The Only Intellectual Faith – Christianity

Introduction to Proverbs

The goal of Christian living, in a manner of speaking, is the development of a renewed mind. This is necessary because the old mind – that is, the mind that is set on the flesh – is hostile to God. It’s hostile to God because its basic operating premise is that “God did not say.” Or, as Paul puts it in Romans, there is no fear of God before their eyes. Thus, in a nutshell, if the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom as Proverbs declares, and men and women don’t practice this basic intellectual commitment in their reasoning, it follows that man is lost in foolishness.

Naturally, this is exactly what Scripture says of us outside of Christ. We are dead in our sin and trespasses. We’re darkened in our understanding due to the hardness of our heart (Ephesians 4:17). Indeed, the fool says in his heart that there’s no God (Psalm 14). The point isn’t that man’s intellectual equipment was defective from the get-go and that lead to the error. Man didn’t take a blow to the noggin and then lose his spiritual way. No. He lost his way because of his moral intransigence, his hatred of God’s authority and desire that God not be God. Sinners, despite the ruin it causes, want to personally replace God and this, invariably, leads to a host of intellectual positions that are irrational. That’s the root of it. We have a moral problem that impacted our intellect and there’s no way to fix the latter without addressing the former. This is why the Christian faith is the only rational philosophy in the world. All other systems of thought build upon a foundation that denies the true God and, therefore, must, as a consequence, build upon false premises.

In this way, the book of Proverbs isn’t a collection of pithy sayings through which we can seek practical advice on how to solve our problems. To think in such a way is understandable but, ultimately, unbiblical. It does, in fact, solve our problems but not in the way we think it will. In Romans 12, we’re called to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God after we learn what the gospel means. And we’re told not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. In this way, Romans 12 and Psalm 1 are parallel chapters as they describe the imperative through which Christian living commences, is centered upon and directed toward – the development of the true mind, the rational mind, the mind of wisdom…the Christian mind. And the Christian mind knows that man doesn’t need help for his mistakes. He needs salvation from his sin. He doesn’t need good advice, he needs the good news of Christ dying for sinners such as himself and then he needs to turn back – repent – from the old way of thinking and set his mind on the things of God in faith and gratitude.

This is why the theme of Proverbs isn’t wisdom or a happy life. The theme of Proverbs is that the fear of the Lord – that is, knowing He’s God and we’re not – and that He’s truly awesome, good, beautiful, sovereign, loving, and just – is the beginning and preeminent part of the good life. That’s the motif of Proverbs. It offers wisdom on the only terms wisdom can be had, which is the setting of the mind on the Lord. To do otherwise in any capacity whatsoever is to set the mind on lies and error and this is antithetical to true wisdom.

This is the thing to know about Proverbs before you get started. We live today in, perhaps, the most anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual age the west has ever known. The soil we have grown up in is decidedly pagan and secular, not Christian. I’m amazed when I hear professing Christians say that the Bible has contradictions in it or that it can’t be taken literally. This is the spirit of the age – irrationality. What they miss when they say such things is that contradictions can’t exist. To arrive at something that’s a contradiction is to arrive at either a flaw in one’s thinking or at something that can’t be true. Thus, to say that the Bible has contradictions is to say either that your thinking is flawed or that the Bible is lying. Either admission from a professing Christian – a supposed lover of Christ – is appalling. To openly state and believe that your Lord and Savior, the One who died for your sins, and saved you from the wrath you deserve, is sometimes not telling the whole truth – or able to apprehend it – is a curious bit of business. The thing is, though, when people say the Bible has errors and contradictions, they clearly aren’t saying that their mind is flawed. No. They’re saying that the error is with God.

To say such a thing is the result of a mind conformed to a system of thinking that’s ungodly. What is that exactly? Simple: it’s the mindset (philosophy) of life that holds that we don’t need to know what’s at the bottom of things or to where everything is going. It’s this that the writers of Proverbs dismiss out of hand – right out of the gate. To not know where everything came from and to what end things are going is to cast one’s reasoning to the wind. Only if God is both the source and end, both the alpha and omega, of existence, can we truly reason about anything at all. Any other premise is no premise at all. Non-Christian epistemologies demand a grand-exemption on this point. They never want to discuss the where from or what for and if you bring it up they will get, at least in my experience, rather testy. This really shouldn’t surprise us, though, because the non-believer is without excuse. He isn’t devoid of information about God so that he can claim there wasn’t enough evidence. Rather, he’s actively suppressing the obvious evidence all around him that’s in nature and in his own conscience.

For the same reason a thief doesn’t want to discuss his whereabouts last night with police investigators, the sinner doesn’t want to talk about ultimate things. His guilt will be easily seen. The foolishness of his flimsy intellectual positions will be on display.

In this way, we see that wondrous love and care our Lord has for his children. We aren’t saved from our sin by some act long ago and then left to our devices here on earth until that day of our death. Certainly not. God’s will is for us, after we are redeemed, to be conformed to the image of his Son. The modern Christian lurches along in America, seeking God’s will as if through divination or horoscopes when, in fact, it’s right here for us. God’s will is our sanctification. He states this plainly for us in Thessalonians as well as in Romans 8 and 12 and Psalm 1. God didn’t redeem us in order that we might fall back into the spirit of slavery and fear. He brought us up out of all that. The thing is, we get the honor and privilege of focusing our minds now that we have the new Spirit of life. We are rescued from the futility of our minds and all that dead philosophy that doesn’t have an answer for, nor want to think about, where life came from and to what end it travels.

So, now that we have this great salvation, we are to live in full focus – setting our minds on the things of Spirit, renewing our minds through God’s holy and life giving Word. To take this task lightly – and it is a glorious task – is to spit in the face of the One who saved us because he has clearly called us to lives of holy discipline in the study and application of Scripture. And it is to reject the very thing we desperately need and, indeed, we’re saved for – Godly living.

And because God is self-consistent, what he wants for us in our every day walk is wisdom. You see, once we have this right, we can ascertain both the big picture of our salvation/sanctification and our smaller picture of daily life and how it’s all supposed to be integrated. The book of Proverbs gives us this glorious integration as wisdom puts on every day clothes and goes to work with us, eats breakfast with the family, ponders business decisions, enjoys friendships and leisure. It also warns us against the snares of the enemy. It warns us against going back to the old mind – the one set on ourselves and thinking of life without God as our final, central and authoritative reference point. It warns us against the wiles of the adulterous woman, drunkenness, laziness, love of money, false friends, bad business decisions, poor parenting, and so on.