5. The Way of Wisdom
5
The Way of Wisdom
Let the wise hear and increase in learning,
and the one who understands obtain guidance.
Proverbs 1:5
“Never let the good be the enemy of the best” is a wise saying, and it seems particularly appropriate at this juncture in our attempt to train our sights on God’s guidance. In the previous chapter we looked at the path of law-keeping, that is, direct submission to the direct commands of the Word of God. Obedience to God as the settled policy of all our living is always the necessary first step toward finding and following his will in particular situations. It narrows our options; for one thing we can know for certain that any path expressly forbidden by the principles of God’s law is not his will and will never be so, and he will not guide us in that direction. If we are feeling led that way, it is not God who is doing the leading. Obedience to direct directions from God is the right course as far as it takes us; it is indeed foundational to Christian living, and we will not find any of the details of his will without it. So we borrow from the world of board games the words “Start Here.”
But for a believer in Christ to seek God’s will through law-keeping alone could all too easily turn one into a grim-faced spiritual accountant, methodically ticking off the dos and don’ts, forever tallying failures against successes, and always feeling oppressed by the shadow of an elusive and as yet unattained perfection of outward performance. Is there some law from God that I do not yet fully understand? Is there some specific implication or application or corollary to obey that I have not yet fully mastered? Though there is a proper place for questions of this kind, formal preoccupation, Pharisee-fashion, with detailed, minute applications of the general principles of God’s law is not a full description of the path along which God guides his people. The truth is that a person living and thinking that way is mentally grooved in a style that leaves out of account something vital in our quest for guidance—namely, that gift from the Holy Spirit through the written Word that is creative and humanizing and outward-looking and self-effacing and profoundly perceptive, the gift which is properly named wisdom.
In this chapter, we will explore the way of wisdom as the needed completion of what we have said so far about being guided by the Word of God. We serve a wise God who graces all his people to a greater or lesser degree with wisdom, to keep us from falling into foolhardiness (folly, as the Bible calls it) and to open our eyes to dimensions of biblical godliness that without wisdom we should miss. Here, we will explore three topics that together take us over this ground: the centrality of wisdom in the Christian life, the nature of wisdom in the Word of God, and the practice of wisdom in daily decisions.
The Centrality of Wisdom
Seeking to live in wisdom, seeking to be wise in the way that we make our decisions and plan our lives, is one aspect of biblical obedience. Scripture requires us to have this concern. In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, a church he had never visited, but to which he sought to teach the same right-mindedness that he taught to all other churches, we find him saying, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time.” Then he adds some exposition of that thought in the next verse: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:5–6). The verb “to answer” here simply means, how we respond to what outsiders say, whatever that is. Speech, the way we speak to each other and to those outside our circle, is the great index of whether we are living in wisdom. Thus Paul initiates the emphasis on wise thoughts, wise conduct, and wise answers, that will recur over and over throughout this chapter.
“Walk in wisdom” has been rendered “conduct yourselves wisely.” That gets the sense but loses the picture. “Walk” is a word Paul regularly uses for “live,” as did the Old Testament writers before him. This image of putting one foot in front of another as you move steadily from your starting point toward your destination is in fact a brilliant picture of how human life should be lived, and Paul has already used it in a weighty way. Earlier in the letter he had said, “As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (Col. 2:6–7). Those great words are in truth the central message of Colossians; they establish the frame within which learning to behave wisely in our relation to other people is now being set. Wise behavior is one particular aspect of what it means to walk in Christ.
In the letter to the Ephesians, over and over again, we find Paul picking up and amplifying thoughts that he had already put out in Colossians, and walking in Christ is one of them. So in Ephesians, following admonitions to walk worthy of our calling (4:1), in love and in light (5:2, 8), we find, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise [not, that is, in the way that unwise people do] but as wise [wise people], making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:15–17). Though being foolish is the easiest thing in the world, as the book of Proverbs, to look no further, plainly shows, it must not happen to you!
The gospel taught you, says Paul, to “be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:23–24). So, “you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are . . . alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (vv. 17–18). This is not a mere ignorance of moral facts and standards. If that were the case, the problem could be solved by an increase in information. But Paul is talking about the willed ignorance toward God and so toward godliness and so toward decency, which he analyzed in Romans 1:18–31, an ignorance that constantly desensitizes in moral matters and produces the hard—that is, the hardened—state of heart that marked, and still marks, the pagan world. Those who over and over resist God’s wisdom inherit the haunting phrase of Romans 1, “God gave them up.” Simply put, God gives them what they most want: a life without him. Hard hearts, says Paul, have polluted the moral standards that these Gentiles knew so that the knowledge already encased in their brains did not lead to a life of wisdom. A person who truly walks in wisdom does not merely pause now and then to spout wise words; he or she actually lives a renewed life.
To nail this point down, Paul now gets specific and speaks of a transformation of lives that had formerly been filled with lies, anger, thievery, bitterness, greed, slander, and corrupting talk. Over against these destructive qualities, Paul spells out what a life “renewed in the spirit of your minds” would look like. Here we see habits of: truth-telling, sharing with those in need, speaking encouraging words, honest labor, kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, all of this shaped by a new attitude toward other people that flows from a revolutionized relationship with the living, forgiving God. It is not surprising, then, that Paul ends this full contrast of the two kinds of lives (Eph. 4:25–32) with a summarizing challenge: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (5:1–2). Then comes one more defining admonition: “Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord” (5:8–9). Notice the breadth of Paul’s three-point thumbnail description of the fruit or evidence of this walking in the light: he specifies it as all that is good, right, and true. How does your life and how do all our lives measure up to that? And now, having highlighted this threefold fruit, he moves on to the cautions that we have already cited: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (vv. 15–16). He is echoing here what he wrote to the Colossians, but from a different angle. What Paul means by this caution is that there is constant Satanic opposition to wise walking—and we must expect it, and be ready to meet it. The days are evil because of what the evil one is doing in them. Paul will say much more about war with the evil one in Ephesians 6 where he instructs God’s people to put on the armor that God provides for us in Christ. Here he simply makes it plain that as far as he is concerned, unwise behavior is Satan scoring points and God being dishonored.
But this passage contains one more phrase of particular interest in our culture where one of the most frequent challenges as we multitask our way through life is “time management.” The Greek word Paul uses for “time” means “moment of opportunity,” and Paul’s thought is that our days and hours are full of moments for advancing God’s kingdom and glory, if only we have wisdom enough to see the possibilities and seize these opportunities accordingly. Making the best use of the time is a phrase that to us as well as to the Ephesians is intended to take our minds right up to the axiom that opened this chapter: “Never let the merely good [or the merely possible] be the enemy of the best.” We are always to make the best use of our time. That is our task. To emphasize this point Paul’s very next line is an admonition that takes us to the heart of this chapter: “Do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:17).
The phrase, “understand what the will of the Lord is,” is surely to be linked up with the familiar words of Romans 12:1–2, where Paul, as we saw, opens the final section of the letter by saying: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” As we have seen already, what these words call for is a total setting of ourselves apart to serve and please God, as the entire business of our lives, out of gratitude for his grace. This summons leads to the crunch verse: “Do not be conformed to this world [for the days are evil as we have already found Paul saying], but be transformed by the renewal of your mind [that is, by the power of the renewed mind that God fashions in you as you walk with him], that . . . you may . . .” May what? Older translations use the word “prove” here, but those who worked on the English Standard Version (ESV), of which J. I. was one, felt they had to amplify that rendering in order to catch the whole thought which no single modern English word covers properly. The old word prove pointed to discernment by testing, much as a woman would “prove” the yeast to be sure that it was still alive before using it to make bread dough. Prove today, however, has more to do with establishing facts by evidence and argument than with working your way through the alternatives so that you can form a judgment as to what God wants of you behaviorally. But that is the true meaning of the Greek word, which the ESV tries to capture by rendering it as follows: “that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
The flow of the thought shows, as we pointed out earlier, that “the will of God” of which Paul speaks here means, not the will of God in general, or the will of God for my whole life, but the will of God in each specific situation in which you and I find ourselves. The same appears to be true in Ephesians 5:17 where Paul says that we are to “understand what the will of the Lord is.” In each situation where a decision has to be made and a course of action has to be settled upon, Paul in effect is saying, “May you understand what is the best use that you can make of this opportunity to please God and bring glory to his name. That is what living by wisdom is all about.” Do we need help to do this? Yes. Will any form of Pharisaic, mechanical calculations on how to apply God’s laws give us the help we need? No. Whence then will come that help? From the indwelling Holy Spirit illuminating and working through our regenerate, renewed powers of mind and heart. Let us explain.
The Christian life, which is a supernatural life from the word go, is a new creation in the heart that begins when we are born again. We have indicated this already. Once we come to know Christ, we are different people from what we were before. This Christian life, the supernatural life which is now our life, is regularly spelled out in the pulpit and in books in terms of tag phrases like: “Be what you are.” “Live out what God has wrought in you.” “Express your new nature.” Or even: “Be natural in Christ.” It is indeed natural for those who are born again to live Christianly, and to do the things that according to Scripture born-again Christians do, namely, love and serve God and others with imagination and devotion, with a sense of privilege and a spirit of self-giving, with a self-forgetful humility and a joyful awareness of self-fulfillment. To grow in wisdom and in Christian responsibility (the two overlap) is simply to realize, ever more vividly, that this is how Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Lord, and our life, wants to express himself in the new renewed personhood that he is developing within us. A Christ-centered quest for Christlikeness in all our attitudes and actions is perhaps the best way of describing how we live out the dynamic drives of this supernatural new nature that the Lord has wrought in us and that the Holy Spirit now sustains and energizes.
The New Testament says that seeing this new nature in action will sometimes perplex people around us; they won’t understand what we are doing or what it is that makes us tick. When Jesus talked to Nicodemus he said that the work of God’s Spirit within a person who is born again is as mysterious as the wind: you hear it and see its effect, but you cannot track it; and those who do not understand what it means to be born again find the Spirit-guided Christian a complete enigma. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Do not marvel that I say to you [“you” here is plural; Jesus is saying, this means you, Nicodemus, and all your Jewish friends], ‘You [all] must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7–8).
The blowing of the wind makes the sand on the ground whirl and perhaps if it gets stronger it will blow down a lean-to shed, or blow the roof off a house. We hear the wind roar and note its power, but we can neither bring it under control nor predict what it will do next. “Everyone born of the Spirit is like that,” says the Lord Jesus. He means that to the observer who is not in on the secret, so to speak, the way that Christians behave is bewildering. They don’t know where the Christian is coming from; they don’t know where the Christian is going; they don’t understand what the Christian is after. So there will often be surprise among people as to why we believers do what we do as we seek to walk in wisdom and make the best use of the time God has given us.
As we can see, however, this is one aspect of what it means to enjoy the reality of Psalm 23:3: “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” We have taken that verse almost as a motto verse for this whole book. Today’s New International Version renders the words, “He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake,” a phrasing which points to the dynamism of the Spirit through the written Word moving us to appropriate action. To live by that guidance is to find and follow wisdom, and this is truly central in the Christian life.
The Nature of Wisdom
It is one thing to affirm that wisdom is central to our life in Christ, but quite another to discern what wisdom is. Our task is now to examine the nature of godly wisdom. For this we turn, of course, to Scripture. Wisdom is a pervasive subject in the Word of God, though we would hardly know that from monitoring an ordinary slew of a year’s preaching in an ordinary Christian church. We seldom hear of wisdom in the pulpit—which is our loss, for Scripture speaks of it often. We all are called to seek wisdom, and promised that if we sincerely do so we shall find it. God’s gift of wisdom is for everyone. You don’t have to be clever to be wise; wisdom is not the same thing as cleverness. Wisdom is the ability to apply true principles in a way that produces right living, first and foremost in terms of human values. Wisdom is traveling along the right paths, living in a way that pleases and glorifies God, because you have found the best thing to do for people, others, and yourself too, in each situation. Wisdom is indeed pragmatic, as is often said, but it is humble, honest, realistic, insightful, generous, compassionate, stabilizing, and encouraging also, and the Gospel stories display it vividly as one facet of the human perfection of the Lord Jesus. Wisdom excels in seeing, modeling, and so making known what can be done in particular situations, and should be coveted by all who want to discern and carry out the perfect will of God.
We have already made the point that the Old Testament includes a whole section that we call “wisdom literature”: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, which together comprise nearly 10 percent of the Old Testament. What we said earlier about these books was in echo of Oswald Chambers, who affirms that the Psalms teach us how to pray, the Proverbs teach us how to act, Job teaches us how to suffer, the Song teaches us how to love, and the book of Ecclesiastes teaches us how to enjoy. Chambers is right all the way. Biblical wisdom begins with acknowledging the goodness of the Creator, Israel’s God, and of the world he has made, and here Ecclesiastes in particular comes into its own.
The central theme of Ecclesiastes (flanked to be sure by words of trenchant gloom on the emptiness and evil of things “under the sun”) really is that we should program ourselves to appreciate and enjoy the simple everyday blessings with which God strews our paths, never mind the big bewildering realities, which, if we allow them to occupy our minds, produce sadness rather than gladness and puzzlement rather than contentment. Life is full of distressing things that would depress us if we let them. But, says Ecclesiastes, having surveyed these things thoroughly and thoughtfully, “I commend enjoyment” (8:15 RSV; “joy,” ESV; “pleasure,” NASB, “mirth,” KJV; “enjoyment of life,” NIV). Here is a fundamental and far-reaching biblical reality. True wisdom as a medium of God’s guidance allows for, even encourages, enjoyment with gratitude to God, though what we are urged to enjoy may be rather different from the more base enjoyments sought by those who are not God’s people. Calvin made this point against his favorite theologian, Augustine, who had austerely spoken as if ordinary everyday pleasures should be cut out of our lives. Two hundred fifty years after Calvin, the English preacher Charles Simeon surely got it right when, expounding “All is vanity,” he saw Ecclesiastes as teaching “two lessons . . . to enjoy God in everything” and “to enjoy everything in God.” That wisdom is about learning to enjoy the enjoyable in an out-of-joint world is indeed part of the bottom line of biblical ethics. But we cannot pursue that here.
We may, however, pause a moment to sharpen our focus on the wisdom books in light of what has just been said. Ecclesiastes, in some ways the most profound of all the wisdom writers, showed us that grateful enjoyment was, is, and always will be a key element in biblical godliness, come what may. Look at the wisdom books again from that perspective, and it becomes easier to see what you are looking at. Song of Songs, to start with, will now focus for you the fidelity-fueled freeness and fervor of wholehearted marital affection between him and her—an enjoyment devised by God that some married couples seem to miss. Job will now focus for you the faithfulness of God, who, after his servant’s patient endurance of what seemed a meaningless agony, blessed him more at the end than he had done at the beginning. The Psalms will now focus for you the beyond-words delight that comes to the heart of those who single-mindedly, persistently, and devotedly wait on God, whatever their outward state, and at last find themselves ineffably visited and wonderfully enlivened as God’s love and vitality are shed abroad in their soul. And Ecclesiastes itself will now focus for you the spirit of cheerful and contented enterprise that overcomes all forms of disillusionment, frustration, boredom, and disgust by embracing the pleasant simplicities (food, work, friendship, marriage) that God has given us to enjoy “under the sun.” With this wisdom digested and internalized, and with the joy in God to which it points highlighted, our discernment of the will and ways of God will become clearer—much clearer, we think—than otherwise it would be.
In the New Testament, the letter of James is a wisdom book echoing in all sorts of ways both the substance and the style of the Old Testament wisdom books and echoing also a great deal of the teaching of Jesus, helping us to realize that among the other things that Jesus was, he was himself a teacher and practitioner of wisdom. James also shows us that, as we have already discovered, the life of wisdom for the Christian is a life of Christlikeness. Living in wisdom is one dimension of what it means to have our Savior as our model.
Scripture speaks of wisdom in many ways, but it will help us to understand the sweep of the concept if we arrange our thoughts about it under the following seven topical headings. First, wisdom is about understanding; second, it is about worship; third, it is about goals and the ends that should be in view in the life we live; fourth, wisdom is about strategies, or means to these ends; fifth, wisdom is about relationships; sixth, wisdom is about self-control; and seventh, wisdom is about humility. Let us elaborate these points.
First, wisdom is about understanding. Wisdom, in the book of Proverbs and elsewhere, is as we have seen constantly contrasted with folly. The book of Proverbs devotes its first nine chapters to a general exhortation to seek wisdom as the supreme value of life, since the quest for wisdom is the most important thing that we can ever engage in. These chapters insist on the priority of seeking wisdom as the means of getting understanding of life, and they are worth looking at in some detail. Here are the first words of Proverbs.
The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel:
To know wisdom and instruction,
to understand words of insight,
to receive instruction in wise dealing,
in righteousness, justice, and equity;
to give prudence to the simple,
knowledge and discretion to the youth. . . .
Proverbs 1:1–4
Having stated what this book is intended to accomplish, the writer says,
Let the wise hear and increase in learning,
and the one who understands obtain guidance,
to understand a proverb and a saying,
the words of the wise and their riddles.
verses 5–6
Then verse 8 strikes a more personal note:
Hear, my son, your father’s instruction,
and forsake not your mother’s teaching.
The teaching of wisdom is presented in Proverbs as a parent’s instruction to a child. That is, of course, very typical of the Old Testament, but it is very Christian, too. We who are parents are meant, still, to teach wisdom to our children in every way that we can.
In chapter 2, the writer of Proverbs develops further how wisdom is to be gained within the context of family:
My son, if you receive my words
and treasure up my commandments with you,
making your ear attentive to wisdom
and inclining to understanding;
yes, if you call out for insight
and raise your voice [in prayer] for understanding
if you seek [understanding] like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.
Proverbs 2:1–5
Understanding means specifically knowing how to live as a response to God’s revelation. Wisdom includes understanding, but wisdom is larger, for it includes also the prudent doing of what we understand that we should do. In other words, it is practical. In some eras and cultures, practical wisdom has been thought of as separate from understanding in a way which might be caricatured as “I don’t need no book learnin’; God gives me all the wisdom I need when I need it,” but the writer of Proverbs (and therefore God) disagrees. Wisdom for the business of living is gained through the labor of learning to understand; understanding is learned from the book of God and books about the book of God, as well as from live teachers who help us in this. So:
Blessed is the one who finds wisdom,
and the one who gets understanding,
for the gain from her is better than the gain from silver
and her profit better than gold.
She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare with her. . . .
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever you get, get insight.
Prize her highly, and she will exalt you.
Proverbs 3:13–15; 4:7–8a
Wisdom is personified as a lady, a hostess, inviting us to join her so that we may receive what she has to give.
Wisdom cries aloud in the street,
in the markets she raises her voice;
at the head of the noisy street she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
If you turn at my reproof,
behold, I will pour out my spirit to you;
I will make my words known to you.”
Proverbs 1:20–23
In chapter 8, Lady Wisdom once more lifts up her voice:
“To you, O men, I call,
and my cry is to the children of man.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
O fools learn sense.
Hear, for I will speak noble things,
and from my lips will come what is right.”
Proverbs 8:4–6
All through Proverbs wisdom and understanding are the key thoughts. Wisdom in the heart starts in the mind and is thus about thinking and about learning and also about unlearning. One mark of a wise person, according to Proverbs, is that one is willing to accept instruction and correction and to learn to know things better than one does at the moment. The life of wisdom is a life of constant learning: constant evaluating, constant discerning, constant extension of one’s understanding. When David declares that his covenant God leads and guides him along the right paths (Ps. 23:3), he means that God does this by getting him to think, and through thinking to understand, and through understanding to gain wisdom—and thus to discern the right path from wrong ones.
Second, wisdom is about worship as opposed to the disregard for God which is the mark of the fool both in Proverbs and in the Psalms. Again, the introduction to the book of Proverbs says it all: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7). Fear, as we have already noted, is a worship-word; it means not panic and alarm, but awe and adoration. If we do not start with the fear of the Lord, then all the knowledge that we manage to accumulate will fall short of the wisdom into which it might have grown—if that knowledge had included an appropriate reverence for God, expressed in a discipline of worship. Fools, on the other hand, don’t even try to learn anything; so they end up pathetically ignorant, says the writer, because they have despised wisdom and instruction. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Prov. 9:10). Note that this is said again in Psalm 111:10 and again in Job 28:28. In the Bible, as in ordinary life, repetition is for emphasis! Those who neglect, or refuse, to learn how to honor God will cut themselves off from wisdom, no matter how much information about God they manage to amass. This is a momentous truth, which every one needs to face up to. It is to be feared that many are not as wise as they need to be because they have erred here.
The word fear in the phrase “fear of the Lord,” as we said, does not imply panic; what it implies is reverence, yet not the sort of reverence that rules out boldness. Christians (along with faithful covenant believers of the Old Testament era) know that through God’s grace their sins are forgiven and that they are in God’s favor so that they can be bold in invoking him, and looking to him and asking for his teaching and his help. Panicky fear would inhibit all of that. Panic, shaking-in-the-boots fear, is not the sort of fear that the biblical writers are talking about. This fear of the Lord is reverence—with boldness, yes—but reverence linked with awe at God’s greatness, and an active, deep concern to obey and please him. That is, incidentally, what the reference to fear and trembling means in Philippians 2:12–13, where Paul directs his readers to “work out [that is, actively express] your own salvation with fear and trembling”—that is, precisely, with awe and reverence. Paul states the reason for the awe and reverence: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” It is awesome to know that God works in our hearts as we seek to use our minds to think for him, to discern his will, to work out what is the best we can do to advance his kingdom and his praise, and to program ourselves for doing that. Every right thought we manage to think, and every right action we manage to perform, is God’s work in us and his gift to us. This realization evokes deep awe and deep gratitude and an ongoing sense of humble dependence on the God who thus confirms to us that he is ours and we are his. This state of mind is at the heart of the human reality labeled “the fear of the Lord.”
Worship is the global name for all the approaches to God and all the dealings with God to which wisdom leads us. Worship begins as humble, thankful, self-abandoning trust in, reliance on, and obedience to the God whom we acknowledge as infinitely good and wise. In Proverbs 3:5–8 we find this:
Trust in the LORD with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes;
fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
It will be healing to your flesh
and refreshment to your bones.
That summons to worship is right at the center of the broader summons to seek wisdom. We are not seeking wisdom as we should if we are not worshipping our wise God, actively practicing “the fear of the Lord” as best we can.
Third, wisdom is also about goals, the aims and targets that one sets oneself. We hinted at this earlier. Wisdom teaches us how to set our sights on objectives that are truly worth aiming at. Goal number one (which all the Bible insists on) is that the knowledge of God, the enjoyment of God, the praise of God, and the honor of God should be our constant aim in everything we do, so that we may truly live to his glory. The consequent goals include love, goodwill, and care in all our personal relationships with family, friends, acquaintances, and casual contacts; faithfulness in all business dealings; integrity in all community involvements and all enterprises in which we lead and direct others; and creativity, the quest for order and beauty, in pursuing whatever interests and hobbies we embrace. Wisdom enables us to formulate and focus our goals in our various fields of activity.
In Ecclesiastes 2:13–14a the wise man says, “I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness. The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.” Part of the implication of “eyes in his head” and “darkness” is that while the wise person sets goals and knows where he or she is going, the fool practices a random kind of living. A fool walks through life as if he were blind. Aimlessness in the most fundamental sense is the sad word that has to be written over the life of a fool. Wise persons, by contrast, have clear purposes and make thoughtful plans. They do not simply drift through life as the fool does.
Fourth, wisdom has to do with strategies, that is, the establishing of means to achieve our goals so that we don’t slip into pitfalls and places of disaster through imprudences that we could have avoided. Think of the mountain climber whose goal is to get to the top; he has to be very careful about the way he goes or he may fall into a crevasse or lose his footing on a slope or a rock face and come to great grief. The book of Proverbs is from one standpoint a very prudent book, constantly teaching, in one way or another, how to avoid life’s pitfalls, so that all the time we are achieving the practice of God-honoring wisdom in all its fullness. This is where willingness to accept advice comes in. Proverbs 10:17 says, “Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof leads others astray.” The fool (one who has chosen not to walk in God’s wisdom nor accept advice and correction from anybody, but to be led by his own mother wit) is going to go astray himself, and he will persuade others to follow him. Everyone has spheres of influence, for better or for worse, and in those spheres of influence others will follow whatever example we set. We are wise to be aware of that—to realize that our way of living and believing will influence others whether or not we intended it so—and therefore to humbly heed advice from others about avoiding pitfalls on our own chosen path. “A wise man listens to advice” (Prov. 12:15). “With those who take advice is wisdom” (13:10). “Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future” (19:20). We shall have more to say about this in our next chapter.
Fifth, wisdom is about relationships, about our thoughts and behavior toward others. This is something to which we have referred already and which the Lord Jesus and the apostles in their teaching underline for us: love and justice and fidelity in our dealings with other people, and the habit of always seeking their good, are matters of priority in the godly life. We need practical wisdom to guide us in living out these virtues, and as with the other aspects of wisdom, Proverbs has some down-to-earth advice for us. For example in Proverbs 14:21 we read: “Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but blessed is he who is generous to the poor.” And in Proverbs 25:21–22 (quoted in Romans 12:20 where Paul’s theme is overcoming evil with good) we find this: “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head [that is, you will prick his conscience by behaving lovingly toward him], and the LORD will reward you.” So we see that neighbor-love, even when our neighbor is not behaving lovingly to us, is one of the marks of the wise person, as opposed to the self-centered person. The self-centered person is not and never becomes wise.
Sixth, wisdom is about self-control. Being able to master and manage yourself under pressure, not coming apart and “losing it,” as we say, is an integral feature of the godly person’s mindset, and Paul lists it, as we saw, as one facet of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:23). Proverbs underlines the prudential value of self-control. Proverbs 25:28 says, “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” That is a pathetic image of vulnerability if ever there was one. Proverbs hammers away at the point. “A man of quick temper acts foolishly” (14:17). “He who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (14:29). Proverbs 29:11 reads “A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.” Proverbs 29:20 declares: “Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” Self-restraint is self-control in action; the lack of self-control seen in quick-tempered explosions the moment you see red is a recipe for disaster, a disaster which may well involve others as well as yourself.
Seventh, wisdom is about humility. Humility, a brother-virtue to self-control, is the opposite of pigheaded pride. Humility reveals itself in at least two ways: acceptance of things you cannot change, and acceptance of correction in areas of your life where you can change—and where you need to. In Proverbs 17:10 we read, “A rebuke goes deeper into a man of understanding than a hundred blows into a fool.” The wise man listens thoughtfully to a rebuke and is grateful for it, rather than resentful, for he knows that he is likely to end up the better for it. As Derek Kidner observes, “Reproof is one of the few things more blessed to receive than to give.” Proverbs 25:12 makes the same point: “Like a gold ring or an ornament of gold is a wise reprover to a listening ear,” for “the ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise” (15:31). This point like so much of what has preceded makes us aware that wisdom in Proverbs is a moral and spiritual virtue in which almost the whole of genuine godliness is contained.
Our profile of wisdom according to the Scriptures is not complete until we add the point that the Lord Jesus came to this world as wisdom incarnate, wisdom walking and talking, wisdom embodied in a fully human life. In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth we read: “And because of [God] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). Christ’s embodiment of God’s wisdom is further celebrated by Paul in his letter to the Colossians which contains one of the most eloquent Christ-hymns in all of Scripture (see Col. 1:15–20). Shortly after that hymn in chapter 1, we read about “God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:2–3). Paul makes it plain to us that the life of wisdom and godliness to which we are called will be a life of Christlikeness, now that Christ has come and modeled wise living in this definitive way for our instruction.
James, wisdom writer of the New Testament, amplifies Proverbs on the subject of wisdom and humility by saying “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom” (James 3:13). Meekness accepts things the way they come at us; it doesn’t quarrel with God when discerning aspects of his providence. Instead, meekness acknowledges that God knows what he is doing and that he makes all things work together for good for those who love him—even if at this present moment things do not appear to be working well at all. A person who is meek accepts the way that God orders things, and such meekness, James says, is a mark of wisdom. As we read further in James 3, we come to verse 17 and find this: “The wisdom from above [that is, the wisdom that God gives, the wisdom of Christlikeness, the wisdom imparted by God’s Spirit that we ought to be seeking constantly] is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” To enter into the quest for wisdom, which means, as we now see, the quest for Christlikeness in all these ways is thus to pursue a life of holiness, godliness, and sanctity, marked by prudence, good sense, discretion, purity, meekness, mercy, and thoughtful self-control. In this fashion, God leads us in paths of righteousness—that is, right paths—for his name’s sake, in other words, for his own glory as the God who keeps his covenant promises and beautifully blesses his people in doing so.
So now we come to our final question in this chapter: How do we put this understanding of the centrality of wisdom and our insights about the nature of wisdom into practice as we seek to live under God’s guidance?
The Practice of Wisdom
The practice of wisdom in daily decisions is an ongoing quest for the best. Three headings will help us cover the breadth of practicing wisdom. We are first to ask, then to assess, and then to act.
First, we are to ask for wisdom—constantly. James opens his letter by telling us to do that, and why. The first two verses of his teaching (1:2–3) have to do with suffering. The simplest definition of suffering is not getting what you wanted and hoped for, but getting instead what you did not want and hoped to avoid. As we face the fact that what we most longed for is now ruled out, there are all sorts of ways in which our situations will now cause us to suffer, and in many cases part of that suffering is trying to discover which of a number of paths that remain open to us, is the one least likely to prolong our pain or to cause us or others long-term harm. When a person is dealing with a medical diagnosis of cancer, for example, what that person really wants is for the doctor to rescind the diagnosis and say that it was all a sad mistake, and he or she can now carry on life as planned, moving into further decades of functioning at full schedule with full energy, cancer-free. But most suffering does not have that kind of exit door. Instead, we must make the best we can of a bad job; we must make decisions where the only options open to us are such as we would rather reject. How do we receive God’s guidance during such a time?
James says that coping with this kind of problem must start with an attitude shift that may at first seem beyond human capacity. We are to “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2). We must see our suffering as God testing the quality of our faith in order to toughen us up inside, and we must accept the trial as from God for however long it may last, knowing that it is maturing us in ways beyond our power to measure (vv. 3–4). But James knows that being in a situation where one is thus under trial is bewildering, and wisdom to live by his wise words is regularly in short supply; so the next thing he says in verses 5–6 is, “If any of you lacks wisdom [if, that is, you are conscious of being thrown off balance and you can’t see what to make of the particular trials you are in and how to count them joy], let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” He adds, “Ask in faith, with no doubting” that God will answer this prayer, and he warns against the irreverent double-mindedness of the spiritually muddleheaded who ask God for things he has promised without any confidence of receiving them. So, we are to keep asking for wisdom to live to God, and if we do so expectantly it will be given; nothing is more certain than that. The kind of humility that leads to and springs from wisdom will never allow us to say, “Now I know for sure all that God is up to in my life”; rather, it will lead us to learn, as Job did, to praise and thank God for knowing what he is doing in our lives without knowing either the what or the why of it ourselves. So we ask for wisdom in times of trial, wisdom that will enable us to face up to our present situation (even if that situation is cancer, job loss, divorce, or children on the road to ruin) and see what is best for us to do, and enable us also to keep rejoicing in God’s gift of present salvation and promise of future glory as we battle through.
Second, we are to assess by wisdom—painstakingly. Wisdom calculates. It calculates all of our responsibilities and then works out how to be faithful in handling each of them, because faithfulness to existing obligations belongs to the essence of wisdom. But wisdom also makes appropriate new commitments after careful consideration, because wisdom leads us to live up to the limit of what we can do for God and others. Some commitments automatically accompany the normal Christian life: commitments to our family, church, friends, colleagues, and work, as well as to keep the various promises that we have made. We put wisdom into practice by keeping before our minds a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our commitments. Such assessments alert us on occasion to circumstances that limit our room to maneuver. For example, a Christian scholar chose not to accept a promotion that would entail a move to a place where his wife would not be able to serve God in the role to which they believed God had called her. Another chose to leave a tenured faculty position because his wife was called to serve a church in another part of the country. A third relocated off the beaten track for the sake of his wife’s health. Wise assessment will prioritize some commitments ahead of others. In the decisions of the three scholars above, they saw their commitment to “love [their] wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” as higher than personal career advancement (Eph. 5:25). Good decisions cannot be made without wisdom’s assessment of priorities, and sometimes that calls for willingness, like John the Baptist, to decrease personally for the increase of another. Wisdom will thus on occasion tap into the truth of John 15:13, that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, and in any case wisdom will operate with a God-first, others-next, self-last mental grid, for that is what the Word of God requires.
A wise assessment will also calculate the consequences of the options that are open and seek to discern which of the possible courses of action would produce the best results not only for self, but for all concerned, and for the cause of God’s kingdom and his praise. A wise God-follower will look at these consequences in light of the great double-barreled command: to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves—even when that “neighbor” is someone not to our personal liking. Liking is not the same as loving, and Christians often find themselves called to love people they do not like. Wisdom has to be working out consequences all the time—for God and for everyone else, not just for self.
In making wise choices, we need to be clear on what we say no to, as well as what we say yes to, and in each case why. These yeses and nos are part of Christlike wisdom. When we read the Gospels and watch Jesus in action we see wisdom in his moment-by-moment choices in response to the many demands for his attention. It is amazing and almost unnerving to see how Jesus was able to make out of every situation something creative, ingenious, and genuinely helpful to the people with whom he was dealing. Well may we marvel at the wisdom that was built into his ministry.
When Jesus, God incarnate, walked in human sandals, each time he said yes to one use of his time, he was saying no to some other use. As we trace his actions, we can usually appreciate the priorities underlying his choices on how to use his humanly limited time and energies, and we can discern the loving wisdom that these choices reveal. For example, once when Jesus was busily teaching a mass of people, including a number of hostile Pharisees who were looking for a chance to trip him up with some theological conundrum, a cluster of infatuated parents elbowed their way through the crowd, bringing their young children and even their noisy babies to him so he could “touch them,” as if his touch would impart some special magic. His disciples, fulfilling their duty in crowd control, told the parents to leave him alone so that he could continue giving instruction on God’s coming kingdom, his own imminent death, signs of the end times, divorce and remarriage, the nature of true prayer, and other matters of similar importance. But Jesus assessed how his time and effort would be best spent and interrupted what the disciples thought was his most important work. He stopped teaching the crowd, scolded his disciples for their mistaken assumption about his and their true priorities, took the children into his lap, and “blessed them laying his hands on them” (Mark 10:13–16; cf. Luke 18:15–17), meanwhile holding them up as illustrations of how by childlike faith and trust we are to enter God’s kingdom—the theological topic that is perhaps the most vital of all.
So there is more to this episode than a simple statement on whether children are more important to God than adults, or whether blessing is a more important activity than teaching. Kingdom issues are at stake here, and what we see here is a stunning instance of wise love as Jesus welcomes the parents, blesses their little ones, teaches one lesson to his disciples about caring and another to the crowd about faith, using the children in his arms as an object lesson to make his point. And the example of Jesus’s wise love, which we meet constantly in the Gospel stories, must guide us as we seek to calculate how we can make the most and the best, for God and others, of the situations we are in.
Third, we are to act with wisdom—resolutely. Some who seek God’s guidance get so unnerved by the possibility of making a wrong choice that they become inwardly paralyzed, unable to make a decision, and therefore they take no action at all. Those of us who are tempted in that direction must realize that inaction is itself action. Inaction is simply making the decision that you are going to do—nothing. Sometimes that is the right decision to make, but sometimes, perhaps often, it is a cop-out. Inaction allows fear to rule and prevents us at that moment from contributing anything of significance to God’s kingdom. Well has it been said that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Jesus told a story about three servants who were given their master’s money to trade with. The first two took some risks with the money and managed to increase it spectacularly. But the third was afraid to take any risk at all, so he kept it in a handkerchief until his master returned, and then he simply gave it back (Luke 19:11–27; cf. Matt. 25:14–30). Jesus represents the master as very cross with the servant who did nothing with the money that he was given to trade with. Now we, you might say, have been given wisdom to trade with, and it is up to us, with God’s help, to do precisely that. We are called to act with wisdom, and if, after careful consideration, our decision is to do nothing for the moment, but wait on the Lord, until circumstances change, we must realize that this decision itself is an action which eliminates other choices. Wise action will always be principled, constructive, enterprising, responsible, and calculated as the best thing we can do to please and glorify the Lord in each set of circumstances. It will never be a choice to do nothing because of self-protective fear.
Conclusion
What does all of this add up to? The thrust of the foregoing chapter can be focused as follows. Many Christians are still haunted by the fancy that real guidance from God for the making of each day’s decisions is a direct ministry of the Holy Spirit in one’s heart that entirely transcends the mental disciplines of analyzing alternatives, applying principles, calculating consequences, weighing priorities, balancing pros and cons, taking and weighing advice, estimating your own capacities and limitations, and engaging in whatever other forms of brainwork prudence in self-commitment is held to require. We emphatically agree that leading us to the best decision is a ministry of the Holy Spirit, first to last, but with equal emphasis we deny that under ordinary circumstances his ministry short-circuits or circumvents any of these sometimes laborious intellectual procedures. On the contrary, they are precisely the means by which the Holy Spirit of God leads us into seeing clearly what it is right and good to decide and do in each situation.
In the previous chapter, we saw that the basic attitudinal frame for godly decision making, both in its positive, obediential and its negative, restrictive, stay-within-limits aspects, is fixed by the revealed law of God, which tells us his value system and lays out his moral ideal in the broadest terms for the guidance of his human creatures. This chapter has tried to show that Scripture itself points us constantly to our need of the gift of wisdom, that is, the good sense and shrewd judgment that the Spirit makes flow from the goodness of the God-centered, God-taught heart. If we are to implement the ideals of the law and so further the kingdom and glory of God in our daily lives, the best decisions will not be made except as we are guided by what older theology called the virtue of prudence, and there will be no virtue of prudence without the gift of wisdom, just as there will be no gift of wisdom without the down-to-earth realism about the business of living, with all its ups and downs, which we meet in the book of Proverbs, and indeed in all the wisdom writings from start to finish.
We fallen humans excel at self-deception when it comes to decision making. We shut our eyes to inconvenient facts, we naïvely rely on our own imperfectly trained consciences, we make exceptions to rules to favor ourselves, we listen only to people who say what we want to hear, we decide on policies and courses of action in unawareness of our own deep-down motives, ambitions, and rivalries; and so it goes on. In decision making we must ever seek honesty, humility, and prudence, and without the gift of wisdom we shall always miss all three.
Having thus argued that wisdom is a stepping-stone to prudence, we shall now explore the truth that advice is a stepping-stone to wisdom. Are you still with us? Hoping so, we ask you to read on.