Tag: wisdom

The wisdom of Jesus

Nine centuries after Solomon, and 400 years after Plato, Jesus came on the scene in Palestine. He was teaching crowds of people there and healing all kinds of sicknesses almost exactly 2,000 years ago. In his teaching he alluded more than once to king Solomon, one of his ancestors (Matthew 1.7).

He spoke of Solomon’s grandeur in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6.29). In Matthew 12.42, he reminds his listeners of the time when “the Queen of the South… came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom”, but then Jesus adds this astounding claim: “now one greater than Solomon is here”! Jesus is saying that the wisdom that he brings is wiser than that of the greatest wise man of old!

The New Testament says that “in Jesus are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2.3). It even calls Jesus “the wisdom of God”: in the divine incarnate Son of God, we have access to the infinite wisdom of God himself. By his revelation, we can learn what wisdom is: how to live a life that is both totally fulfilling and at the same time pleasing to God. This is the key to what human life is all about! God has revealed his wisdom, which is a worldview that no human being could have discovered unaided. Jesus’teaching is essential for us to grasp. 

Jesus re-emphasised the “fear of God”, but he also spoke of the love of God. He faithfully warned us of some bad news. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” he said; “Rather fear him [God] who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10.28). By this allusion to the “fear of God”, Jesus means that we must realise that one day we will have to stand before the ultimate Judge of all the earth and give account of our lives. And he forewarns us that there will be a potential terrible penalty if our sins are not forgiven – hell. This is the ultimate eternal loss. 

But Jesus in his wisdom tells us we can avoid that by understanding that God is also loving: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish [in hell] but have eternal life” (John 3.16). Jesus calls us all to a fulfilling lifestyle when he gives what he called the two most important commandments: “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and secondly, to love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22.37-39). To commit to obeying these two divine commandments means a radical change of life for us who love ourselves more than anyone else! But how to love God? It can only come when we realise how much God has loved us. “God demonstrates his own love for us,” writes the apostle Paul, “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5.8). God loved us despite our unworthiness as sinners; he sent his Son to die for us, bearing our punishment in our place, guiltless though he was, so that through faith in him we may receive forgiveness and a new life, eternal life. This is the Good News of the Gospel.

He forgives us as we respond in grateful faith, so we no longer fear his judgment.  We begin to love God as the Holy Spirit of God “sheds abroad in our hearts the love of God” (Romans 5.5). This is the true way to happiness.

Clive Every-Clayton

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The key to wisdom

King Solomon came through a rough time struggling through his own existential wisdom journey, but finally he came to the profound answer, summed up in a curious expression: “Fear God”. This, he concluded, is what our human life should be all about.

So are we supposed to live our lives in fear of God? But God is loving, so we shouldn’t be afraid of him. What does the “fear of God” mean?

In another of his books, entitled “Proverbs”, which contains much practical advice, Solomon returns to this question, summing up his thought with a simple but profound maxim in which he lays down the foundation of real wisdom; we do well to take heed. 

This key truth is enunciated in a succinct proverb which recalls his conclusion in Ecclesiastes: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10). Before considering what the fear of the Lord means, notice that this is just the “beginning” of wisdom – meaning you don’t even start out on the way of wise living without this first basis. Millions of thinkers have failed to find satisfying answers to the Big Questions because they didn’t heed Solomon’s wisdom at this point. Herein lies the essence of profound God-given wisdom. 

If we want to find it, we must begin by coming to “fear the Lord”. Let me explain what that means, beginning with the negative: it is not intended to teach that we should lead a life of fear, being constantly fearful of God. The idea is rather that we are to take on board who the Lord exactly is. He is no small god; neither is he a divinity invented by some religious philosopher. No, He exists from all eternity, already present before the creation of the universe. He is the mighty Creator, whose power and wisdom are infinite: “he made the earth by his power, established the world by his wisdom and by his understanding stretched out the heavens” (Jeremiah 10.12). The immense number of stars is no problem for him – he calls them all by their names. And he knows every thought that passes through our minds too.

The Lord is absolutely good, both holy in the commandments he gives us, and loving as he calls us to belong to him. In his love, he desires to share his wisdom with his creatures so that we may find the way of true happiness. To “fear” the Lord is to take account of all that God is, in a right-minded openness to his truth. He is absolute Lord, gracious Saviour, and man’s very best friend. Without acknowledging God’s existence, man can never find the true worldview. This is the one essential fact to grasp – taking account of God’s reality is “the beginning” of proper understanding, without which we go obligatorily astray. We need to begin by reckoning on the existence of our Creator.

The Greek philosophers paid scant attention to the basis Solomon laid down in his inspired writings. Their philosophies lacked that necessary wise foundation; godless thinkers have suffered ever since from the confusion of having no absolute grounds for their worldviews.

Does God himself have any real place in your life and in your thinking? Do you realise that he has revealed truth and wisdom to humankind? Are you paying any attention to what he has communicated in the Bible? If you don’t have this key to knowledge, you can’t even begin to know true wisdom. God being the fundamental reality behind all his creation, we can never make sense of it if we ignore him. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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Humanity’s wisest man

Four centuries before Plato, Socrates and Aristotle began their philosophical search for wisdom, a wise man wrote three short books that even today are distributed throughout the entire world and studied by millions. When this author was young, he was about to be entrusted with national responsibilities; he had the reflex of turning to God in prayer. What did he ask for? “Give your servant an understanding mind,” he prayed, “that I may discern between good and evil”. That young man was about to be crowned Solomon, King of Israel in 962 BC. His prayer was so powerfully answered that “Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt”. He wrote 3,000 proverbs, “spoke of trees… of beasts, birds, reptiles and fish”, and he wrote over 1,000 songs. People came from afar to listen to his wisdom.

One of his books has a very contemporary feel about it: it reveals how his heart had been hungry for human fulfilment, but he had found it hard to find. Yet in his book “Ecclesiastes” he shares his personal experience as he struggled to avoid the emptiness of life in his search for true human satisfaction. The testimony of this wise philosophical thinker is well worth studying, and it is available in every Bible. 

His book starts out with dramatic effect: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” How contemporary does that feel! This is not his conclusion, but his starting point. He recounts how he had sought fulfilment and discovered that every avenue proved inadequate to satisfy the deep needs of his heart.  

He first tried studying to gain understanding and knowledge; he became very erudite, but found that, as he describes it, it was just like chasing the wind, concluding “accumulating knowledge is vexatious and increases sorrow”. From that he turned to hedonism: “enjoy yourself”, he said to himself, but despite trying to cheer himself up with wine, women and song, he remained frustrated – “Pleasure? What use is it?” It was all vanity. 

Then he turned his hand to work, conceiving and accomplishing grandiose constructions – houses, gardens, pools and forests. He obtained slaves to work for him and had great possessions of flocks and herds. He grew very rich in silver and gold: “I kept my heart from no pleasure”, he testified. “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and lo and behold – it was all pure vanity and chasing the wind”. Then the enigma of death confronted him: since the wise and the foolish end up in the same cemetery… “I gave my heart up to despair” he concluded. “I thought the dead more fortunate than the living”.

All this sums up our human predicament and it is extremely depressing; but fortunately, that is not the end of the story. He makes the occasional allusion to God in his book as he continues to “search out the scheme of things” – the whole picture, a true worldview. “God made man upright”, he writes in a flash of inspiration, “but they have sought out many schemes” – devious philosophies.

He turns finally to be positive: “Rejoice, young man in your youth… Walk in the ways of your heart… But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment”. In other words, realise you are responsible for your life and will have to answer one day to God. “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth,” he concludes; “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole raison d’être of man” (Ecclesiastes 12.13-14).

Clive Every-Clayton

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A blessing out of hopelessness?

Post-modernity enshrouds us in a depressing cloud of despair: despair of finding any ultimate meaning, despair of knowing any absolute truth, despair of ever truly understanding who we are and what is the meaning and value of our human existence.

All this is profoundly disturbing, but in the midst of our confusion, hopelessness and despair, there is at least one glimmer of light, one saving grace that can enlighten our darkness.

The unexpected blessing is this: we may learn, first, that the quest for valid answers to our existential questions has totally and abysmally failed because our proud expectation was incorrect that we could find them by our own reasoning powers.  This is a humbling but salutary lesson – that man’s reason is unable to ground truth on anything ultimately valid. The efforts made down the centuries by thinkers starting out merely from their own unaided intellectual powers have now been shown to offer only relative answers, human opinions, futile and partial, not really absolute truths. The wise among us can see that Descartes set us off on the wrong track with his “I think, therefore I am”. This started us off thinking only out from ourselves – and it has led to the present end of hope for getting final truth. 

This solemn discovery can prove to be a blessing for the seeking soul.

How? Well, in the light of this discovery, we may learn, secondly, that we need light from a Source that is wiser than mere mortal man. If the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe, wouldn’t the Maker of such a brain be endowed with mind-boggling wisdom? He knows very well the limits of our human thinking to come up with absolute truth, so he has provided a better way by which we may get the answers we crave.

So as we despair of our own intellectual efforts, consider the potential blessing: trust in our reason has led us to realise the limits of our reason, so the next logical step that will renew our hope for authentic answers is to trust the infinitely wise Creator who shares his knowledge with us. He knew all along that we needed his input; right from the creation of the first couple he told them in words some vital things they needed to know.

We should be thankful to God for teaching us this humbling lesson: recognising that we are unable to find many key truths unaided, we are led to acknowledge our need of God’s revelation of truth. And the first element of his truth is that he exists: it is another human folly to imagine we can do without listening to him or by dismissing him completely. It is “the fool” who “says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14.1). The “beginning of wisdom”, according to God’s word, is to “fear the Lord” (Psalm 111.10) – which means taking on board the fact that he is there, that he is wise, and good and loving, well capable of teaching us the way of true human fulfilment as we yield to him his rightful place as the Lord of our lives.

Turn then from vain human thinking and study the words of God! That is the ultimate blessing from which we humans can benefit, once we abandon our proud attitude of expecting to find the answers by ourselves without his revelation.

Intellectual pride will actually blind you to God’s truth: be humble, be teachable as you turn to study the Bible!

Clive Every-Clayton

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Do not be fooled!

There’s good news and there’s fake news: it is important to discern which is which!

Christmas commemorates the messengers from heaven announcing “good news of great joy that will be for all people” (Luke 2.10). The incarnation of the Son of God was – and is – “good news”. And it is universal truth, “for all people”. And it’s a source of “great joy” – deep happiness and human fulfilment.

Though “fake news” seems to be a modern concept, there have always been purveyors of falsehoods, and their fake news is folly that leads people astray. Fake news is actually bad news because it’s false, so people believe a lie.

In previous blogs I have insisted that only God knows all truth; only he can communicate that absolute truth to us; he sent his Son into the world to tell us the truth that he wants us to know; and that hearing Jesus’ teaching “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8.31-32). There alone is the source of real truth, good news, not fake. 

It is not polite to call another person a “fool”, but twice in the Bible God uses this word to describe two types of people. Two of our perplexing questions are: “Does God exist?” and “What happens after death?” It’s vital to obtain true and reliable answers to these fundamental questions. God himself both gives the answers, and condemns as “fools” those who think differently. Concerning the existence of the Creator God, Lord of the Universe, Maker of all things visible and invisible: to deny his existence is a big mistake: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14.1). This is a foolish belief-statement for several reasons: first, it would require an exhaustive research of the entire universe to be able to make such an affirmation. As that is impossible, the statement merely expresses one person’s belief, or lack of belief. Secondly, it fails to consider seriously all the pointers to God’s existence in the amazing creation we observe all around us with its glorious beauty, the mathematical precision of its physical constants, and human beings themselves who, despite our fall into corruption, still reflect much of the personality of the God in whose image we were created.

So don’t draw the hasty and false conclusion that “There is no God”; if you haven’t found him yet, that’s no proof of his non-existence. Study the life and teaching of the One who came down to earth from Him at that first Christmas: you will see he is believable.

The word “fool” is also used in one of Jesus’ parables concerning the second big question – life after death. A farmer gets richer and richer until he no longer had enough space to keep all his goods. He decides to tear down his barns and build greater ones, saying to himself, “I have plenty of good things laid up for myself for many years; I will take life easy, eat, drink, and be merry”. Then Jesus adds: “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul will be demanded of you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (Luke 12.16-21).

Here is the folly of not preparing for eternity and the Day of Judgment that we must all face. Don’t believe the fake news that “when you’re dead you’re dead”. The Bible warns us: “Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Hebrews 9.27). 

Please, for the sake of your eternal soul, don’t be fooled!

Clive Every-Clayton

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