My child, will you treasure my wisdom?
Then, and only then, will you acquire it.
And only if you accept my advice and store it within will you succeed.
Train your heart to listen when I speak,
Cry out in prayer for perception, insight, and comprehension.
Open your spirit wide to expand your discernment,
then pass on what you have learned to your children.
Keep seeking wisdom in the persevering way a profiteer would hunt for gold,
search in hidden places for me as for cherished treasure.
Then you will discover the fear of the Lord and find the true knowledge of God.
Fear of the Lord is the knowledge of what it is to be without God,
It is the terrifying knowledge of what it is to live in falsity and without integrity.
This is only understood once the treasure has been discovered,
and the true path is known:
the true knowledge of God.
Wisdom is a gift from a generous God,
and every word spoken by God is full of revelation.
It becomes a fountain of comprehension within you.
It is the living water.
For the Lord has a bountiful store of wisdom
and makes this accessible to those who live a life of honesty,
seeking God with their whole being, without limits.
The Lord becomes your protector when you follow honest ways,
when you genuinely care for your neighbour,
when you devote yourselves to those who are weak and in need of help, and
when you feel the weakness of those who need you, look at them and love them,
and let them be your guide.
You will discover all that is just, proper, and fair,
and you will be empowered to make the right decisions as you walk into your life, your destiny.
When wisdom wins your heart and revelation breaks in,
true pleasure — true, irrepressible joy — will enter your being,
and it will be filled to overflowing.
If you choose to follow good counsel,
you will inhabit a place of divine alignment and bliss,
and understanding will protect you from making poor choices.
Being positioned in this way, aligned with God, will rescue you from evil in disguise.
Deception will be evident, and those who can’t speak with honesty won’t convince you.
There are those who have left the paths of righteousness
and walk in the ways of darkness.
They are walking on a path to nowhere,
wandering ever deeper into darkness and deception.
Only wisdom can save you from smoothly spoken lies that seduce,
so difficult to distinguish from truth, unless you have surrendered your understanding to God.
Lies are spoken by those who leave the way,
those who have forgotten what it was to be on an honest path.
Now they inhabit a world situated on the road to hell, a place of death and misery.
On this road, truth is obscured and words of love are confused and lost.
Those living on the road to hell entreat others to join them,
and their words sound plausible.
But if you join with those who live lives of forgetfulness and deceit,
if you join those who have chosen the path of death,
you will never come back to the path of truth.
You will find nothing more on your way but destruction and despair,
a darkening and desolation of everything that comes to your senses.
It is a place where nothing has value…
Even the gold you were once seeking will be abandoned as worthless.
Treasures like gold lie scattered in abundance inside hell, especially near the entrance.
They are discarded there very quickly after arrival, and sit there, untouched, for eternity.
There is no appetite in hell for things that were desirable even moments before entry.
Hell is a place of plenty, where all desire is sucked free (emptied) of life.
That is the nature of deceit.
You won’t know what destruction is until you enter the emptiness of hell, in its abundance of plenty.
Hell makes a carcass of even the most innocent of riches.
In hell, nothing has changed, but desire has gone.
All appetite — desire — was a gift from God, even the appetite for corruption.
All appetite exists only while there is an opportunity for it to be used to get closer to God.
That is appetite’s only goal. Even while there is an appetite for corruption, there is hope.
Hope and desire are allied.
If you keep your eyes closed on the way to hell,
if you sleep, or pretend to be asleep,
you will be ushered in and welcomed just the same.
You don’t need to make the choice to go in, there’s no requirements aside from showing up,
the entrance is free,
but it takes you from the path of life and there is no return.
There is not even a desire to return.
All hope is lost.
Follow those who follow wisdom
and stay on the right path.
All who truly love and follow God will enjoy life to the fullest and will inherit their destinies.
Love God in full surrender.
The treacherous ones who love darkness
will lose not only all they had and could have had,
but even their own souls!
Written by: Ruthie Baigent 30 June 2023, using the Passion Translation and the Christian Community Bible translation of Proverbs 2