cut off as we deserve to be.

Yet He subjected Himself to that judgment for us, taking our judgment upon Himself. Although altogether righteousness, He endured the wrath of God against our sin and folly in our place and cloths us with His own righteousness as with a robe. Therefore, the sweetness of honey should not only cause us to lift our eyes onto the superior sweetness of God’s wisdom in the abstract rather it should also cause us to consider Jesus, who through the folly of the cross brings us a steadfast hope that can never be cut off.

As we come to the Table of our King, let us stand amazed at the wisdom of God manifoldly displayed through the foolishness of the cross. Through the broken body of Christ, we now eat a bread that is far sweeter than manna, a bread that testifies that we have been made into the living body of our Lord. Through the blood of Christ that was shed as He drank the cup of God’s wrath, we now drink a cup that is sweeter than any wine, a cup that testifies of the new covenant that Christ has inaugurated as our great High Priest, bringing us back to the garden that was lost to us in Adam. By eating this bread and drinking this cup, let us proclaim the return of our King, our blessed hope that will not be cut off.