Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do! And whatever else you do, develop good judgment. (Proverbs 4:7)Wikipedia blacked out the other day in protest of proposed internet legislation. The blackout was only for a day, but it is amazing how we have come to depend on it and the internet in general for knowledge.
With the internet and the availability of knowledge at our fingertips, we know a lot. We can find out almost anything from the internet. The chords to a favorite song, the population of Madagascar in 1897, the different breeds of horses, how to put a pulley belt on a GE dryer, just about everything.
We are awash in knowledge. We know more raw knowledge than at any other time in human history.
But as a culture, we are dumb as a rock. There is no discernment, no common sense, no wisdom.
The writer of Proverbs said that wisdom was the best thing you should get, so get wisdom. It sounds so simple.
But how do you get wisdom? How do you plug into the circuit that somehow transmits wisdom to your life.
Someone once said that if you teach children knowledge without teaching them about God, you are making time bombs. Without the knowledge of God to balance out the knowledge of everything else, there is no perspective. Everything becomes equal.
That is the thing that is bad about the internet: everything is equal. Trivia is as important to a computer as deep wisdom is. And when we do not have access to wisdom, we lose perspective. We lost he ability to tell what is important and what isn’t. our heads become full of knowledge, all of which competes for our attention.
Some of what age brings should be that perspective, the knowledge of how things fit in to life. That knowledge of perspective is wisdom. It is the realization that some things are more important than others, and that some things are to be avoided at all costs.
We lost that in an information age. We become so swamped with information that we lost the perspective. And when we do, we lose wisdom.
In Louis L’Amour books, it always portrays cowboys and men who roamed as deep thinkers. They didn’t know a lot, but hours spent on the back of a horse made them think a lot about what little they knew. So if the read a book, they thought a lot about that book. They didn’t have access to many, so the few they had access to became important to them.
We have access to so much that books become commonplace. And with the advent of Kindle and electronic books, we have access to even more. One person can carry around in his pocket more books that whole states had in their possession one hundred years ago.
And most of them are drivel. Wisdom tells us what is drivel and what isn’t. but that knowledge can only come when we have the perspective of the One who is eternal.
He is all that is truly important.
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