Articles
How to Get Wisdom
“The beginning of wisdom is: Acquire wisdom;
And with all your acquiring, get understanding.
Prize her, and she will exalt you;
She will honor you if you embrace her.
She will place on your head a garland of grace;
She will present you with a crown of beauty.” (Proverbs 4:7-9)
How does one start to become wise? By acquiring wisdom! But what an embarrassingly simple instruction this is! On the surface, it might even appear to be an unhelpful tautology. It is like a man who sets out to build a car, and upon consulting the instruction manual, the only step listed is “Build a car.” Is the first step to getting wisdom really, “Get wisdom”? What are we supposed to learn from this?
Wisdom is sometimes popularly defined as “applying knowledge” (as opposed to simply knowing stuff). However, this is not really a precise enough definition for the way the Bible speaks about wisdom. Solomon, for instance, is described as one of the wisest people in the world (1 Kgs 4:29-34), and yet a reading of 1 Kings makes it clear that Solomon ultimately failed to apply his wisdom in some rather abysmal ways (e.g. 1 Kgs 11:1-8). Wisdom is ultimately as much about one’s thoughts as it is about one’s actions. It is about the ability to reason rationally. It is involved in the administration of justice (1 Kgs 3:28), in the work of skilled craftsmen (1 Kgs 7:14), the ability to appoint qualified leaders (Ezra 7:25), and in God’s creation of the world (Psa 104:24). Rather than making foolish decisions, we wish to possess wisdom to make good decisions.
But wisdom is also a paradox. One must first have it in order to accumulate it. It is highly relevant to quote Jesus here: “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him” (Matt 13:12; cf. Mark 4:25; Luke 8:18). One cannot become wise without first becoming wise. The reason for this is because the very decision to acquire wisdom itself requires a little bit of wisdom to make. If one decides to be a reasonable person, that itself is a reasonable decision. And if one decides not to be a reasonable person, that decision itself is inherently unreasonable.
The wise man is the one who sees his own need for wisdom, and even his own deficiency in it. There is no such thing as a genuinely wise man who goes around telling people how wise he is. Proverbs repeatedly warns about the danger of being wise in one’s own eyes (Prov 3:7; 12:15; 26:5, 12, 16; 28:11). If one feels compelled to remind everyone about how advanced their wisdom and experience are, it becomes palpably evident that what experience they have has not actually given them wisdom. The one who says, “I am wise” is, by definition, a fool (Prov 12:15). But the wise man is the one who is willing to listen to others. He need not agree with everyone he listens to, or heartily affirm every point his ears hear. But his ability to at least listen to the opinions and advice of others is something that again contributes to his acquisition of wisdom. It takes wisdom to even look for opportunities for wisdom in this way!
More important than that is the inextricable way that acquiring wisdom is tied to fear of the Lord. Proverbs 4:7 said that the beginning of wisdom was “Acquire wisdom.” But three other times in Scripture, the affirmation is made that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psa 111:10; Prov 1:7; 9:10). In fact, these are really two ways of talking about the same idea. One cannot even begin to acquire wisdom unless one has a fear for the God who made the worlds with wisdom. Furthermore, if one has no fear of God, one will never have any truly reasonable foundation on which to build one’s beliefs. Many a man has tried in the endless espousing of philosophy to build a worldview without the fear of the LORD. But the ideas they put their trust in are like houses built on the sand of the sea, subject to collapse when subjected to the simple “so what?” But if one does have a fear of the LORD, then one has already overcome the biggest hurdle to the acquisition of wisdom. Having fear of God ultimately means trusting not in one’s own experiences or ideas, but rather in the experiences and ideas revealed in Scripture.
Get wisdom. Fear God. In doing these things, you will start yourself on the path to wisdom, and that path will be a source of unending growth and bounty for you as you acquire it.
