Episode Details

Prayer

Lord, as we open your word now, may you renew our minds and exalt and glorify yourself through our lives. Lord, may you better enable us to choose the good and to refuse the evil, to turn from evil and to turn unto you. Lord, give us wisdom through this study, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Reading

Genesis 2:16-17.

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, (17) but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Meditation

When I say “wisdom”, what comes to your mind? What do you actually think wisdom might be? There are a number of ways we could try and explain this, but one of the most basic things about wisdom is that it involves taking action. Wisdom is not just discerning between good and evil, it is choosing the good and refusing the evil. The two trees in the garden represented this choice, and presented two courses of action to Adam and Eve. God called Adam to choose the good, to choose to eat of the tree of life, and to refuse the evil. In other words, to refuse to disobey God.

As Adam and Eve learned to make that decision, they would be growing in the faculty of wisdom. This principle of wisdom is one that endures in creation at all times. To live in God’s world, we must submit to God’s rule. We must choose to follow the path of life. To reject that rule is to invite death. To experience God’s blessing, Adam and Eve had to follow God’s design and do things God’s way. Put differently, they had to live by his blueprint. A fish cannot survive out of water, a bird cannot survive under water, a plant cannot survive without water, and people cannot survive without wisdom. Without choosing life by submitting to God’s wise design in creation, as revealed in his holy law, we bring down the consequence of death upon ourselves. “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death” (Prov 13:14).

In Proverbs 3, Solomon said that God founded the world on wisdom. God’s wisdom is ingrained into the very DNA of creation. For us then to live in his creation, we need to abide in that wisdom. If life was a river, the fish must stay in the river, and we’re the fish. Maybe I can put it this way: the river is wisdom, and we need to swim in it to live. If the fish jumps out of that river, he starts gasping and can’t breathe. So it is with us and wisdom. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was designed to begin to teach this lesson – to impart this wisdom to Adam and Eve. The same lesson remains true for us today. Wisdom and obedience is a condition of life.

Be ye doers of the word…

The application is clear: we must live in wisdom, choose the good and refuse the evil. The question is: how can we actually do that? There are a few lines of application we might draw out here.

First: be committed to the task of getting wisdom. This is the first lesson of the Book of Proverbs. “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Prov 4:7). Wisdom requires knowledge and insight into which decision is right and which is wrong. Having that insight comes through the prayerful, patient labour of getting wisdom from God’s word. Getting wisdom is a non-negotiable, it’s not an added extra to the Christian life. Wisdom is a condition of life.

There is a destructive error roaming about in the church today. I’m going to call it the “Wisdom is optional” error. It’s the idea that God’s laws and his wisdom are separate things. As though wisdom is an optional upgrade reserved for super-mature Christians only. As though wisdom is about choosing the better of two good options, or finding the most ideal decision in a situation. From a biblical perspective, wisdom is not fundamentally about