Wisdom’s Pain

Solomon, the world’s wisest person, admits to the pain of wisdom.( “Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.” Ecclesiastes 1:18 NAS95)  I don’t believe he is asking for sympathy, not that we would be willing to offer it. That would be a bit like feeling sorry for the rich guy because of the weight of responsibility that comes with great riches. We rarely say, “better to be a fool,” or, “better to be poor.”

But the weight of wisdom is indeed heavy. Deep thinkers wrestle with deep problems, and many of those problems are not exclusively abstract. They can be very personal. Wrestling with dilemmas can lead the soul on a very dark path, and can, in fact, be a wrestling not only with a dilemma, but with the devil himself.

Consider the task of a wise person who is charged with helping a fool. Of course, it has to be this way, for a fool will never consider how to help a wise person. The thought never crosses his foolish mind. But how to help a fool, who will not listen to correction, who rarely follows advice, and who repeats his mistakes over and over - how indeed? And so the wise man, with all of his wisdom, comes to the end of his knowledge and watches as the fool sinks into the consequences of his actions, knowing the whole of the situation, seeing how it could have been different, but can do nothing about it.

That rather practical application of “the pain of wisdom” can be followed by other questions that may be further removed from daily life. But those who wrestle with the problem of evil involve themselves, not only in mental struggle, but also spiritual. Some people struggle with this not at all. They say something penetrating, like “It is what it is,” and then go on as though they just solved something. But to live in a world where God is pure good, and yet to know that He tolerates, for a time, pure evil - how do we reconcile these things? And what does it mean to love this God and to submit to Him, and to glory in Him, and, to defend Him against human accusers and recommend Him to unbelievers?

Or consider the pursuit of seeking to honor God as God, and thus to affirm His absolute sovereignty, recognizing that the One, true God can be nothing less, and then to consider that humans, as creatures of God, created as moral agents, are responsible for our own actions, though all that we are and do falls within the scope of the divine drama, and to be sure that we are more resolute about honoring the glory of God than the glory of man, how does one do this without provoking the ire of those who prefer not to wrestle?

No Mere Human Institution

The company of people who find in Jesus their only hope of salvation is no mere human institution. It is not like WalMart. It is not like the Rotary Club. It is something unique in this world, precisely because it is not merely or primarily a human institution.

There are proven methods for running human institutions. Production; marketing and sales of products; those things have been studied and imitated over and over. But Jesus’ church does not operate primarily by what it produces or how it markets itself. The church cannot properly function without a conscious and practiced reliance on God’s help and enablement - to seek those primary and necessary things that only God can do - to penetrate cold and hard hearts; to change lives from the inside out.

Charles Finney led revivals during what is now called “The Second Great Awakening” during the first half of the 1800’s. He had drunk deeply of the American “can-do” spirit, and heartily embraced methods by which he could guarantee ‘spiritual’ results. He was convinced that if he did his thing, the Holy Spirit would then show up. I do not doubt his sincerity. But historical surveys conducted in the wake of his mass revivals show little remaining fruit due to the fact, in my view, that he conducted “revival” as though it were a “mere human institution.” And the current church culture seems to be following hard in the steps of Charles Finney.  

We have embraced the notion of “if we build it, they will come.” Programs and staff have become more important than prayer and witness. The hard edges of truth-telling have been shaved off by a desire to be attractive and non-offensive. In striving to be an asset to the community, we unwittingly become a liability to the Kingdom.

What practice is there that more clearly indicates a deep and true dependence upon God than any other? Where is the flag to which we look to see from which direction the wind is blowing, whether the power of the Spirit, directing our humble, human labors; or our own blowings, elevating our pride and pretensions, and expecting that God will be pleased to assist. I believe that the one practice more clear than any other is prayer, both of individual believers daily seeking the Lord’s direction and help; and the prayers of Christians together who dare not rush ahead and make God’s help an afterthought.