Daily Devotions from the Book of Proverbs

Publisher Marketing: It has been correctly stated that a person should study the book of Proverbs if he or she wants to be wise. Accordingly, whether by design or not, the book of Proverbs has been organized into thirty-one different chapters. That means that a person can read a chapter in the book each day based upon the numerical date of the month. For example, on the first day of the month, one would read the first chapter in the book of Proverbs. On the second day of the month, he or she would read the second chapter. On the third day of the month, he or she would read the third chapter and so forth for the whole month. If a person were to do that for an entire year, then he or she would read the whole book of Proverbs twelve times every year minus a few chapters for those months with fewer than thirty-one days. However, one should note that in trying to write different daily devotions on the book of Proverbs that it is not practical to write twelve separate daily devotions for each entire chapter in the book of Proverbs. First, it is not practical to do so because an entire chapter may not have twelve separate truths to share for each of the twelve months. Second, even if it were possible to write twelve separate devotions for each entire chapter, those devotions would be too lengthy and too repetitive to be read in a single setting. For those reasons, I have divided each of the thirty-one chapters into twelve groupings of two or three verses each. By doing that, a single devotion covers only a few verses and it can be restricted to a single page. In addition, since no devotion in this book is writing about the same two or three verses, no devotion is a duplicate of another. The organization of the devotions in this text has followed the same pattern as how one might read the book of Proverbs for themselves. In other words, on the first day of each month, this text will have a short devotion on two or three verses from only the first chapter of the book of Proverbs. On the second day of each month, this text will have a short devotion on two or three verses from only the second chapter of the book of Proverbs. That format has been used throughout this text. By so doing, a person might read the eighth chapter in the book of Proverbs on the eighth day of a particular month. Then if he or she were to read this devotion book for that same date, it would be a short devotion on two or three verses from the eighth chapter of the book of Proverbs. Writing this text according to that structure seemed better than just going through each chapter in verse-by-verse order. The reason is because it does not seem right that a person would read the second chapter in the book of Proverbs on January second and then read a short devotion in this text that is on a few verses in the first chapter of the book of Proverbs. One final introductory note must be made with respect to Solomon's language. Because he had lived about nine hundred years before the Incarnation of Jesus, he did not use the same terminology as the later apostles in the New Testament. Instead of talking about a person being saved, he had used words such as wise, righteous, knowledge, and understanding. In every case, though, as will be frequently shown in this text, those words always meant the same as being saved. It would have been totally ridiculous for him to ever say that a wise, righteous, knowledgeable, or understanding person would die lost. Therefore, it will also be important to show in this text that those labels had only applied to individuals after salvation rather than before.