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?