Ancient Wisdom Still Applicable

The journey through the first seventeen books of Scripture establishes God's sovereignty among the nation of Israel, as the Hebrew people are led to a new worldview God established with them through His Covenant. As we meet up with the poetic books of wisdom, we are artfully drawn into the personal experiences, struggles and longings of God’s chosen people. We not only gain insight into their humanness, but peer into how God is pointing Israel, and us, towards the keys of life – wisdom is found through an abiding fear of the Lord. Today’s reader of these books is drawn into the heart of the early Hebrew people and if carefully read, will recognize our reflection in their journey to know the Lord our God.

Wisdom, something many of us think of as something we gain, has been with God from the beginning, indwelling within each of us when we were created as Imago Dei. From our beginning, many have continued in search of their calling, not realizing it is experienced through the confusion of Job, our communication with God through Psalms, developing confidence gained in Proverbs, cynical awareness in Ecclesiastes and God’s true love in Song of Songs. God’s calling for each of us is not found looking around the world or through the experiences of our life, his calling is found when we accept where we are in our walk with God. As the great writer Oswald Chambers said, the books of wisdom teach us how to suffer, how to pray, how to act, how to enjoy and how to love.

The journey of wisdom opens up a door to the ultimate calling for our lives, which comes upon each seeking follower of Christ in the life path that we are on – the calling of God is found in the season and changes of direction in our walk. Each of the authors, psalmists and scribes of wisdom crafted for their audience a message that all of God’s people would be able to access as the truths of their message helped to accelerate them towards the abiding reality of Gods calling for those who believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ.

Wisdoms Spiritual Formation Today

Through our deep dive into the books that comprise what is known as wisdom literature, we enter a concise, memorable, simple and profound knowledge of who we are as creations of the God we serve. The wisdom God gave us through our savior Jesus Christ allows us to observe life and reflects on the voice of experience and thoughtfully digest our human experience and give us practical living skills for confusing circumstances. Most importantly, it challenges us not to falsely spiritualize everything in life.[1] Drawing on this revelation, I have come to understand how God has called me throughout my life – heavenly interruption. We all have the future life we have created in our own minds, when God calls this life is redirected as God directs our steps. The battled within each of us is to embrace the interruption as a calling from God or fight to keep the plans we have envisioned.

When Job and his wife experienced the future they envisioned together being tragically interrupted, it was natural for them to cry out and ask why? Today, our world of society, as with Job’s friends, endeavors to package this “why” into a box that we can identify and understand. However, the spiritual leaders that Job was called into, like all men today, must reconcile the full weight of the Fall as we come face to face with the reality of being separated from the Imago Dei in which we were originally created. As Billy Graham once said, “Nowhere does the Bible teach that Christians are exempt from the tribulations and natural disasters that come upon the world. Scripture does teach that the Christian can face tribulation, crisis, calamity, and personal suffering with a supernatural power that is not available to the person outside of Christ.”[2] As men, like Job, our world tempts us to find solutions, make changes and solve problems in order to restore what we have each lost when our lives are interrupted. As believers, we are tempted to embrace the empty answers which support the concept of retribution as strive towards equity – exactly where the satan wants to keep us all as we flounder through life.

With moral relativism having hijacked our world, we are faced with a confused political system focused on using anything, including global pandemics, to strengthen the war on the Church. As the book of Psalms transcends God’s revelation, we are brought back into focus with the faith, wisdom and salvation that Christ came to establish among us as Christians. Through the history of Israel’s cycles of praise and lament, today we can reflect on how the Lord shields us as followers of Christ, as we cry out in our circumstance and trials to build us up in faith and rest in the knowledge of our salvation in the Lord.[3] Through meditation on the poetic beauty of the Psalms, we are drawn back into a time, to the hope of salvation that God painted for us to see with clarity, that Christ is our reality in whom we gain wisdom and through whom we find our salvation.

However, while salvation is the prize, many in the western world are taught to focus our efforts on ourselves, the plans we make, the effort we are allowed to exert and skills we are pushed to obtain. Rather than considering the many proverbs of righteous living, many follow the temptation of the world that is designed to lead us away from what Christ Jesus became for us as a gift from God – the wisdom (or hokamâ) that provides us with the skill we need to live according to God in our understanding and knowledge. It is not hard today, to observe the patterns of our and the worlds actions, which lead to the ensuing consequences outlined in many of the sayings contained within the book of Proverbs. God’s wisdom allows us to observe the choices of the world, though the eyes of our salvation, guiding us towards a life in the context of the multitude of proverbs, the believer may capture his thoughts as we face the choices of the world that lead down the path of wisdom and folly. While individual proverbs are not necessarily promises from God, they collectively draw the reader back to the main point – the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

It is the lack of such wisdom that keeps us in the chaos of life, empty and searching as the Qohelet creatively depicts in the book of Ecclesiastes; there is only futility in a life of pleasure outside of the fear of the Lord. Taken in context, the presentation of Ecclesiastes provides Christians today with an understanding that can experience a deeper significance of life, through the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In confronting the reality of death, the Qohelet observes, the only reality, making sense is what Jesus also showed us, that the life we live is a temporary experience; as Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”[4]

Finally, from our creation, God intended us to build and maintain righteous relationships as the book of Song of Songs artfully portrays. The fear of the Lord embodies the fullness of God’s love for what He created when he set mankind over His creation as His Imago Dei. In today’s world, with moral relativism on an exponential trajectory, the apostle Paul understood and instructed the Church to rejoice in the intimate relationship we have through Jesus Christ.[5] When God made man and woman, knowing we would live together in a fallen world, He intended us to experience love, through the designed intimate relationship of marriage in which we learn appreciation, purity and approval on our way toward overcoming our selfish indifference. Through the wisdom we find in Christ and the maturity that is called for in both our marriage to our spouse and thus to Christ, we provide the daily bread of life that is found through the abiding fear of the Lord.

In a world in which truth has become relative to the beholder as we move further away from Christ as a society, the body of believers who identify as the Church can remain unified through the collective message of the books of wisdom. A life committed to Christ will not be without suffering and when it comes our prayers to the sovereign God we serve become our praise. When faced with the day to day distractions and choices, we can meditate on the many wise proverbs, which bring meaning to the world we live in and help us keep our eyes focused on our savior, Jesus. Finally, love. There is no greater love than the love God has for His creation, and we can experience this love by laying ourselves down for our friends. The love we experience in our relationships that teach us sacrifice and intimacy, lead us to the keys of wisdom – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”[6]

[1] Walt Russel, Playing with Fire; How the Bible Ignites Change in Your Soul, 151. [2] Billy Graham, “Billy Graham Sermon: Joy in Tribulation,” Billy Graham Evangelistic Association - UK, last modified November 5, 2019, accessed November 16, 2020, https://billygraham.org.uk/p/billy-graham-sermon-joy-in-tribulation/. [3] Psalms 3:3-8 [4] Matt 16:24-25 [5] Ephesians 2 [6] Proverbs 9:10