”How wonderful to be wise, to analyze and interpret things. Wisdom lights up a person’s face, softening its harshness.“
Ecclesiastes 8:1 NLT
Even and especially in the dark times that try one’s soul, wisdom is a blessing. We’re often too fickle and too easily perturbed. Our circumstances blow us about with alarming ease and we sleep when we ought to be praying. All this is true and yet we cry out, “Abba, Father…” with all the saints because this is what saints do. Those of us who are made righteous by faith will live by and in that faith. It’s wonderful to be wise in that wisdom gives one the key to interpreting all things – not as “brute” facts, but as facts in accordance to the plan of God.
Romans 12:2 tells us to achieve the renewed mind – that is, the mind of Christ – as opposed to the fallen/worldly mind. The new mind thinks according to the principles of Scripture. It tests everything to see what the principles of the Lord say to the particulars of daily life. The principle of Adam is the old perspective of looking at life through the humanistic lens…through the bits and pieces method. The principle of Christ is to see all things in faith.
”The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.“
Proverbs 1:7 ESV
The Adamic mind is foolish in that it insists on seeing life’s affairs according to its own standards. It rejects humility and logic and insists on looking at life from the humanistic perspective, leaning and insisting on its own understanding rather than God’s. This is the source of one’s “harness of expression” – which is a way in which the Bible speaks of the scourge of bitterness.
There’s a logic to the whole thing – that is, the progression from insisting on one’s own way and the development of bitterness. The harsh expression is what happens as a man or woman realizes the hard way that God is not mocked. Consequences close in. Reality (God’s will) closes around them .
I’ve seen this happen to people as they’ve aged. Once prideful and stubborn, but stripped by time of their youth, they begin to realize that they simply can’t get their way. Some loss or another, some slight, or frustration, begins to haunt them as they realize that time isn’t on their side. There will be no ultimate victory for the man or woman of the flesh. Never. Youth is vanity and vexation because it has this false hope; age (Ecclesiastes 12) brings the delusion down. In light of this, instead of joy in the hope of Christ, their countenance is darkened. Youth fades and brings down with it false hope. All that’s left is the silence of the encroaching day of Judgment.
Beneath all the fine attire of unbelief, all the pomp and ceremony, all the apparent wealth, even the smiles, is great and resounding terror. While young, that terror rages and plots and dreams cruel dreams. As they age and their powers wane, when they can no longer manipulate and God pulls back the blessings of health, youth, and time, they’re left with only that harshness of expression. At the end of our days, the rage and vanity that is self-worship retreats into the hollowness that is bitterness.
It’s this sword of self-worship that the man or woman in Christ lays down as he/she falls to their knees before Him. It’s the sweet surrender. In the day of grace as is our day still today, repentance is the embrace of life and forgiveness. It’s wisdom to know Christ and His word! Folly is the presumption that we live in any other world than His! This is exactly why the visage of the wise reflects hope but the face of the unrepentant settles into an eternal scowl where it will gnash its teeth forever unless it comes to Him now for mercy.
In Christ we can analyze and interpret all the details of our lives in Him, which means, ultimately, in hope. His promises subsume the mysteries of our days. A man or woman at their end, on the floor, crying in pain, seeing only blackness and despair, is nevertheless in Him and He whispers, “I am here, child…I will deliver you…I will explain all, wipe away every tear, and make all things new!” There is indeed no condemnation and wisdom tells us this.
The sinner isn’t so, but is like chaff that the wind drives away. Pain and frustration pile up in the fool, but joy and hope in the heart of the wise. Christ is all the difference. The hope of the glory of God is how the great saints sang songs of joy even as Nero executed them. Wisdom knows that God wins and that we win in Him. Death. Disease. Divorce. Failure. That things may seem so utterly bleak right now is because your deliverance will shine brighter than you can possibly fathom right now. Wisdom waits on Him. Wisdom hopes in Him, not in chance or fate, or anything else, but in Him. In Christ is all the wisdom of the world. And someday we’ll see Him face to face and there’ll be no more fear or sorrow or death.
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