Proverbs 15:33
The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honour is humility.
The Hebrew word used for instruction is ‘musar’: discipline; thus reading in is Hebrew text: “The fear of the Adonai is the discipline of wisdom”.
Many look for wisdom just like many honor the virtue of humility, but these two each require going through a particular path.
When the natural man studies wisdom but doesn’t own within himself a healthy ‘fear’ and reverence for God, His Instruction (Torah) and His retribution system, wisdom and knowledge will only serve to inflate this man’s ego. It will only be used to promote his personal agenda and will do more damage than good. Ancient Greeks just about worshipped wisdom, but it was the wisdom of man through which they could not even find the knowledge of God. Their kind of wisdom did much damage to mankind and is still the cornerstone philosophy of humanist secularism in the western world today; a philosophy diametrically opposite to the Hebraic Judean culture from whence our faith birthed.
It is the same thing with honor. If a man receives honor before he has been humbled through life’s school of ‘hard knocks’, he becomes proud, arrogant, demanding and dictatorial, wherefrom stems the wise comparison.
Let us therefore not put the cart before the horses. Before we honor someone’s wisdom, let us make sure he has gone through the ‘whole course’. We must ask ourselves, ‘Has that person’s character only been molded by wise rhetoric, or has it gone through the humbling hard knocks that shape the character of a man?
The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honour is humility.
The Hebrew word used for instruction is ‘musar’: discipline; thus reading in is Hebrew text: “The fear of the Adonai is the discipline of wisdom”.
Many look for wisdom just like many honor the virtue of humility, but these two each require going through a particular path.
When the natural man studies wisdom but doesn’t own within himself a healthy ‘fear’ and reverence for God, His Instruction (Torah) and His retribution system, wisdom and knowledge will only serve to inflate this man’s ego. It will only be used to promote his personal agenda and will do more damage than good. Ancient Greeks just about worshipped wisdom, but it was the wisdom of man through which they could not even find the knowledge of God. Their kind of wisdom did much damage to mankind and is still the cornerstone philosophy of humanist secularism in the western world today; a philosophy diametrically opposite to the Hebraic Judean culture from whence our faith birthed.
It is the same thing with honor. If a man receives honor before he has been humbled through life’s school of ‘hard knocks’, he becomes proud, arrogant, demanding and dictatorial, wherefrom stems the wise comparison.
Let us therefore not put the cart before the horses. Before we honor someone’s wisdom, let us make sure he has gone through the ‘whole course’. We must ask ourselves, ‘Has that person’s character only been molded by wise rhetoric, or has it gone through the humbling hard knocks that shape the character of a man?
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