The Meaning Of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/proverbs/9.htm

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”; or as I prefer to read it, “The awe of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Many disagree with me, and I’ve said this many times before and I’ll keep saying it, there is no reason to fear the Lord. Either the authors had a misconception of God, or the translators of the modern Bible missed their mark, but God should not be feared. A synonym of the word “fear” is “awe”, and that is why, when I read “the fear of the Lord”, I prefer to read it as “the awe of the Lord”, which is completely true. Our God is awesome, so awesome, we can’t begin to fathom it.

Now that I’ve rambled about that, you will read many times throughout the Book of Proverbs, “the awe of God is the beginning of wisdom”, and that is so true. God is wise, always has been. “Wisdom” was here before God created the universe; many say the cliche “God is love”; you can also say, “God is wisdom”. I can’t begin to understand it, but scientists who have studied the universe say that it is a miraculously perfect sync of time, space, and matter, and if any one of those three were thrown off by a microsecond, the entire universe would explode or implode, one or the other. That, shows you just how awesome and wise our God is, to create something so perfect. And the best understandable comprehension is the human body; I was a mere EMT, but what little study we did of anatomy and physiology is, well, the miracle doesn’t begin to cover it. The Central Nervous System with it’s complex network of nerves that carry signals from the brain, through the spinal column, electrical signals that tell the heart when to beat, that tell the diaphram when to contract to expand the lung so they fill with oxygen, the fact that we get the oxygen we breathe from plant life, and they get the carbon dioxide they need to breathe from our exhaled air, nerves that protect our body, that when our hand touches flame that will hurt us, the nerves in a microsecond send signals to the brain telling the brain that fire is hot and it within the same microsecond sends signals through the autonomic nervous system so that we instantly say “ouch” and pull our hand back out of the flame. I could go on and on and on, but our lives, our human body, our brain, the gifts God gave to each of us is nothing short of miraculous. I can amateurishly draw a halfway recognizable sketch, but I couldn’t begin to learn how to do neurosurgery on the human brain, just the opposite, Dr. Ben Carson is one of the greatest neurosurgeons ever to walk the earth, but I’m guessing he would do good to draw a stick figure. My rambling is in high gear now, but I’m just trying to draw the slightest picture of how awesome our God is and how wise He is to create the PERFECT universe, with PERFECT lives to occupy it. And it is wise of us to acknowledge that, to love that, to appreciate that, and to seek the wisdom He has given us.

Verse 5, “Come, eat of my bread And drink of the wine I have mixed.” You will never hear me say that I am a smart man, I know that I am not. So when I read this verse, I may not have a clue what I am talking about, but the word “bread” is often a symbol for God’s Word, the instruction He gives us in the Holy Bible. Wisdom says, “Come, eat of my bread…” The Bible is packed full of wisdom. It would have been wise if the people would have acknowledged the warnings of Noah and repented of their sin before the flood came. It would have been wise if Abraham had have waited on the promise of God rather than take matters in his own hand to produce an heir. It would have been wise for the Hebrews to have honored God, appreciated their gifts, and not been such whiney babies about their lives and they might have been able to enter the promised land instead of dying in the wilderness. And the examples go on and on and on. And there is wisdom in the Bible for us too, if we search for it, and if we accept it.

And that said, let me climb on a different soapbox. Just imagine how wonderful our world would be if we all spent more time studying the Bible to obey the commands and wisdom of God, rather than spending time researching the Bible, looking for loopholes which allow us to sin. I follow a lot of religious Facebook pages, and it is so disheartening to see just how many people are searching for loopholes that allow them to live the lives THEY want to. They search for loopholes in honoring the Sabbath, they search for loopholes so they can eat the foods they desire, they search for loopholes that allow them to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and that, as a result, there is no more sin in the world and they can do whatever they please and they will go to Heaven because Jesus died on the cross for them. And it is so sad, so very sad. But I am smart enough to know that it is all the work of Satan. Satan lies, just like he lied to Eve, and it causes people to sin. Not only do they twist the words of the Bible into what they want to hear, but even worse, they mock those that do follow God’s word.

But it is foolish to do that. It is not wise. And that is what the Book of Proverbs is about. Solomon isn’t just giving us a list of what wisdom is and isn’t, God, through him, is urging us to seek wisdom and to be wise.

Sorry for the rambling, and I apologize in advance because I’ll probably repeat some of this again.

And, don’t just listen to me. I may be wrong as wrong can be. Study God’s word for yourself. Seek the wisdom He is giving us throughout scripture. And most importantly, seek the God that made man rather than the God that man made.

Amen!