People often use the words “knowledge” and “wisdom” without distinguishing the difference. While they’re closely related, they don’t have quite the same meaning. According to the Cambridge Dictionary wisdom is“… the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments”. This is perhaps a definition of human wisdom at its best. You can have all the knowledge in the world and know all things but without wisdom you’re prone to making mistakes.
Wisdom employs knowledge in that part of us which we call “free-will” and attempts to steer us in the right or preferred direction. However, to really achieve the best outcome we also need to seek the wisdom and the will of God. God has blessed us with the ability to choose, but He wishes us to use that will in accordance with His, by choice. Human wisdom is flawed and limited: Divine wisdom draws on complete knowledge.
THE MAKER’S INSTRUCTIONS. God made us and all that we can see, along with what we can’t see. He knows how we operate, what works and what’s in our best interests, as surely as the designer of a car knows how it will operate optimally. Therefore, “For best results follow the manufacturer’s instructions”. Failure to live by our Maker’s instructions is arrogance, and a mistake akin to constructing a complex engineering project out of the box without consulting the directions.
Some professing Christians miss the will of God, and like any unbeliever think that what they’re told by their news media, their college professors, their favorite celebrities and their friends is truth. They neglect or refuse to weigh up hypocrisy, inconsistency and risk. They fail to read between the lines or to consider the motivation of the source. We are too easily impressed and swayed by human wisdom, even being lazy by taking the words of unbelievers as truth without question. And it’s not just the unbeliever we should be wary of. I’m a great believer in comparing the words of a preacher to the words of God: you should be too.
THE COST OF COMPROMISE. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of all is to put human wisdom above God’s wisdom. There’s a profound price to pay for that; a consequence of putting the product over the Producer:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord“ (Jeremiah 17:5).
FROM THE BEGINNING. At the very beginning of life on earth the attack on faith was levelled at what God had already said. The serpent’s method was to immediately bring into question God’s first, simple and easy to obey commandment not to eat fruit from just one of the multitude of trees in the garden. Eve and then Adam failed miserably. They believed the serpent when he suggested that God hadn’t really said that death would result from eating the fruit (which He did in Genesis 3:3) and believed his suggestion that God was just trying to spoil their lives by denying them the fruit. That was all the dynamic duo needed to throw wisdom to the wind and just do what they wanted anyway. The same weakness in human nature continues to this day, inspired by the same lies.
NOT OF THIS WORLD. There are two different worlds in existence, and it’s imperative for the Christian believer to recognize that. Citizens of both worlds have a different destiny think differently, or they should. When being questioned by Pilate, Jesus told Pilate that while he was a king, he was not the king of any human domain:
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36).
As citizens of God’s kingdom the professing believer has been given a manual; a set of maker’s instructions which lay out the narrow path to a Godly and Spirit-filled life. To reject this manual and go it alone, or to claim to be hearing something fresh from God’s Spirit every day when the truth is already out there is to risk living by lies and deception, as surely as the serpent twisted and added to what God had said in the garden.
GOD’S WORD IS MEATY AND SPECIFIC, NOT ETHEREAL. The problem with the charismatic insistence upon “letting the Spirit take over” in church and fellowship settings is that the word of God is prone to re-interpretation, augmentation or being ignored altogether. The largest threat to the Church in our time is the ignoring of Biblical Scripture. Over and over again Scripture claims to be the very word of God: God’s message to us through His Son, HIs prophets and His Holy Spirit. The war against God and God’s people is waged against that very principle.
In our day we’re all being coerced or tempted or leaned on to live by human wisdom, or the wisdom of the serpent, and not God’s wisdom. Human wisdom sorts and utilizes knowledge or takes a back seat without reference to God, and then puffs itself up with pride over its achievement. Godly wisdom seeks the superior will of God. Which one do you want to live by? Even in the churches that claim to be “on fire” for God and living by the Spirit of God, the word of God is sometimes abandoned, in a theology which insists that the Bible was for “then”, and that we need a “new movement of the Spirit”. We need new words from God. The Bible is old but “God is doing a new thing”. In this way the people who tell us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (and He is) also allow and encourage their “something new” to overshadow and take over from what Jesus Christ has already said.
JESUS QUOTED THE OLD. Something new can indeed be a great thing: times change and the Church moves on. However, the Spirit will never contradict what He said two thousand years ago or six thousand years ago. If he does, it’s a different spirit, not the Spirit of God. Jesus, praying for his present and future disciples – us – said this:
“Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).
Jesus had demonstrated personally the correct and only way to resist the deception of the devil in his temptation in the wilderness. He answered each trick of the serpent not with tongues and not even praise, but with Scripture – words which had been spoken by God fourteen hundred years before. In this way Christ was demonstrating the fixed nature of Truth. There was no attempt to ignore or alter what God had already said, no matter how “old” it was. Why? because God’s word as recorded in Scripture is Spirit. It is eternal and can never be old or stale or irrelevant. Instead, it’s to be our ultimate guide:
“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
The Bible id our measuring stick. Any attempt to push it into the past in favor of the words of some contemporary self-professed “prophet” or “apostle” is nothing less than attempting to take God’s place: the intention of Satan, the serpent. Cults routinely trash the word of God, claiming it to be too unreliable to trust, and then introduce their “new revelation ” which they insist is reliable. It’s the same old lie of the serpent, dressed up slightly differently.
THE WISDOM OF THIS WORLD. The wisdom of this world makes decisions based on human reasoning without reference to the will or the word of God. It’s at work even in the church, attempting to convince us all that life evolved from slime three billion years ago. It tells us that God has forgotten all about that morality stuff and now you can live however you want to live because God is love and He just wants everyone to be happy. It tells us that we are masters of our own lives and that there will be no hell or punishment or judgment or recompense. It tells us that all roads lead to God and that we should open our minds to other philosophies and other truths.
The truth is that the universe is built on and operates on fixed principles which are not and cannot be altered by our will or our proclivities. The God who made it all has fixed views, fixed principles and fixed intentions. If He did not, he would not be God at all, he would be a politician. The universe and all of nature even had it been created would decay and collapse. The people who are held up in this world as being the brightest, the cleverest and the most intelligent do not impress God. HIs wisdom works on entirely different principles which are far above those of humanity:
“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19).
University professors, media giants, politicians and evolutionists are paraded as being the most intelligent and powerful among us; the wisest of all men and women, but God sees it all so differently. God’s plan is to turn our professed wisdom into dust, because that’s all it’s worth:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate” (1 Corinthians 1:18-19.
“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe… “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:20-25).
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 