What is wisdom?
This article may be reproduced in print or on web sites, subject to the copyright notice below.
Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted - one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?
If you do not know, those words come from the title song of Eminem's film 8-Mile. This film is all about success - about what it takes to escape from poverty and deprivation in urban Detroit, into - ultimately - worldwide fame and fortune.
If I asked you what would count as 'everything you ever wanted'? I wonder what you would say?
There are many people who would say, 'I want to be rich'. 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' I do! I don't mind if it involves a lot of coughing from the audience. Just lead me to the money, and everything will be fine.'
There are others who see sex as the answer: if I can only have enough sexual partners, or enough sexual encounters, my life will feel fulfilled and wonderful. If it has to be on Teen Big Brother, well, that is OK.
There are others for whom fame is the key. Never mind 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' I want to win 'Pop Idol' - or perhaps even better, I want to be one of the judges on 'Pop Idol!'
The film 'In Bed With Madonna' shows her visiting a doctor to get her voice checked. The camera is there all the time, filming everything. The doctor asks her: "Do you want to talk at all off camera?" And Madonna says no. Warren Beatty - her boyfriend at the time - says:
She doesn't want to live off camera, much less talk. There's nothing to say off camera. Why would you say something if it's off camera? What point is there in existing?
And for Madonna, fame is the spur. There is no point in existing if it is not in front of a camera.
For still others, power is the ultimate goal. They do not want to be rich or famous, but they do want to influence and control people's lives and destinies. Napoleon said:
I love power like a musician loves his music.
- and there are plenty of people around today who still think like this.
What counts as success? Is it money, sex, fame, or power? These are the messages that the media hammer home at us relentlessly.
But if we are people of any depth at all, we know that these things cannot satisfy us, because they do not fulfill their promises, and we can never have enough of them. Money is not going to satisfy us. If you asked Bill Gates if he had enough, he would probably say 'no'. Howard Hughes, one of the richest men in the world, and the Bill Gates of his era, became paranoid, and lived the last few years of his life in isolation and squalor, and died in misery.
We know that sex is not enough. I think it was Marilyn Monroe, for many the ultimate sex symbol of the past century, who said,
you are born alone and you die alone.
Fame?
First I thought I wanted the fame, I wanted to live a better life. But then all the kids screaming. All the girls falling at my feet. It came so fast I didn't know what hit me. And it turned out it wasn't even what I was looking for.
- Eminem.
Power? Alexander the Great, after he had conquered the whole known world in his early thirties, cried with frustration because there was no-one else left to conquer.
We know that if we are going to be truly fulfilled human beings, we need something more than money, sex, fame or power.
It is clear that a really successful life will not look anything like we have come to expect. What we need is the wisdom to recognize what it does look like, and to pursue it.
A large chunk of the Jewish Bible, our Old Testament, is about how to succeed in life. Scholars call this the 'Wisdom literature'. It includes the books of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. This is a neglected part of the Bible, and many followers of Christ rarely, if ever, read it.
I would like to encourage you to get hold of a modern translation like the 'New Living Bible', and read through the whole of Proverbs. There are 31 chapters, so if you read one chapter a day, you could finish it in a month.
Alongside this, you might want to get hold of and read "The Tree of Life: Reading Proverbs Today", by Graeme Goldsworthy. This will help you to understand Proverbs better.
Our title for this article is: 'What is wisdom?' We are looking at Proverbs chapter 1 verses 1-7. These verses are an introduction to the whole book. The rest of this article will make more sense if you read these verses from the Bible before going any further.
Verse 1 is just a note about authorship, or at least, editorial supervision:
These are the proverbs of Solomon, David's son, king of Israel...
Verses 2-6 introduce the theme of the book, and verse 7 gives a headline for what it says about wisdom.
So what is wisdom? What kind of wisdom makes for success in life? We're going to try to build up an answer to this question, in the rest of this article.
Here is a beginning:
I am smart if I know how to get what I want in any situation.
Plenty of people would be happy with this. And the Bible agrees with it, up to a point: wisdom is about what we could call 'life skills' or 'tactical ability'. It is about the most effective way to reach your goal.
Look at Proverbs chapter 1 verse 2-6 , and you will see that there are five purpose statements for the book, and the 'life skills' aspect comes out very clearly in them:
- For attaining wisdom and discipline (verse 2)
- For understanding words of insight (verse 2)
- For acquiring a disciplined and prudent life (verse 3)
- For giving prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young (verses 4-5)
- For understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise (verse 6)
These purpose statements bring out the practical aspect of knowing how to live well. And many of the Proverbs are about practical matters, such as being hard-working, not lazy. One of my personal favorites is Proverbs chapter 26 verse 14:
As a door turns back and forth on its hinges, so the lazy person turns over in bed.
Whoever wrote that clearly understood how I feel in the depths of my being at 6 o'clock in the morning.
So Proverbs contains practical guidelines that are not particularly 'religious' in nature.
We can say that wisdom is knowing the most effective way to achieve your goal in any situation.
But while wisdom in the Bible is practical, it is never just pragmatic. It is not just tactical skill. It is not the same as 'street smarts':
- knowing how to separate someone from their money in a dodgy business deal
- knowing how to get a girl into bed
- knowing how to 'work the system' politically
Wisdom in the Bible is always moral as well as practical.
So the central purpose statement, in verse 3 says that Proverbs is for
acquiring a disciplined and prudent life, doing what is right and just and fair.
The footnote to verse 7 in the New International Version of the Bible very helpfully tells us that
The Hebrew words rendered fool in Proverbs [that is, someone who is the opposite of wise]... denote someone who is morally deficient.
(That is, they are not just stupid, but they do things that are wrong.)
So, for example, two very strong emphases in Proverbs are on integrity in your business dealings - on not 'conning' people or taking advantage of the disadvantaged, and on purity in your sex life. The foolish person - the one who is the opposite of wise - is the person who is corrupt in business, or promiscuous in sex.
So we need to expand our answer to the question 'What is wisdom?' to say something like this:
Wisdom is knowing the best goal to aim for in any particular situation, and the most effective way to achieve it.
...where 'best' includes the idea of 'best in a moral sense' - what is good.
Pause for a moment and think about this. Why should wisdom be moral? Why should being wise and successful be equated with doing what is right? On the face of it, there is no obvious connection. There are plenty of people who think that they can be smart and successful by being unscrupulous and immoral.
But wisdom is moral because it is God-centered There are two reasons for this:
1. Because God really is there
Because God really is there, and God really is the center of everything. So when your life is centered on God, you are living in line with the way things really are. And that is wisdom. But if you leave God out of the equation, you are out of touch with reality - like someone who believes the Earth is flat. And that is foolishness.
This is why Psalm 14 verse 1 says that
The fool says in his heart, there is no God.
The ultimate stupidity is to deceive yourself about the ultimate reality.
2. Because God desires our best
We need to understand that God wants us to live life to the full! God wants us to have the most successful life possible. In John chapter 10 verse 10 Jesus told his followers
My purpose is to give life in all its fullness.
When God gives us commands like 'Do not murder', 'Do not steal' and 'Do not commit adultery,' this is not out of a desire to restrict us, or to make us miserable, or to stop us enjoying life. It is because these things are deeply destructive of our lives.
The commandments are there to stop us going off on paths that lead to our own destruction. They are warning signs that say 'Keep clear of the edge - cliffs liable to give way.' Living like this may look like success, but actually it is dangerous and destructive. It does not work.
We find it terribly hard to believe that God wants us to be happy. But He has made us for infinite happiness - and because of the way he has made us, the only way we can find this happiness by living as he intended - by knowing Him and loving Him and trusting Him.
This is why the path of business corruption or sexual immorality is not just breaking a commandment, but is also a path of self-destruction and foolishness.
If God really made us, we cannot be truly wise if we ignore him. If he made us for a relationship with himself, we cannot be truly wise if we are not on speaking terms with him. So in the Bible, and particularly here in the 'Wisdom literature', wisdom is God-centered The starting point for all real wisdom is the fear of the Lord.
The key verse in our passage is verse 7 - in fact, this is the key verse of the whole book:
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline.
In typical Jewish fashion, Proverbs is using 'knowledge' here as a synonym for wisdom. In Proverbs chapter 9 verse 10 it actually says,
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
What does 'fear of the Lord' mean? In this context it includes the ideas of believing in God's reality, worshiping him, trusting him and obeying him. And the book of Proverbs says that this is 'first base' for living a wise and successful life.
What is wisdom? Well, we can sharpen up our definition a bit: wisdom is a God-centered way of living. It enables you to know the best goal to aim for in any situation, and the most effective way to reach it.
Now, there are a couple of important misunderstandings that we need to clear up:
i. Proverbs are not laws
The wisdom books are not the same as the historical books, and they are not the same as prophecy, and they are not the same as law. It is important that we understand that they are different, or we shall get into all kinds of trouble when we read the book of Proverbs.
The books of wisdom are just that - guidelines how to live a wise life.
So Proverbs, for example, contains many short, punchy sayings, very similar to what we today understand a proverb to be: 'Too many cooks spoil the broth.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'Least said, soonest mended.'
We know that these sayings are not really talking about cooking or sewing. They are encapsulating principles for wise living - that sometimes, the more helpers you have, the longer it takes to do something, or that prevention is better than cure. It is the same with the proverbs in the Bible: they are bullet points. They are God's sound-bites for living.
So we must not think they have the same kind of force as, say, the Ten Commandments. When God says 'do not murder', that is an absolute principle that applies at all times and in all places.
But when Proverbs chapter 26 verse 4 says...
When arguing with fools, don't answer their foolish arguments, or you will become as foolish as they are
...this is an illustration of a principle for how to live a wise life. It does not mean we must always ignore people we think are being stupid. In fact the very next verse says,
When arguing with fools, be sure to answer their foolish arguments, or they will become wise in their own estimation
We could read these verses in a very wooden way, and say that the Bible is contradicting itself. But let's not be naļve. The Bible is not contradicting itself: it is inviting us to wrestle with how to apply wisdom in the actual situations that we face day to day. Proverbs are not laws.
ii. Proverbs are not promises
Just as the Proverbs are not laws, we must also say that they are not promises.
For example, Proverbs chapter 16 verse 3 says,
Commit your work to the Lord, and then your plans will succeed.
Down through the years, I suppose followers of Christ have reassured themselves with this verse in all kinds of circumstances.
But you just cannot take this as some kind of magic charm, or blanket promise from God to bless our schemes, however selfish or stupid they are, as long as we pray about them.
This is not a promise. It is more like a general principle: this is how the world works. If you live a life that is committed to God, and lived according to his will, it will succeed - as God judges success, not necessarily as the rest of the world judges it.
So we need to keep in mind that Proverbs are not laws, and they are not promises. Rather, they are God's sound bites for successful living. They are general principles, stated in a memorable way, not necessarily in a precise way.
We have to chew over them and wrestle with them, to understand how they apply in the specific situations we face.
OK, with these points cleared up, we can go back to our answer to the question 'What is wisdom?' Wisdom is a God-centered way of living. It enables you to know the best goal to aim for in any situation, and the most effective way to reach it.
We need to take this one step further, in closing: wisdom means following Christ.
As followers of Christ, we always need to read the Old Testament through New Testament glasses. The New Testament has its own distinctive take on wisdom. When we come to the New Testament, the connection between practical wisdom and spiritual reality is even more clear.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 24 it describes Jesus Christ as
the mighty power of God and the wonderful wisdom of God
And in verse 30 it says that
For our benefit God made Christ to be wisdom itself. He is the one who made us acceptable to God. He made us pure and holy, and he gave himself to purchase our freedom.
What is it getting at by saying this? It is saying that God's own wisdom is shown to us through Jesus. God saw the best goal to aim for - bringing glory to his name by saving many people - and the most effective way to achieve this - through the death and resurrection of Christ. So it means that Christ is God's 'last word' in wisdom.
But it also means more than this: If we are going to be wise and successful - as God sees it - if we are going to line up with God's wisdom, we shall follow Christ.
We began by saying that the things people think count as success - money, sex, fame, power, do not really work. We are ending by saying that the really successful life is centered on Jesus Christ, and the really wise person is the one who follows him - because he is ultimately at the heart of reality.
You might remember what Jesus said, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: Everyone who hears his words and does them is like a wise builder, building his life on solid foundations. But everyone who hears them and doesn't do them is like a fool, building on sand (Matthew chapter 7 verses 24-27).
God wants us to be successful. He wants to give us His life here and now. And this means being followers of Jesus Christ, looking at things as he looks at them, trusting him, learning to be more like him day by day.
The truly successful life - as God sees success - is not a life of unlimited money, sex, fame, or power. Rather, it is a life that is following Jesus Christ.
What is wisdom? Wisdom is a God-centered way of living. It enables us to know the best goal to aim for in any situation, and the most effective way to reach it. Wisdom means following Jesus Christ.
If you are anything like me, when you hear all this, you may feel that you do not do 'wise' very well. But God promises to give us wisdom if we ask him and trust him. James chapter 1 verses 5-6 says:
If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
This article is based on a talk originally given by David Couchman at Above Bar Church, Southampton, on Sunday 19th October 2003.
Copyright notice
You may use this article in print or on a web site, subject to the following limitations:
- The article is reproduced in its entirety, without variation.
- There is a link back to this site.
- There is a copyright notice crediting Focus Radio for this article, and including these conditions.