The Wisdom Of The World
“Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”
— 1 Corinthians 1:20
Our world prides itself on nothing more than its vaunted wisdom. Having confused sophistication for wisdom and knowledge with understanding, our world looks down on those who believe in God and trust in His Word. Yet the Bible says that God has made the wisdom of this world foolishness. Most, however, do not really believe that. Sadder still, even Christians are impressed and intimidated by the world’s apparent wisdom.
But let’s take a quick look at what the world’s wisdom has accomplished through the years. Wisdom supposedly reached a pinnacle in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle brought to light vast stores of knowledge that the world had not hitherto known. Yet their writings have done little to regenerate humankind and alleviate humanity’s problems. More recently (several hundred years ago), we ushered in the Age of Reason, supposedly a golden age of wisdom. But in truth, these were some of the bloodiest years France has ever seen. The guillotine, like some huge monster, consumed its victims until the streets of Paris ran with blood, and that Age of Reason became a very unreasonable, frightening, and terrible time. Even in this modern age, we haven’t learned our lessons. We’ve accumulated great stores of knowledge, so much that we cannot even measure it. Yet have we really arrived at wisdom? The twentieth century has been history’s bloodiest era.
Do we really want to rely on the world’s “wisdom” if it has resulted in all this bloodshed? Let’s bank our lives on the wisdom of God, wisdom that resulted in a different type of bloodshed—the blood shed by Jesus as He hung on the cross to die for you and me. God’s wisdom can do more to ennoble human life and alleviate the pain of human existence than anything conceived by the wisdom of this world.
“Wisdom is the something that enables
us to use knowledge rightly.”
Paul Lee Tan
