Wise Up! Part 2: God’s Wisdom Versus Worldly Wisdom

What would you say to a teen girl who tells you that she is thinking about breaking up with her boyfriend because kissing him has gotten boring? Well, if you are a typical reader of our blog, my guess is that you would first of all be dumbstruck. When you had recovered sufficiently from the initial shock, you might stammer something along the lines of her real problem being that she doesn’t understand what romantic relationships are, that they should not be built on physical attraction, and that she was thinking about this all wrong. You would probably be very favorable to the idea of her breaking up, and if you were brave enough, you might mutter something to her such as “This is why teenagers shouldn’t date.” 

I ask this, not simply as a hypothetical, but because I know someone whose boss faced that exact situation. She was not only a boss, however, but also an educator and in her role, she was viewed as a mentor. And it wasn’t just any teen girl who told her that kissing had gotten boring. It was the boss’s daughter. So, what wisdom did she impart to her daughter as both a mother and a mentor? She gave her resources on better kissing techniques. That’s a very different idea of wisdom than what I would think.

How can there be such radically different views on wisdom? Such widely differing answers to the problems of life indicate that there is something radically different about what people think wisdom is. Who is right? And how do we get wisdom? And why is one person’s wisdom another person’s foolishness? I want to take a minute and briefly explore these related questions.

Last week, in the first blog post in this brief series on wisdom, we looked at the different words Scripture uses for wisdom. The goal was to get a more robust view on what wisdom is and what we are shooting for when we talk about being wise. This week we will be discussing a related but different issue — what is the starting point of wisdom, what is the goal of wisdom, and how will that impact the way we think about wisdom?

 

The Fear of the Lord

Psalms, Proverbs, and Job all make the general statement “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” or something very close (Job 28:28; Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7; 9:10; 15:33). Many people have heard this expression before, but what exactly does it mean? In what way is fear of the Lord connected to wisdom? And why do I have to have that before I am wise? After all, there seem to be a lot of people who know a lot and are successful and don’t fear God. 

The fear of the Lord is a topic that is often debated and discussed. We don’t have time to jump into all those discussions, but at this point I’m just going to state that the fear of the Lord is a holy respect for God and His words, a healthy dose of fear of what will happen if His words are violated, and a life that demonstrates we take God seriously when He gives us warnings and when He promises blessing. We could say that the fear of the Lord is a recognition of the greatness and power of God, and a humble response to that recognition. 

What does this have to do with wisdom? Well, if we respect God and His words, if we acknowledge Him as our Creator, if we admit that we don’t know best, but He does — that will shape in a very serious way what we consider wise and foolish. Everything God says must be taken as our starting point. We don’t get to stand in judgment over what God has said, trying to determine if He’s right or wrong. If He says marriage is between a man and a woman, then we must accept that; we don’t get to cross-examine God.

The fear of the Lord is the foundation of our wisdom because our starting point in figuring out life must begin within the bounds of everything that God has said. Many people get off track because they doubt what God has said here or there, or they want to tweak this part of God’s instructions or explain away that command. If we want to be truly wise, it must begin with the humility of a creature that realizes everything God says is the starting point for our wisdom. 

But the fear of the Lord will also remind us of our ultimate end. If we fear God appropriately, that is because we recognize that we are the creature and He is the Creator. One day we must give account to Him, and everything that we say or do in this life should be preparing us for that most important of meetings. Hebrews reminds us that we all have an appointment with death (Hebrews 9:27), and Solomon reminds us that we will be judged for what we do in our life (Ecclesiastes 12:14)

So the fear of the Lord means we take God’s Word seriously and we take seriously the fact that we will stand before Him. If you’re going to be wise, this is where you need to start. But what if you start somewhere else?

 

The Wisdom of the World

There are several ways of describing the world, but I think one of the best is simply godless. Not even anti-God, per se, but simply life lived without God in the picture. This is what we find in James when the merchants failed to take God into their plans (James 4:13-16). They weren’t doing awful, terrible things. They were doing what businessmen do – making plans. But those plans didn’t include God, and so they were viewed as both arrogant and evil. 

The world does not take God into account and doesn’t fear His coming judgment. One of the descriptions of the last day is that people living then will be eating, drinking, and getting married when God’s judgment falls (Matthew 24:38). Once again, these are not great crimes against humanity, but the point is that people are totally unaware of the coming judgment of God and are ignoring His very serious threats of judgment. 

Rather than start with the recognition that they are creatures standing before their Creator, the world begins by thinking that they are god. They don’t report to anyone. Instead, they get to decide what is right and what is wrong. This is the original lie (Genesis 3:5), and from this singular lie has come all evil. 

When you have people living with no fear of God’s ultimate judgment, no awareness of Him in their everyday life, and the belief that they are the ultimate standard of good and evil, what they define as wise will look very different from what the Bible says is wise. Psalms sums this up well: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) Those who live life as if there is no God are fools, yet they often see themselves as wise (Romans 1:22).

The result of this, predictably, is what we find in James 3:13-16. A wisdom that is “earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (James 3:15). A wisdom that results in the exaltation of self and the problems that creates. A wisdom that results in relational chaos — bitter envying and strife — because everyone is trying to be god at the same time, and that’s a lot of gods to fight with each other.

 

So when you start talking with someone who doesn’t fear God, and you find yourself coming to a radically different conclusion about what the wise path forward should be, don’t be surprised. After all, you are both starting from very different foundations – human thinking versus God’s revelation – and you both have very different goals – preparing to meet God versus exaltation of self. And if you have a different starting point and different goal, it’s really no surprise you come to wildly different conclusions about specific issues of life. If wisdom is the skill of making the right choices, you have to start right and be pointed in the right direction to know what those right choices should be. 

And you’ll probably need a little help along the way, but we’ll talk about that next week. 

 

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. You can check out Bible studies he has written as hearanddo.org.