Supreme Wisdom
Supreme Wisdom
There is the third “greater than” that Jesus used to describe himself: “greater than Solomon” (Matthew 12:42 NIV). Proverbially, literally, and figuratively, the name Solomon is synonymous with wisdom. His name represents that even three thousand years after he lived. After visiting him, the queen of Sheba said that not even half of his greatness had been told. The Bible tells us that he was without peer in virtually every discipline. Yet he was his own liability. Knowledge without character is deadly. Solomon knew all the answers. He just did not live them. In the end, Solomon’s is a sad story and a grim reminder that even the dispensers of wisdom have a breaking point. Highly gifted people are not gods, even if they think they act or speak for him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a powerful writer in his day. When he died, thousands of people lined the streets of St. Petersburg to bid him farewell. His Brothers Karamazov and numerous other works were lofty in skill and far-reaching in impact. But Dostoyevsky was an inveterate gambler and went to the grave quite poor by virtue of that addiction.
Alexander the Great conquered the world but could not conquer his own thirst for alcohol. Dying a young man in his early thirties, he went to the grave a loser.
Michael Jackson—what an incredibly gifted entertainer and dancer, considered by those in the field almost superhuman in the scope of his gifts! But what a tragic end to a tragic personal lifestyle. He was almost a replica of Elvis Presley in his success and failures.
Stephen Hawking—one of the greatest minds to have ever lived. How enviable a capacity! But he lives in a wheelchair, communicating with the world by the movement of one finger.
We all have our breaking points. For some it will be moral or spiritual. For others, a physical malady of dreadful proportions. For still others, it will be the sudden stopping of their lives like an engine in midair. For all of us, life comes to an end in this world. All of us.
In giving the answers to our deepest struggles and breaking points, Jesus also embodied what character was intended to look like and what eternal life is. But there is more. He spoke it, lived it, and is able to empower those who seek to live that way. The temple, Jonah, and Solomon. All memories of what is real and transitory. Jesus Christ is greater than the temple, greater than Jonah, and greater than Solomon. He alone offers you and me the fulfillment and joy of walking with God. For that privilege we need a Savior.
As we look back upon history, we see dark spots of human behavior. Among them, few are as dark as the scourge of human slavery. The name that was most influential in bringing that horrific trade to an end is that of William Wilberforce. I have referred to him in a previous chapter. Wilberforce was converted to Christ at the age of twenty-six and was to give the rest of his life for the noble cause of breaking the chains of oppression and the demeaning of human beings in the massive phenomenon of slavery. Oddly enough, physically he was quite dwarfed. One writer said, “The hand that struck the shackles from the galled limbs of our British slaves was the hand of a hunchback.” He was brilliant and extraordinarily gifted, a master of mimicry, a born actor, an accomplished singer, and a perfect elocutionist.
James Boswell said of him, “I saw a shrimp mount the table but as I listened he grew and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.”5 And “when he rose to address the House of Commons, he looked like the dwarf that had jumped out of a fairy tale; when he resumed his seat, he looked like the giant of the self-same story.”6
As a member of Parliament, he fought his entire life to defeat this dreadful practice. So many discouraged him from the fight, saying that it would never be corrected. With more than a million souls in this dreadful traffic, some thought they would appease him by agreeing to a bill that made the fresh importing of slaves illegal. It took him twenty years just to get that bill passed. But he continued to work relentlessly to bring the whole practice to a halt and was literally on his deathbed when the word came to him that the bill illegalizing slavery had made it through the Parliament. Fifty years of his life had been dedicated to that cause. His words in response: “Thank God! I have lived to see the day.”
I have often seen the dark scourge of human trafficking as a reflection of self-enslavement and plunder. We ourselves are in chains. This is at the root of all human discrimination.
There is an impact on the world when we ourselves are freed from our own enslavements. Those who would deny the Christian the privilege of sharing the Savior with others deny the Christian the beauty and power of Jesus Christ. Of all people, it was Bertrand Russell who attributed Gandhi’s success in India to the fact that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized nation. That is quite a statement from an atheist, crediting the success of a pantheist to Christian theism.