The words of a man’s mouth are deep waters; the fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook.
We associate wisdom with obscurity. Want the meaning of life? Climb a mountain and decipher a riddle. Want to know how to understand others? Read ten thousand hours of psychology. Need to run a society? Look, we’ve got these thousands of experts who can give you guidance in long, strange words full of ‘ology’ and ‘ism’. The problem is this: wisdom’s difficulty isn’t in being obscure, not at the base. Wisdom is right out in the open, waiting for us. We’re just really reluctant to admit that.
We know wisdom is valuable, and so, we think, it must be difficult to acquire. Then we forget to ask what type of difficulty we mean. Is wisdom physically difficult? Intellectually? Spiritually? The temptation is to look at this question and decide it must be intellectual difficulty. Is wisdom difficult to get because it’s hard to wrap your mind around?
We tend to look at a set of words we don’t understand and assume that because we don’t understand, the ideas we’re missing must be really impressive (assuming we’re looking for wisdom). What does it mean to be ‘beyond good and evil,’ as Nietzsche wanted us to be? Well, strictly speaking, the phrase is nonsense; in plainer terms (which omit the obscuring spatial metaphor), Nietzsche wanted men to be better than good, worse than evil, worse than good, better than evil, and aware that both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were meaningless concepts. This formulation too resolves to nonsense. The formulation he offers, however, is appealing, full of grand rhetoric and challenges to the universe.
As a matter of fact, the foolishness of men tends to become deep and muddy, a tangle of obfuscations and lies. We can see this clearly enough in a different context. If I eat my sister’s dessert and lie about it, continued questioning of that lie will swiftly involve me in a remarkably complex tangle, one growing more dubious and self-contradictory by the minute. A lie, in daily life, tends to grow quite complicated, trying to account for its inconsistency with reality.
As per Romans 1:19-21, men know God and His nature. We just hide it from ourselves, preferring the lie. In seeking ‘wisdom’, these men refuse to give up that foundational lie (Ps. 14:1). As a result, the lies and subtleties and distinctions begin to pile up. Every time men probe deep enough into a problem, they find that without God the whole endeavor collapses, and every time collapse is threatened, man chooses to substitute yet another stopgap for the God he denies. The result is that human wisdom turns into a heap of part-truths glued together by desperation and deliberate ignorance.
Such a mess is confusing to the participant, let alone the newcomer. Man’s wisdom, having worked so hard to get rid of God and conscious of its failure, ever seeking new ways of avoiding reality, turns into an incomprehensible mess. Riddles and unanswerable questions and semantic vagaries and outright self-contradictions substitute for wisdom, giving no light at all.
The wisdom of God, by contrast, may be as deep as all the oceans combined (Rev. 22:1), but it shines light most generously. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path,” the psalmist declares (Ps. 119:105), and “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all…” (1 John 1:5). God gives us true wisdom, wisdom founded on obedience to Him (Ps. 111:10) and not on a lie. He does not hide this wisdom, not from those who have eyes to see (Matt 13:9).
That’s the problem, you see, the real difficulty of wisdom. The stream of wisdom is a babbling brook before our feet, merely a fall and a splash away, ready to embrace us in its vigor, but we abhor it. Oh, man loves wisdom in the abstract. It’s just that we hate what wisdom actually requires of us: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before our God (Mic. 6:8).
We like wisdom we don’t understand precisely because we don’t understand it. A command I can’t decipher means nothing, and therefore I cannot be condemned by it. No judgement can be issued on the basis of gibberish and nonsense, on vague questions and self-contradictions. I can look to this standard without fear, for it cannot call me wicked, nor can it require me to do what I do not want to do.
God’s wisdom, on the other hand, is a scourging whip upon all men. Have you been perfectly wise today? I haven’t. I’ve sinned. I’ve done less than I should, and I’ve done what I oughtn’t. My heart has wandered from Him, and my being has been turned from His path. I have not always done justice; I have often walked outside of lovingkindness; I have strayed and sought to walk apart from God. All this, my sin, wisdom declares to me.
Only by the gift of God, the gift of a new heart, can man abide to find wisdom. The difficulty, we see, is spiritual, not intellectual, not with the wisdom that truly matters. As Isaiah cries, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Is. 55:1). The subtleties of philosophy may be difficult, but the wisdom of God to salvation is a moment’s submission for any man, woman, or child (Matt. 11:29-30). To Him be the glory, then, that He gives us new hearts which abandon the old lie, “There is no God” (Ps. 53:1), and declare even in sorrow, “For I know that my Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25).
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
