Solomon strongly believed that a significant source of training and guidance is parents. Parents, are you instructing your children? Have you trained them to listen to your instruction, or do you, as our culture teaches us to, expect your instruction to “go in one ear and out the other?” Do you believe that you can’t say anything in the way of guidance and accountability for your children or they might turn away from you? Do you believe that your children can only learn by making their own mistakes, and so your job as a parent is to allow them to do that? Are you living your life in such a way as to gain wisdom yourself, starting with the fear of the Lord, and be perceived as a credible instructor of wisdom for your children? If you aren’t training them, they will receive their training from someone else. In our culture, that someone else is often their peers, which is like the blind leading the blind. No wonder they place no value on experience and insight gained only with age.
In teaching his son how he should value wisdom, Solomon compared wisdom to a woman. What image does that convey? Consider how young men desire women; he wants his son to desire wisdom with that strong of a desire. What if we don’t desire it that much? Then we won’t seek it. If we don’t seek it, we won’t find it, and instead, folly will overtake us. Where my desire doesn’t match what Scripture reveals it should be, I ask God to help my wanting to be what He wants it to be. The consequences of complacency are too severe for my preference.
Note the generalities Solomon offers with regard to the wicked: they do wicked things. That should come as no surprise to us, then, when we see that happening. We need to expect that and be on our guard. That means we won’t partner with them when God tells us not to, and we won’t follow their lead. You’re not setting up any wicked people as your examples, are you? Or allowing your children to do so?