This verse opens the interlude poem on wisdom's worth, Proverbs 3:13–20.
Quick answer
The person who finds wisdom is happy, blessed, deeply well off. The poem opens with a congratulation, not a command.
Read the whole unit
Between the chapter's two lectures, it pauses to sing. This eight-verse interlude is a poem in two movements. The first (vv. 13–18) is framed by happiness: it opens "Happy is the man who finds wisdom" and closes "happy are all who retain her," and between those bookends it prices wisdom against everything an ancient reader valued, silver, gold, rubies, long life, riches, honor, and finds the market unable to match her. The closing image reaches all the way back to Eden: she is "a tree of life to those who take hold of her." The second movement (vv. 19–20) changes the register entirely: the same wisdom the son is urged to find is the wisdom by which the LORD founded the earth and established the heavens. That is the poem's quiet astonishment. The thing being offered to an ordinary young man is the very principle by which the world was made. Wisdom is not a study aid; she is woven into the architecture of reality, which is exactly why living against her is living against the grain of everything.
What this verse contributes
This verse sets the poem's key signature. "Happy" is the Hebrew ashrei, the word that opens Psalm 1 and that Jesus reached for in the Beatitudes: a public congratulation of a life that is working. The verbs are treasure verbs, finds and gains, wisdom hunted rather than trivia collected, and the claim is complete before the poem explains it: show me the person who has found wisdom, and I will show you someone to envy.
Related: Psalm 1:1–2 · Matthew 13:44
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.