BIBLICAL WISDOM

Many people think that what's written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven -- getting right with God, saving their eternal souls.  It does have to do with that, of course, but not mostly.  It is equally concerned with living on this earth -- living well, living in robust sanity.  In our Scriptures, heaven is not the primary concern, to which earth is a tag-along afterthought.  "On earth as it is in heaven" is Jesus' prayer.

"Wisdom" is the biblical term for this on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven everyday living.  Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.  It has virtually nothing to do with information as such, with knowledge as such.  A college degree is no certification of wisdom -- nor is it primarily concerned with keeping us out of moral mud puddles, although it does have a profound moral effect upon us.

Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work and exercising leadership, using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace.  Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do.  In matters of everyday practicality, nothing, absolutely nothing, takes precedence over God.

-- Eugene Peterson in “The Message”


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