When most people think of wisdom, they will
either imagine someone with incredible academic skill (and language that only
professors can understand) or street smarts (usually a fast talker with the
ability to sell sand to Bushmen, perhaps a Katondo street salesman). Alternatively they may think of a man with a
long grey beard sitting on a hill side gazing at a waterfall in deep thought.
But the real picture of wisdom is very different. Most importantly, real wisdom
is available to all of us.
Wisdom is about skilful living. More
accurately, wisdom would be understanding life and skilful living would be
called “prudence” (i.e. timely application of principles), but they fall in the
same “family” of words. Wisdom is timeless, that is why it can be passed on
from generation to generation. Let us also remember that human nature does not
change, even if technology does. That means that, in principle, wisdom has
value across the generations, no matter the context it will be applied in.
David Atkinson, writing about the book of Proverbs, tells us:
despite the centuries which
separate us from the authors of these sayings, the unchanging continuities of
human existence remain: making friends, coping with sexuality, handling money,
responding to poverty, making a living,
learning through loss, muddling through difficulties, facing death, and so on.
These are the constant human themes, and Proverbs addresses them all. Wisdom is
about helping people to cope; about seeing things in a fresh way which gives
resources for living… it puts a mirror up to our behaviour and says, ‘Are you
like this? Is there a better way to live?’
This presupposes, as I have already said,
that there is a common thread connecting us, a shared human nature. This
nature, both physical and moral, can be called an order or law of nature.
Atkinson goes on to say:
We know deep inside us, what moral
obligation means, and that it confronts us from without. Moral obligation is
not simply something we make up for ourselves. We know that recoiling in horror
against genocide in Rwanda or ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia is not a matter of
personal taste and preference for those who do not like that sort of thing.
There is an objective moral order which confronts us.
This is now more an African and Asian
perspective than it is Western. Post modernism has swept through the first world
and with it the idea that each person can choose their own right and wrong,
their own wisdom. Now the voices protest about anyone insisting on moral
standards at all. Hopefully, the tide is turning. Atkinson further explains:
in recent decades there have been
moral philosophers who have argued that morality, if it means anything at all,
is essentially private and personal. That usually means subjective and
relative. More recently, however, there has been a recovery of the fact that
moral obligation has an objective dimension (which ordinary common sense tells
most of us anyhow).
Once he has made a case for objective morals which apply to all human
beings, he focuses on the personal, omniscient source of these standards.
“Christian believers identify that source of moral value with God.”
The search for wisdom only makes sense if there is a standard which
applies to all people of all times. That standard only makes sense if there is a
guarantee that the system will continue to work, to bring a satisfying
foundation for our true identity, the road to a fulfilling purpose and that
life can have meaning even in the midst of meaningless trouble and apparently
senseless times and chance.
For Atkinson, as for those who share his faith, there can only be
one conclusion:
The God whom
Jesus Christ reveals is the Creator whose ordering wisdom lies behind
everything that exists, whose moral character gives meaning to our awareness of
right and wrong, and whose Holy Spirit infuses us with life, light, love and
creativity.
We cannot begin
a search for wisdom without accepting that there is a standard of right and
wrong that is bigger than all of us. If we fail to do this, then there is not
only no point to the hunger and longing, but there is also no logic is any of
us ever again saying “It’s not fair”. But somehow even the most confident
agnostic will not say “This is inconvenient” or “this is illogical” but “It’s
not fair, it’s not right” when they are wronged (however they may interpret
wrong in the post-modernist philosophy). Learning wisdom begins in seeing right
and wrong. It’s that simple. But this is only the beginning of the journey,
which leads us to the source, and all that is in store for those who hunger and
thirst for more.
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