| Vol. 18, No. 2, Mar. - Apr. 1989 |
John H. Paterson
Get wisdom, get understanding ... Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee:
love her and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing... ( Proverbs 4:5-7)
IT is one of the simple facts of life that human wisdom cannot lead a person to God. It may point them in the right direction; it may lead them to conclude that there is a God, but it cannot, by itself, bring them into contact with Him. For some people, this is a tragedy they never resolve; they spend their lives and their wisdom searching for God and end in despair because, although they want to, they have still not found Him. For others it becomes, perversely, a source of pride, for if they, with their fine minds, have been unable to discover God, then that must prove that He does not exist!
But to find God it is necessary both to start at the right point and then to seek Him. And Paul tells us that this "right point" is the recognition that there are two kinds of wisdom, and that it is quite possible to possess one and not the other:
"Howbeit we speak wisdom among the perfect: yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, which are coming to naught: but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the world, unto our glory: which none of the rulers of this world knoweth ..." (1 Corinthians 2:6-8)
But this at once raises an important question: is all human thought then vain? It must, surely, play some part in bringing us to perceive the true wisdom of God. How, then, do these two kinds of wisdom relate to one another?
These are questions which, it seems to me, are dealt with in what are generally known as the Books of Wisdom in the Old Testament. Whatever we call them, we can recognise the character of these books -- Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. They are intended, I think, to show us from both a positive and a negative standpoint where true wisdom lies, and how it is acquired. Their effect is to divide humanity into two categories -- the wise person and the fool. This division is, you may recollect, most marked in Proverbs, where there are almost one hundred references to fools, folly and the foolish. The fool is, for these writers, simply someone who thinks himself wise but who does not, in reality, possess the key to true wisdom.
What does it mean to seek or get wisdom, as these Scriptures urge us to do? It seems that two things are involved. They are to develop: (1) [29/30] the ability to identify the wisdom of God when we meet it in the circumstances of our lives. To learn, then, to discern the hand of God in external conditions is "wise; (2) the ability to adapt to the wisdom of God, by responding rightly to God's actions. The wise man is recognised by his attitude of heart, or his response, when and where God touches him personally.
It is these reactions to what we might call internal and external circumstances that represent the true wisdom. And it is the struggle -- the learning process -- to achieve right reactions which occupies the writers of the books we know as the Wisdom Books.
They are, of course, diverse in character, but I think that it is possible to trace through all five of them this common theme. It might be easier to do so if their order in the Bible was slightly different, for they seem to me to be a graded series of approaches to the problem of the two wisdoms. If, just for now, you will allow me to tamper a little with their order, I will try to show you what I mean.
AT one end of the scale comes the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. No one can read this book, especially in a modern paraphrase, without being impressed by the worldly-wise cynicism of the writer. It all sounds completely, wearily up-to-date! And what it amounts to is that, viewing things as they are in the world, there is no sense in them. In other words, a "wise" person, in any human meaning of the word, would never have created a world like ours; nor would he allow it to run in such a contradictory fashion. Good intentions and good actions are frustrated, evil flourishes. One cannot even account for -- explain the why's and wherefore's of -- the natural world, let alone the world of man: rivers run into the sea and the hydrological cycle goes on turning century after century without any apparent progress or change (1:7). What good is it?
Viewing the world armed with the best of its wisdom, the Preacher can only reiterate that it arouses nothing but "vanity and vexation of spirit" (10 references). It doesn't make sense and the more you think about it the less sense it makes: "I applied my heart to know wisdom ... I perceived that this also was vexation of spirit" (1:17) -- or "a striving after wind" as the Revised Version puts it. The word translated "vexation" has its apparent origin in a root that describes hunger and greed: this search for wisdom is an unsatisfied hunger in the human mind. If you have made your best efforts to understand the world as you see it and have failed, you are left hungry.
The reaction of the Preacher comes in the twelfth chapter. His advice to anyone wrestling with the problem of why the world does not work wisely is -- to forget it! We should turn away, he says, from vain efforts to make sense of nature and events, and turn to their creator. Furthermore, we should do that early, in the days of our youth, so that we waste as little of our lives as may be in what is, for human wisdom, an impossible task. What eventually counts as true wisdom is (12:13) to "fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."
SO far, these scriptural thoughts on wisdom have been overwhelmingly negative. When we turn to Job, negative ideas still predominate; that is, most of the book is still about what wisdom is not. But we have moved on appreciably from Ecclesiastes. In Job, we have a man who recognises the existence of another and higher wisdom, but who is hard put to it to find its key.
There are two excellent reasons why this key eluded Job. One is that he was being assailed for much of the time by his friends' cliche-ridden "explanations" of what had happened to him in that incredible run of misfortunes which had overtaken him. I have already suggested that one of the spiritual skills that the man or woman of God must learn in seeking wisdom is the ability to interpret circumstances, and to discern the hand of God in them.
Not the least of Job's troubles was the fact that he had several friends who believed precisely that they had that kind of wisdom: that they understood the mind of God! So out came their explanations. A few examples will suffice. In Job 4:7-8, Eliphaz argued that nobody ever heard of [30/31] innocent people suffering, so that if we suffer it is because we deserve to do so. In Job 8:4-6 Bildad argued that Job's disasters could be mitigated if only he would pray, so he had obviously failed in this respect. And in Job 11:1-7, Zophar came straight out and accused Job of self-righteousness. And so on!
Now it seems clear, as we read the book, that Job could not have known the right explanation, but his great virtue and strength was that he certainly knew nonsense when he heard it! Groping as he was for understanding among unprecedented calamities, he at least knew that none of his friends had the right answer, and he repudiated all their arguments. In this sense, his achievement was negative, but it was a wonderful achievement for all that! He must have been sorely tempted to grasp at any one of the facile, if wounding, explanations offered by his friends, but he did not do so: "In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with foolishness" (Job 1:22). To be able to identify the false even when you do not know the true is a very great step forward. To be able to say, "God is not like that" is part of the way of finding out what He is like.
I said that there were two reasons why Job could not find the key to heavenly wisdom -- and why, in a very real sense, he never did find it, for the book ends with his abruptly halting his search when confronted by God Himself. The first was the tangle of false reasoning which his friends wove around him. The second was, of course, that Job did not know what was going on, all this time, in heaven!
The late Dr Francis Schaeffer was fond of using an illustration which, although drawn from a rather curious source, may be helpful to us in trying to picture Job's situation. He used to point out that in the old, classical Chinese theatre there were two stages, one above the other. The lower one represented earth, and the upper one heaven, or the abode of the gods. Actors on the lower stage could not see what was going on above them. All they could go by was an occasional noise from above -- and the reaction of the audience who could, of course, see both stages from where they sat.
Now where Job is concerned, we form a privileged audience. We know from the book exactly what was going on above and below. But Job and his friends did not. What they were trying to do was to guess from the evidence in Job's life what was happening on that upper stage. As it happens, all the guesses made by Job's friends were rather simplistic; they were based on a simple idea of cause and effect. But Job rejected that idea. He had no knowledge of the real explanation, but still he argued for some higher, hidden wisdom. External things do not carry their explanation in themselves. Bravo Job!
SO how is this higher, hidden wisdom to be found? In the Book of Proverbs we can, so to speak, watch the search for it in progress. The writer is quite clear that such a search is necessary; that it will not, in effect, simply drop into our laps. Here we find the wise man seeking, and the fool resting on his laurels -- on the fund of earthly wisdom which he has built up. Keeping in mind the nature of the true wisdom, the wise man puts himself in the way of acquiring it; he is careful about his actions; careful about his priorities, careful, too, not to accept the obvious, or the flashy, or the short-term advantage.
The fool is just the opposite; he is drawn to whatever increases his wealth, his pleasure, or his comfortable ease. He takes risks -- borrowing, gambling, drinking -- whereas the wise man keeps tight hold on himself and his belongings, all the time seeking wise use of them. And the writer's message to his son is to be wise, to avoid the path of the fool.
It is interesting to pause here and notice that these admonitions had a very real relevance in their day. If, as Proverbs 1:1 asserts, these are the words of Solomon, then his son, Rehoboam, received them, and promptly made the wrong choice. When he came to the throne, he was presented immediately with two wisdoms (1 Kings 12:1-16): that of Solomon, as represented by his old counselors, and that of the young men who were Rehoboam's own contemporaries. And he chase the wrong wisdom, and lost ten-twelfths of his kingdom! [31/32]
So here again we have made some progress in the Books of Wisdom. We now know that there are different kinds of wisdom, and that only one of these developed from a knowledge of God and His ways. What next?
WHEN we turn to the Psalms, we find the true wisdom really shining through -- patchily, perhaps, as the life of the psalmist was patchy, but everywhere apparent. There are many times when David himself seems baffled, as Job was, but there are many references, too, that show him emerging from bewilderment into a remarkable perception of the wisdom of God.
There are 150 psalms, and only space here for one or two comments on the growth in wisdom and understanding revealed by the book. But notice firstly, if you will, how the psalmist begins to perceive an integration between man, nature and history. For the Preacher and Job, these three usually contradicted each other, whereas for David they confirmed one another:
And the firmament showeth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge ...
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
(Psalm 19:1, 2, 7)
The psalmist has learned to detect the hand of God, and the voice of God, among all the conflicting sights and sounds of His world (and David had had plenty of conflict in his own experience): to discern the reality behind the appearance.
Notice, secondly, the psalmist's realisation of how the wisdom of God works itself out in the individual. Whereas the leading character in Proverbs, as we have seen, is the fool, the recurrent note struck in the Psalms is, "Blessed is the man ..." That is, as it happens, the phrase with which the book opens. David has come to understand, in the wisdom of Lord, where blessing lies -- in what conduct, and in what attitude to God.
He makes it all sound simple, but it isn't! For this "hidden" wisdom, as Paul called it in 1 Corinthians, is hidden largely because it is an upside-down wisdom. It is the reverse of our everyday wisdom or, to quote Paul directly:
"For behold your calling, brethren, how that not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise ..." (1 Corinthians 1:26-7)
It involves looking at strength and saying, "No, that is really weakness", or at weakness and saying, "No, in God's hands that is strength." It is, in fact, a rather advanced lesson in God's school. But it was one in which David had already graduated! He had taken the practical examination when he fought and killed Goliath, and here in the Psalms is his written testimony to what he had learned:
And causeth them to wander in the waste, where there is no way.
Yet setteth he the needy on high from affliction
And maketh him families like a flock ...
Whoso is wise shall give heed to these things.
(Psalm 107:40-43)
SO the wisdom of the wise increases as they come to understand the ways of God. They learn what a growth in that wisdom demands of them; they know the blessing of the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates in it day and night (Psalm 1:2). But now we come to the Song of Solomon, and whatever are we to say about that? Should it be in our Bible at all and, if so, what does it contribute to the whole?
These are not easy questions to answer! My own comment is, in any case, not so much an answer as a suggestion as to how we may link this book with the other four. [32/33]
What the Song seems to me to tell us is just this: that a heart which has learned to discern God's wisdom in unlikely circumstances, and to adapt to His ways, can be brought into a very close relationship with Himself. The psalmist spoke of loving God and loving His law (cf. 119:97, 113, 163), but this is a long step further on. It is a relationship so close, and based on so perfect an understanding of God's ways, that only this kind of poetry and image can fully represent it.
This, in short, is the result of an ever-increasing knowledge of God. And it is this, surely, in prospect that makes the long and often difficult pursuit of true wisdom worthwhile. It is this, ultimately, that drives us to persevere in our quest.
And his banner over me was love.
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