THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

I drove past a school the other day and noticed a sign which read, “Wisdom begins with Wonder”.  Well in a world chock full of knowledge, we could certainly use a little wisdom.  However, the Bible tells us that the ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, not ‘wonder’.  Of course, scripture is too controversial to place on school sign, so they had to come up with something.

An article I just read in my local paper tells us of a boy who dumped his father’s dead body along the side of the road seven years ago, telling no one his father had passed, so he could continue to collect his social security checks.  Seven years later, and neighbors and the boy’s mother suddenly became curious as to why they hadn’t seen the father.  They decided to alert police that something might be wrong.  Ya think?

I can't help but feel sympathetic towards the boy, simply because he was likely never taught (‘trained up the way he should go’) to get out and make his own way in the world. They said he had become a hermit. These days, children often end up taking care of parents with any number of disabilities, who themselves are incapable of coping in this world.  How can we expect parents to train someone to do something they never did themselves? The medical community continuously provides them with names for their dys-ability’s and nonchalantly prescribes drugs to help them cope; but unfortunately, there is no cure for dysfunction.  Well, there is, but that cure is Christ and society doesn’t acknowledge the efficacy of His rules.

I have no idea what that fellow’s home life was like, but what I do know with certainty is that it was dysfunctional.  Today, society is unable to define exactly what dysfunction is, much less teach students to recognize it in their own homes.   All lifestyles are equally valid in today’s world, and everyone writes their own rules.   Things roll along pretty smoothly until a corpse gets dumped along the side of the road, or a recluse that was never ‘trained up’ shoots up an elementary school, or a pedophile is hired on as teacher, or God forbid, a priest.  The truth hurts, but the truth is if we’re all writing our own rules, the psycho’s are as entitled to their rules as we are to our own. 

Education programs are designed to give kids information they already know –birth control methods and putting condoms on bananas, some of our ‘institutes of higher learning’ are even teaching them how to pleasure one another during homosexual  sex (how will they ever function in life without that knowledge?) – yet no one bothers to teach them that having five children with four different mothers and providing no support whatsoever is a problem that not only affects them, the mothers, and the five children -- but society as a whole!  Oh no, we can’t play judge and jury, but heaven help us, students  cannot graduate without knowing where the local Planned Parenthood is so they can nip at least one of those children in the bud.

Children are taught the trinity:  abortion is empowering women, a failure to support same sex marriage is bigotry and global warming denial is an abomination.  Meanwhile, our society grows sicker and more depressed than ever.  If the first pill doesn’t work, we go to the doctor and add another to our repertoire, while our children watch and learn that that is how you cope with life --  a new pill, a new partner, and its all good.

The fact is ’the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord’. He teaches us to deal with this life He has given us and who better to do so?  But I don’t expect our society to acknowledge that fact anytime soon. Self help books will continue to fly off the shelves and our lawmakers will continue to churn out volumes of man-made law in an attempt to keep society in line and make the masses play nice.  The actual effect is that it just makes us all become lawbreakers.  And that’s rather fitting, because God says we are all lawbreakers – each and everyone.  But it only took Him two volumes to show us that – the Old and the New Testament. Both volumes, written by forty different authors, point to His Son as our ‘get out of jail free’ card.  But it takes the wisdom we are sorely lacking to accept such a simple truth.