The Way of Wisdom

Listen to me! For I have important things to tell you. My advice is wholesome. My words are plain to anyone with understanding, clear to those with knowledge. I, Wisdom, live together with good judgment, I know where to discover knowledge and discernment. – Proverbs 8:6-12 excerpts (NLT) 

In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is depicted like any other street-corner preacher with a megaphone. Wisdom seeks a hearing. Wisdom wants to be heard and received by the masses. So Wisdom shouts for attention.

But unlike many street-corner preachers with megaphones, Wisdom doesn’t just promote itself. Wisdom promotes the virtues of knowledge, judgment, and discernment embedded in every conscientious individual. Wisdom doesn’t talk down to us. Wisdom invites us to bring our knowledge and our judgment with us, as we walk alongside wisdom in discernment. 

This open invitation—to seek truth through trusted networks of all the best scientific knowledge and spiritual discernment and historical judgment available to us—is a far cry from the current American sociopolitical climate of religious parochialism and insular thinking.  

The banning of books, the whitewashing of history, the discrediting of science, and the frontal assault on public education and intellectualism, all speak to a retrenchment, a narrow frugality in the American mentality. The rejection of Wisdom’s openness is what threatens a return to isolationism and a reconstitution of segregation. 

Thank God for the Wisdom of free thought and free expression and free self-determination. May she never give way to the urgings of social coercion and the schemes of spiritual myopia. 

Prayer
Lord, in wisdom we apply the knowledge you’ve given us … and in wisdom we seek your discernment as we continue to discover even more of what we don’t know. Amen.

About the Author
Kenneth L. Samuel is Pastor of Victory for the World Church, Decatur, Georgia.