Where Can Wisdom Be Found?What it is, who has it, and why knowing more is not enough

Smart is not wise

Most of us know two kinds of people. One is the cleverest person we know. The other is the person we would go to if our marriage were falling apart, or our son had stopped speaking to us, or the doctor had just given us bad news. They are seldom the same person. We know without being told that clever and wise are not the same thing.

A surgeon can repair a heart and be unable to keep his own family together, an economist can explain inflation and be deep in debt, and a man can speak five languages and have nothing kind to say in any of them. None of them is short of knowledge. What they are short of has another name.

The Bible treats this as the most valuable thing a person can get. One whole book, Proverbs, was written to teach it, and it tells the reader to put it ahead of everything else he is working for: “The beginning of wisdom is: Acquire wisdom; and with all your acquiring, get understanding” (Proverbs 4:7).

¹³How blessed is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. ¹⁴For her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain better than fine gold. ¹⁵She is more precious than jewels; and nothing you desire compares with her.

Proverbs 3:13-15 · NASB95

Everything else you have depends on it. Money, health, talent, education, and opportunity are only as good as the judgment of the person holding them, and a fool can waste all five. Until you know how to live, nothing you own is safe in your hands.

Skill in living

The New Testament was written in Greek, and its word for wisdom is sophia. To the Greeks, sophia belonged to the mind. The wise man was the one who could grasp an idea, argue for it, and build a theory out of it. Whether it changed the way he lived was another matter. That is still what most people mean by the word: wisdom is for thinkers.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and its word is chokmah. It means skill. The same word is used for the craftsmen who built the tabernacle: God says of Bezalel, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:3). A man with chokmah in his hands can take a lump of gold and make something beautiful out of it. A man with chokmah in his life does the same with his days.

So when the Bible speaks of wisdom, it means God’s truth known and then put into practice. Moses said so to Israel before they entered the land. He had taught them God’s commands, and he added, “So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples” (Deuteronomy 4:6). The wisdom was in the doing.

Proverbs often sets three words side by side: knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. They overlap, but they are not the same, and a person can have a great deal of the first with very little of the last.

Where would you dig?

The book of Job has a chapter about mining. It describes men cutting shafts into rock far from any town, hanging on ropes below the surface, digging under the roots of mountains, and damming underground streams, all to bring up silver, gold, iron, and sapphires.

⁹He puts his hand on the flint; he overturns the mountains at the base. ¹⁰He hews out channels through the rocks, and his eye sees anything precious. ¹¹He dams up the streams from flowing, and what is hidden he brings out to the light. ¹²But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?

Job 28:9-12 · NASB95

Human beings can find almost anything they decide to look for. So where do we look for wisdom? Below are six places people dig. Open each one and see what comes up.

Every one of those shafts brings up something worth having, and none of them brings up wisdom. Job says why: it was never in the ground.

¹³Man does not know its value, nor is it found in the land of the living. ¹⁴The deep says, ‘It is not in me’; and the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’

Job 28:13-14 · NASB95

The chapter does not stop there. When the mines, the markets, and the sea have all come up empty, it turns to the one place that is left.

Why it has to be given

The Bible gives the same answer from beginning to end: wisdom belongs to God, and He gives it. “For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Proverbs 2:6). “He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to men of understanding” (Daniel 2:21).

There is a reason it cannot be found anywhere else. God made the world by wisdom: “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19). Wisdom was there before the first mountain, so it is not one of the things inside the world, waiting to be dug up. It stands outside the world, with the One who made it. That is why James calls it the wisdom “from above” (James 3:17).

Paul gives a second reason, and we all know it from ordinary life. You cannot find out what another person is thinking by studying him from the outside. You know it only if he tells you. “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11). If that is true of your neighbor, it is far more true of God. No instrument reaches into His mind. Either He speaks, or we do not know.

He has spoken. “For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). The Spirit, who alone knows the mind of God, gave it in words, and those words are the Scriptures. The same Spirit lives in every believer and opens those words to him. This is why wisdom can only be received. It was never discovered by anyone. It was revealed.

Because wisdom belongs to a Person, it has a starting point, and the starting point is a relationship and not a piece of information: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10). To fear the Lord is not to hide in a corner. It is to take God as God: to trust Him, to bow to what He says, and to turn from what He hates. A person who has not come that far has not yet begun.

Two kinds, and they do not mix

If there is a wisdom from above, there is one from below, and James describes both in a few lines.

¹⁵This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic. ¹⁶For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. ¹⁷But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy.

James 3:15-17 · NASB95

Earthly means it never rises above the ground: it deals with this life and has nothing to say about the next. Natural means it comes from the human mind and feelings alone, with no help from the Spirit of God. Demonic is the hard word. James is not calling every teacher a devil. He is saying where the idea of wisdom without God came from. It was the serpent’s offer in the garden, the first ever made to the human race: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), and Eve saw “that the tree was desirable to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6).

The two do not blend, because each calls the other foolish. God did something no human wisdom would have designed: He saved people through a man put to death on a cross. To an educated Greek that was nonsense, and to many educated people it still is. Yet it does what no philosophy has ever done. It removes guilt, it changes the person who believes it, and it gives hope in the face of death.

The Bible also records an experiment. In Ecclesiastes King Solomon, with unlimited money, time, and intelligence, sets out to find what life means, using only what he can observe “under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). He tries learning, pleasure, building, wealth, and work, and gives the result of each. His summary of human wisdom at its best, with every advantage: “So I hated life… because everything is futility and striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:17).

The wise and the fool

The Bible divides the human race in several ways, and one of the plainest is this: the wise and the fool. In English the word fool is an insult. In Scripture it is a description, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). A fool, in the Bible’s sense, is a person who lives as if God were not there. He may be brilliant. He has left out the one fact that every other fact depends on.

By that definition every one of us starts out a fool. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” (Proverbs 22:15), and nobody has to teach a child to put himself first. Proverbs names three kinds of people who have not turned, and wisdom calls to all three: “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge?” (Proverbs 1:22).

The wise, in the Bible, are not the educated, the old, or the religious. They are the people who have come to God through Christ: “But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Wisdom comes with salvation, on the first day, as part of the gift. That is why Paul can tell new believers to walk “not as unwise men but as wise” (Ephesians 5:15). He is not asking them to become something else. He is telling them to live as what they now are.

He also reminds the church at Corinth who was sitting in it: “there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble” (1 Corinthians 1:26). God filled His church with ordinary people on purpose, “so that no man may boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:29). The simplest believer has what the greatest unbelieving scholar does not: he knows God.

Which comes first?

If wisdom comes only from God, and a person without God has none, how does anyone ever start? Does an unbeliever stay away from Christ because he lacks wisdom, or does he lack wisdom because he is away from Christ?

The Bible says both, and the two together make a closed circle.

Follow it around. A person who does not fear God has not begun to be wise. Without wisdom, the things of God look foolish to him: “a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Because they look foolish, he will not come to God. And because he will not come, he goes on without the fear of God. Paul adds that he is also being kept in the dark: “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Nobody thinks his way out of that circle. “The world through its wisdom did not come to know God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). The best minds of Greece did not reason their way to Him, and no one has since.

So the circle has to be broken from outside, and God breaks it. “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). He does it through a message, the gospel, and by His Spirit He opens a person’s eyes to it. The first thing that person does with open eyes is fear the Lord, and there wisdom begins.

Jesus said to whom it is given: “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants” (Matthew 11:25). He is not saying that a good mind keeps anyone out. Paul was a trained scholar and Luke was a physician. He is saying that nobody gets in by a good mind. The line runs between the proud and the humble. The proud man measures the gospel against what he already thinks and walks away. The humble man admits he cannot get there by himself, and asks. “When pride comes, then comes dishonor, but with the humble is wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2).

If you are reading this as someone who does not believe, there is no insult in any of it, and there is good news. The way in does not depend on how much you know, and God turns away no one who asks.

How to tell who has it

Anyone can claim to be wise, and most of us privately do. James does not accept the claim. He asks for evidence: “Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom” (James 3:13).

He names three things to look at. Good behavior is the general direction of a life, seen over time. Deeds are the particular acts that make it up. Gentleness is the spirit in which they are done, and the word means humility. The person who thinks he is wise is usually proud of it. The person who is wise is usually humble.

Then James lists the marks of the wisdom from above (James 3:17), and each one can be checked against your own life.

• Pure. Its motives are clean. It is not trying to win, to impress, or to get even.
• Peaceable. It makes peace and takes no pleasure in a fight.
• Gentle. It corrects when it must, with kindness, and it knows how to forgive.
• Reasonable. It is willing to yield, and it can be taught.
• Full of mercy and good fruits. It moves toward people who are suffering and does something for them.
• Unwavering. It does not take one side today and another tomorrow, or treat people according to their rank.
• Without hypocrisy. It is the same in private as in public.

Set that beside the other list: bitter jealousy, selfish ambition, arrogance, and lying against the truth (James 3:14). A person can hold three degrees and fit the second list. A person with no schooling at all can fit the first.

People who had it

Scripture shows wisdom in people more often than it defines it. Four of them make the point from four directions, and each time the people watching drew the same conclusion: this did not come from the man himself.

A prisoner, a king, a captive, and a man who waited on tables. In none of them does Scripture credit the man’s own mind. Each time it says where the wisdom came from: God.

One stands above all four. He was fully human, and as a boy in Nazareth He learned as boys do: “Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52). When He began to teach, His own town asked, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?” (Matthew 13:54). Seven hundred years earlier Isaiah had named Him “Wonderful Counselor” (Isaiah 9:6), and He said of Himself, with Israel’s wisest king in mind, “something greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42).

The man who wrote it

One of those portraits has a second half. Solomon received wisdom, and he also wrote it down. He spoke three thousand proverbs (1 Kings 4:32), and several hundred of them fill the book that carries that name. You have read some of them above. Now set them beside the record of his own life in 1 Kings.

It did not happen all at once. The same chapter that records his prayer for wisdom begins with a marriage alliance with Egypt, and it says he loved the LORD, “except he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places” (1 Kings 3:3). The law had told Israel’s kings long before what to avoid: “He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away” (Deuteronomy 17:17). It also required each king to write out his own copy of that law and read it all the days of his life (Deuteronomy 17:18-19). Solomon knew the rule and made an exception for himself, then another, and forty years of exceptions became his life. He described the process himself: “Dead flies make a perfumer’s oil stink, so a little foolishness is weightier than wisdom and honor” (Ecclesiastes 10:1).

So can wisdom be lost? God did not take back what He had given: late in life Solomon could still write the book of Ecclesiastes. What he lost was the use of it. He knew, and he did not do, and by the Bible’s own definition that made the wisest man on earth a fool. Wisdom is not a possession that stays safe on a shelf. It is kept by obeying it, and disobedience wears away the very judgment that would have warned you.

He reached the right conclusion in the end. After a whole book of everything he had tried, the last page of Ecclesiastes says, “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). That is where the book of Proverbs begins. He ended where he should have stayed.

How wisdom grows

All of this comes down to things a person can do. Wisdom is not a talent that some are born with and others lack. It is given, it grows, and it is kept, and the same steps serve all three.

1. 1

   Start where it starts

   “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). There is no way around the first step. Come to God on His terms, through His Son, admitting what you are and trusting what Christ has done. Everything below is for the person who has done that. Without it, these are only good habits.

2. 2

   Ask

   This is the simplest step, and the one most often skipped. James’s promise sets no condition on who may ask: God gives “to all generously and without reproach” (James 1:5). Without reproach means He does not scold you for having to ask again. Solomon was wise before he was wise: when he could have had anything, this is what he asked for. Ask before the decision and not after it, and ask expecting an answer (James 1:6).

3. 3

   Open the Book

   God answers that prayer mainly through what He has already said. “The testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple” (Psalm 19:7). Read it daily, and read all of it. Proverbs has thirty-one chapters, one for each day of the month, and a chapter takes five minutes. “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you” (Colossians 3:16): a guest visits, but what dwells in a house lives there.

4. 4

   Do the last thing He showed you

   Wisdom that is not obeyed does not stay. “A good understanding have all those who do His commandments” (Psalm 111:10). Jesus tied knowing to doing in the same way: “If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself” (John 7:17). If you are waiting for more light, ask first whether you have used the light you were given. This is how judgment is trained: the mature are those “who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

5. 5

   Sit under someone wiser

   “A wise man will hear and increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel” (Proverbs 1:5). Find people who have followed Christ longer than you have and whose lives show it, and spend time with them. Sit under teaching that explains the Bible and does not replace it.

6. 6

   Stay teachable

   The test of a wise person is what he does when he is corrected. “Reprove a wise man and he will love you. Give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser” (Proverbs 9:8-9). Solomon described the other kind in Ecclesiastes, and he may have been looking in a mirror: “A poor yet wise lad is better than an old and foolish king who no longer knows how to receive instruction” (Ecclesiastes 4:13). The day you can no longer be told anything is the day you begin to lose what you have.

7. 7

   Guard what you have

   “Do not forsake her, and she will guard you; love her, and she will watch over you” (Proverbs 4:6). The use of wisdom is lost the way Solomon lost it, by small permissions. Decide what you will let into your mind. When you see that you have gone wrong, turn back at once and do not wait for a better time. “Buy truth, and do not sell it” (Proverbs 23:23).