| 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."
