For the past 8 years, I have summed up my life's purpose in one goal: to glorify God. In this time, glorifying God has grown in its definition for me. Within the last 12 months, the definition has focused upon knowledge and wisdom. God gives those who believe and obey Him knowledge and wisdom. And not just a little, but any amount needed to live for Him. Even more, this knowledge and wisdom allows us to know God, to experience Him, and to escape evil. Knowledge of God is revealed by God. It allows believers of God, who seek His knowledge, to be wise and have understanding beyond that of people who do not know God and seek His Truth. This idea is evident in Western culture's knowledge and understanding of evil.
"His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who has called us by His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His very great and precious promises so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption of this world caused by evil desires" (2 Peter 1:3-4).
"Too many in Washington today have a modern, Western, secular mind-set that either discounts - or outright dismisses - the fact that evil is a real and active force in history. They insist on interpreting events only through the lenses of politics and economics" (Rosenberg, 2006, 46-47).
As real as God is in my critical thinking, evil is just as real. There is clear evidence of evil in our world: from pornography, molestation, and addictions of all kinds, to suicide bombers, threats of annihilation, and so much more. Evil seeps in through unGodly ideologies at all levels. The most disturbing aspect of unGodly ideologies is that so many of the current, controversial issues are cloaked in human-made costumes meant to pass for Godly Truth. God would never compromise Truth to make peace - never!
"Stop fooling yourselves. If you think you are wise by the world's standards, you will have to become a fool so that you can become wise by God's standards. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. (1 Corinthians 3:18-19).
I see many people in the world claiming knowledge and wisdom who have no resemblance of God. Worse, though, are the people who claim to have God, but whose wisdom is more similar to the world's than it is to God. Prophecy is powerful:
The Lord says, "These people come near me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent with vanish" (Isaiah 29:13-14).
Wisdom and intelligence without God is dead. An example of this is evident in Rosenberg's (2006) recollection of his first job in Washington immediately before the Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He writes,
"When I first moved to Washington in January 1990 to work for the Heritage Foundation, it seemed increasingly clear to me that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, attack Israel, and draw the world into a bloody new Middle East war.... I was certainly new to Washington and as green as they came. I had no master's or PhD in history or politics of the Middle East. I had lived but a semester in the Middle East, and Israel at that, not in an Arab or Islamic country.... But I could not shake the overwhelming feeling that the experts were about to be blindsided" (44 and 45).
The Washington experts were certainly blindsided in the summer of 1990, and again on September 11, 2001 with much more gusto. The difference between Rosenberg and the others was (and is) knowledge and wisdom revealed to Rosenberg through relationship with God and scripture (i.e., knowledge of good and evil).
"When they saw the courage of Peter and John, and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13).
In God's system of schooling, a life of knowing Him surpasses every level of earned degree known to humankind. Ordinary people with Godly wisdom and knowledge are able to participate in the divine and they are able to escape corruption caused by evil. Worldly knowledge and wisdom eventually drowns even the most intelligent among us.
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