AP

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Proverbs 9:10

How important it is that we have the RIGHT worldview when we interpret the events that influence our lives and our thinking!  At present, we are engrossed in a culture that has a WRONG worldview – that has a view of the world that has NO PLACE for the GOD of CREATION.  This God is so gracious that sent his beloved, one-and-only Son into the mess we have got ourselves into in order to DIE for all our sin, to REDEEM us. It was WE who brought/bring God’s perfect world to ruin, and yet Jesus came also to RENEW the whole creation to the perfect condition in which it was originally created!

In Proverbs 8:22-31 Solomon had carefully outlined how the LORD’s WISDOM is the basis on which HE created everything, and by which HE SUSTAINS everything.  Although the wise King of Israel didn’t realise it himself, he was really pointing us to the Lord Jesus Christ concerning whom, a thousand years later, the Apostle John would write, “In the beginning was the Word (Greek: ’Logos’ – ‘word/wisdom’), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” (John 1:1-4)!

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Solomon is declaring that we can’t even get past first base in terms of wisdom and knowledge unless we first acknowledge WHO God IS as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, and as the SAVIOUR of all who put their trust in him.  Any attempt to be ‘wise’ with a worldview different from this is futile and meaningless.  Today we hear highly qualified scientists grappling with what exactly happened in the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang that amazingly produced our Universe without God’s input, and Solomon is saying they are wasting their time!  Why?  Because the very concept of Wisdom belongs to the LORD himself: he produced Wisdom before he even brought anything else into being.  From all eternity the LORD ‘gave birth’ to Wisdom; Wisdom was the ‘craftsman at his side’ when he formed, out of nothing, the oceans, the mountains, the seas, the heavens, the clouds (8:22-31).

We are reminded again of the point the psalmist made in Psalm 119:27 – “Let me [first] understand the teaching of your precepts; THEN I will meditate on your wonders.”  If we don’t get the order right we are getting nowhere.  Let us first acknowledge what God clearly reveals in his written Word and THEN let us go for all our worth and with all the skill God has given us to study the Universe of which we are a part and meditate on all its wonders, God’s wonders.

It will be a sad day when ‘scientists’, and people generally, who have devoted their whole lives to a framework of enquiry which refuses to acknowledge the God of the Bible, appear before him, only to find they had missed first base!  Moreover, Solomon tells us that a worldview that REJECTS God’s wisdom is one that listens to, and embraces, ‘Madam Folly’ concerning whom he writes: “The woman Folly is loud; she is undisciplined and without knowledge.  She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way.  ‘Let all who are simple come in here!’ she says to those who lack judgment.  ‘Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!’  But little do they know that the DEAD are there, that her guests are in the depths of the GRAVE.” (Proverbs 9:13-18).