The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2, “The Worldview of Wisdom” 

in 

The most sublime insight reached in Proverbs is that God Himself is the Source for this practical wisdom. It is not merely something He recommends in order to help people get along better in this world. It is His own possession as well. Wisdom speaks again:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,

before His works of old.

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,

before the earth ever was …

When He prepared the heavens, I was there …

When He appointed the foundations of the earth,

Then I was by Him as a master craftsman,

And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him,

Rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth,

And my delight was with the sons of men.

There are two clear worldview implications in this passage. The first is that God built the world by wisdom, and therefore wisdom is built into the fabric of the world. “Wisdom” is shorthand for the way things really are. Wisdom is about reality, about the way things work, and therefore about the way to live a happy and successful life.

The second worldview implication is that wisdom is one, even as God is one. In other words, spiritual wisdom, moral wisdom, philosophical wisdom, and practical wisdom are all the same. Unlike the worldview of our own contemporary culture that tends toward fragmentation, the worldview of wisdom is unifying. There is not one kind of wisdom for one field of endeavor and another kind for another field that can and will lead to opposite and contradictory conclusions. There is not a lower story of facts that contradicts an upper story of meaning. There is no dichotomy between being a good person and living the good life. It may not always be easy to grasp the connections, however, and part of the purpose of Proverbs is to illuminate those connections.

Copyright © 2015 by Garry D. Nation.  All rights reserved.

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