The Cord That Is Not Quickly Broken

What Proverbs Means by Favour

Anyone who has stood in a Nigerian church car park after the second service will have seen the word. It is on banners and car stickers, on programme themes, on the backs of shirts, and in the mouth of the preacher who has just asked the whole hall to say it together. Favour. Say it loudly enough, the implication runs, and the gates of heaven, the visa office and the admissions list will all give way.

The people who say it are not fools. A young graduate with no uncle in the ministry, no cousin at the bank and no name that opens doors needs to hear that God is not limited to the network she lacks. Daniel Jordan Smith, an anthropologist who has written on Nigerian prosperity churches, reports that church leaders often present their own wealth as the evidence of God’s blessing, and that members mostly accept this even though they are far poorer than the people leading them. The teaching has real pull because the need is real. A pastor can fairly add that God does open doors, that Joseph was lifted out of a prison, and that to say otherwise would be to preach a very small God. I agree with every word of that. What I want to ask is whether the word favour, as Proverbs uses it, is the right name for the door.

Honest meeting begins with the word itself. In three sayings of Proverbs, 8:35, 12:2 and 18:22, the writer uses the same Hebrew phrase about obtaining favour from the LORD. The word is ratson, and the standard lexicons give it as goodwill, acceptance, delight, pleasure. It describes the face of a superior turning warmly towards someone. That is a good deal more intimate than a result. It is a relationship in which God, who owes us nothing, is pleased, and a person who has that doesn’t need a password. Doors may open afterwards, or they may stay shut for a long while, but the favour was already there.

What Proverbs gives is three places where the phrase turns up, and each one reaches into a different room of ordinary life. One concerns the pursuit of wisdom, one concerns goodness of character, and one concerns marriage. I want to take them one at a time, and be honest at each step about what the text says and what it doesn’t.

How Far the Cord Image Goes

The image that holds the three together comes from Ecclesiastes, and it needs a careful word before we lean on it. The writer is talking about companionship. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. If one falls, the other lifts him up. Two lying together keep warm. And at the end of that run comes the line.

“a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

— Ecclesiastes 4:12 (ESV)

The translators’ handbook on Ecclesiastes by Graham Ogden and Lynell Zogbo calls it an ancient Israelite proverb about the strength of combined effort, one that may well have a counterpart in many cultures, and it adds that the number three need not be literal. Nothing in the verse names wisdom, character and marriage as the three strands, and I won’t pretend it does.

So the cord is a picture borrowed to carry something the verse never says. I think the borrowing is fair, because the three Proverbs really do share a phrase and a God who is doing the favouring. But it is a picture, and when it begins to sound like a formula in which each strand is a lever, it has stopped being one. A cord can be pulled apart by a determined hand. The saying only says it takes more doing.

Wisdom Calling at the Crossroads

The first saying is spoken by Wisdom herself.

“For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD,”

— Proverbs 8:35 (ESV)

Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is not found in a quiet library. She stands where the roads meet and the town gates open and cries out to anyone who passes. The ESV puts it plainly, that on the heights beside the way, at the crossroads, she takes her stand and cries aloud, and her cry is to the children of man. Picture the junction outside any Nigerian market on a busy morning, with every kind of person and every kind of hurry, and someone in the middle of it calling out for people to stop and listen. Most of the traffic goes round her.

Later in the chapter she says she was beside the LORD like a master workman, daily his delight, rejoicing before him. The Hebrew poets are speaking of wisdom as something older than the world, close to God, glad of what he made. Christians have always heard more than poetry here. Paul calls Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

“but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:24 (ESV)

Care is needed, and the early church found it out the hard way. In the fourth century the Arians seized on the Greek form of Proverbs 8:22, in which the LORD created Wisdom, as proof that the Son was a creature. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, answered across his Four Discourses against the Arians, written between 356 and 360 during one of his exiles. According to Geoffrey Boyle’s account, he held that the speaker is Wisdom, the Son, and that Proverbs must not be expounded in its bare first sense. The ESV has possessed where the Arians read created, and the translation question is worth a whole sermon on its own. What matters here is that one of the great African theologians of the early church did not treat Proverbs 8 as a self help chapter. He took it as speech from a person.

That changes what finding wisdom means. It isn’t acquiring a skill, or collecting maxims for a good life, though Proverbs has those too. It means coming to the one who calls and learning to take his voice as the voice that settles questions. Plenty of us come to him when the shortcuts have failed. The saying asks us to start there, which is a rather different order of business.

There’s an obvious objection, which is that Wisdom’s promise sounds like a transaction. Find me, and you get favour. But the text reads as an invitation as much as a promise, and the favour it names is the delight of the one who calls. Anyone who has been wanted by a person they admire knows that nobody buys that.

Picture a final year student in Zaria choosing between two supervisors and two project topics. She prays about it for a week and fasts on the Friday, and she never once opens Proverbs, where the question of whose counsel to trust is spelled out at length. Nothing is wrong with the prayer or the fast. But the voice at the crossroads has been speaking the whole time, and she has walked past it to ask a different door for a signal.

Good Men, Evil Devices and Noah

The second saying is blunter.

“A good man obtains favor from the LORD, but a man of evil devices he condemns.”

— Proverbs 12:2 (ESV)

Proverbs has no gentle category here, and the line is stark. Yet the word good deserves a fair hearing. The good man of Proverbs isn’t a man who never falls. The writer says elsewhere that the righteous falls seven times and rises again, and the wicked are the ones who stay down when calamity comes. What marks him is the direction of his getting up.

Picture a quantity surveyor in Port Harcourt, a church member with a clean Sunday record, who has been adding ten per cent to every bill because the clients expect it and everybody does it. (This is a constructed case, though anyone in the building trade will know the type.) One morning he reads Proverbs 12:2 and cannot shake the phrase evil devices. He stops. The text doesn’t promise him a bigger firm. It promises that the LORD turns his face toward a man like that, and what that looks like in a building trade run on envelopes might be a clear conscience, a name that holds up under audit, one client who stays because the numbers are straight. It might also be a lean year. The saying is honest enough not to say.

The favoured man everybody reaches for is Noah.

“But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.”

— Genesis 6:8 (ESV)

The preacher usually says that Noah got favour because he was righteous. Look at the order. Genesis 6:5 describes a world in which every intention of the human heart was only evil continually, and the very next thing, in verse 8, is that Noah found favour. Only after that does the writer tell us Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, who walked with God. The Hebrew word for favour here is chen, which the lexicons give as grace, a different word from the ratson of Proverbs. So the two texts don’t say the same thing, and the difference matters. Genesis leaves it open whether the righteousness earned the favour or grew out of it. A careful reader should say that and stop.

Paul settles it for those who come after. We are saved by grace through faith, and then, as he goes on in Ephesians 2:10, we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand. The good man of Proverbs 12:2 isn’t earning his way to favour. He is a person being made good by a God who has already turned toward him.

A neighbouring saying shows what that goodness looks like in public.

“Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.”

— Proverbs 3:3 and 4 (ESV)

The ESV footnotes good success as repute, and that is the sense I’d keep. A life of steady faithfulness collects a reputation slowly, in the eyes of people who had no reason to be generous. Most Nigerians can name the person in their office, their parish or their street whom nobody has ever needed to watch, and everyone knows what that name is worth when a stranger needs a signature or a guarantor. It is not a promise of promotion. It is the kind of standing that makes a person trustable, and it comes only to those who have been trustworthy for years, including in the years when it paid nothing.

Finding a Wife, and Not Finding One

The third saying is the one that makes people shift in their seats.

“He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD.”

— Proverbs 18:22 (ESV)

The ESV cross refers it to Proverbs 31:10, the portrait of the excellent wife, and it is worth noticing what that portrait shows. She is busy, shrewd with money, generous to the poor, and trusted by her husband. Whatever else the passage is, it isn’t a picture of a decorative companion. When a man finds someone like that, the text says he has received something from God.

Paul takes this earthy picture and lifts it. Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25), and Paul calls the whole arrangement a mystery that refers to Christ and the church. A marriage run on that engine shows something to anyone watching, even those who can’t say what it is they see. It’s an image of costly love, and that is why Proverbs’ remark is more than a romantic tip.

The same Ephesians text speaks to people whose marriages are hard. Nobody who has sat through a counselling session with a couple who haven’t spoken properly in a year needs to be told that finding a wife is a good thing. They need to hear that Christ’s way of loving, giving himself up, is something a person can begin to practise on a Tuesday evening whatever the other person does, and that the practice is itself a place where God’s face turns towards them.

Now say what a careful reader has to say next. Proverbs 18:22 is an observation, a wisdom saying, about what usually happens when a man finds a good wife. It is not a law that everyone must marry, nor a verdict on anyone who hasn’t. Think of the widow in her fifties, the man whose wife has left, the woman who prayed for a husband through her thirties and is now at peace with God but still lonely in a hall full of couples. A sermon that sells this verse as the next step in a sequence, wisdom first, then character, then the spouse, tells those people that the queue they are standing in has been closed on them. I think that is cruel, and I don’t believe the text intends it.

The better question is whether the verse can bear that weight of sequence at all. The man about whom Luke twice says that the favour of God rested on him never married. We will come back to him.

Favour in the Life of Jesus

Luke gives us the test case, and it unsettles every neat version of this subject. When the angel came to Mary, he said what the favour talk says.

“Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”

— Luke 1:28 (ESV)

Luke does not say that she opened a door, got a job or avoided trouble. The next verse says she was greatly troubled. The angel tells her not to be afraid, for she has found favor with God, and what follows is a pregnancy before the wedding in a small town, the talk that anyone who knows small towns can imagine, and in time the death of her son. Favour in her case looked like being trusted with the hardest assignment in the world.

Then there is the child himself.

“And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”

— Luke 2:52 (ESV)

Here are the three Proverbs in a single sentence. He grew in wisdom, he was good beyond any man’s reach, and he had the favour of God and of men. Yet he never married, he owned almost nothing, and the same people who watched him grow in favour with them ended up demanding his death. If favour meant ease, he is a sad case. If favour is the delight of the Father resting on a person, then no one has ever had more of it, and Calvary falls inside it, not outside.

That is the turn this essay has been working towards, and it lands hard on both of the easy versions. The password version, where favour is a result, has no way to explain Mary or Jesus. The tidy sermon version, where favour is the reward for completing three steps, has no way to explain a Christian who is wise, good and single, or wise, good and married and still ill, still poor, still unanswered. Both versions run out of road at the cross. The cross is the one place where the favour of God and a great deal of suffering meet in the same person, and it tells us the favour was never the same thing as the outcome.

Proverbs has always known its limits. The book is a collection of sayings about how God’s world usually runs, and the people who preserved it also preserved Job and Ecclesiastes, which spend a good deal of their length noting that the usual doesn’t always happen. To read Proverbs 8:35, 12:2 and 18:22 as guarantees is to ask the book to speak louder than its own editors allowed.

What to Do on Monday Morning

There is a reason the three sayings keep company, and it has nothing to do with a clever outline. Paul tells the Corinthians that because of God they are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30, ESV, quoted in part). The wisdom that calls at the crossroads and the goodness that rises after a fall are not two projects for the ambitious. They are what the same person gives to those who belong to him, and the love of Ephesians 5 is the pattern he sets for how it is lived with another person. A cord is strong because the strands run the same way. These do, since each one begins with Christ and returns to him.

It also keeps the whole matter honest. If wisdom, goodness and love are things he gives, then none of us can take the credit, and none of us has to hold the favour in place by performance. We are asked to follow, which is harder on the pride and gentler on the nerves than any formula.

So what are we to do with a cord of three strands that isn’t a formula? I’d offer three small things, and none of them is a slogan.

Start with the one who calls. Some of the people who have chased favour hardest, through water bought by the litre and seed sown into every basket in reach, have spent very little time just sitting with the Gospels and hearing Wisdom talk. If you have a hundred hours for a vigil, you can find fifteen minutes with Luke. Let Jesus speak first, before the shortcuts have failed. That is the first strand.

Then look at your work this week the way Proverbs 12:2 would. Is there a device in it, a padded figure, a small silence, a favour owed that nobody has named? You needn’t be perfect, and the text doesn’t ask for perfect. It asks what happens after you fall, and which direction you rise in.

Third, whether you are married or looking, widowed or content, hold the picture of Ephesians 5 in front of you as a standard for the love you give, because every one of us lives in some kind of relationship that Christ’s love is meant to shape. Your parents, your congregation, the flatmate you can’t stand. The cord of favour doesn’t stop at the door of a church wedding.

And if you are in a season where none of the three appears to be working, where you have prayed and sat with Luke and told the truth about the invoice and still the door has not opened, you are in the same room as Mary on the morning after the angel left. She had the favour. She also had a long road ahead of her. Perhaps the next time you hear the word shouted across a car park, you could answer it quietly with a question that Proverbs and the Gospels both seem to ask. Whose delight are you living in, and what has he asked you to carry?

References

Biblical References

Ecclesiastes 4:12 (ESV). The threefold cord, quoted as a picture borrowed for the argument; verses 9 to 11 summarised, not quoted.
Proverbs 8:1 to 4; 8:22 to 31 (ESV). Wisdom at the crossroads and the gates, and her description of herself beside the LORD, paraphrased from the ESV text.
Proverbs 8:35 (ESV). Wisdom’s promise that whoever finds her obtains favour from the LORD.
Proverbs 12:2 (ESV). The good man who obtains favour and the man of evil devices who is condemned.
Proverbs 18:22 (ESV). The man who finds a wife obtains favour; the cross reference to Proverbs 31:10 is noted.
Proverbs 3:3 and 4 (ESV). Steadfast love and faithfulness bringing favour and good success in the sight of God and man.
Proverbs 24:16 (ESV). The righteous falls seven times and rises again, paraphrased in part.
Genesis 6:5 to 9 (ESV). The corruption of the world and Noah’s favour, with the order of the verses noted; verse 8 quoted, the rest paraphrased.
1 Corinthians 1:24 (ESV). Christ as the power and wisdom of God, linking Proverbs 8 to Jesus.
1 Corinthians 1:30 (ESV). Christ as our wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, quoted in part.
Ephesians 2:8 to 10 (ESV). Salvation by grace and the good works prepared beforehand, paraphrased.
Ephesians 5:25 (ESV). The husband’s love patterned on Christ’s love for the church.
Luke 1:28 to 30 (ESV). Mary as the favoured one who was greatly troubled.
Luke 2:40 and 2:52 (ESV). The child and young man Jesus growing in wisdom and in favour with God and man.

Other Sources

Athanasius of Alexandria. (c. 356 to 360). Four discourses against the Arians (Discourse II). As cited and summarised in Boyle (2021). Used only through Boyle’s account of his reading of Proverbs 8:22.
BibleHub. (n.d.). Strong’s Hebrew 2580: chen [Lexicon entry]. https://mail.biblehub.com/genesis/6-8.htm. Source for the Hebrew word for favour in Genesis 6:8.
BibleHub. (n.d.). Strong’s Hebrew 7522: ratson [Lexicon entry]. https://mail.biblehub.com/hebrew/7522.htm. Source for the glosses of ratson and for BDB’s placing Proverbs 8:35, 12:2 and 18:22 under goodwill of God.
Boyle, G. R. (2021, February 9). Parsing the Proverbs with St. Athanasius. The Lutheran Witness. https://witness.lcms.org/2021/parsing-the-proverbs-with-st-athanasius/. Source for Athanasius’s reading of Proverbs 8:22 and the dating of the discourses.
Ogden, G. S., & Zogbo, L. (1997). A handbook on the book of Ecclesiastes. United Bible Societies. https://old-tips.translation.bible/?p=37081. Source for the proverbial sense of the threefold cord and the non literal number.
Smith, D. J. (2021). The Pentecostal prosperity gospel in Nigeria: Paradoxes of corruption and inequality. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 59(1), 103-122. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10312994. Source for the observation that members read material reward as a sign of God’s hand.

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.