Posted on 02/01/2021 10:31:14 PM PST by Pilgrim's Progress
“If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God" (Proverbs 2:4-5).
One thing that we've learned over the years is that men think they understand stuff, and they don't understand stuff at all. The average guy thinks he knows all he needs to know about “religion,” but start to talk to him using Scriptures and they are totally ignorant of the most basic thing of all, biblical salvation by grace through faith without works of any kind. Their understanding is that nothing in this life is free, and everything costs something; including God’s riches though they be at Christ’s expense.
People think that they understand life; that they understand how things are. They don't understand how things are. They think they understand how things are done and how things should be done and how the world works and so on but they don't understand. They really don't. They're under delusion. Consider this verse:
“Man's goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?" (Proverbs 20:24).
Now, that verse isn’t saying that everything a man does is ordained of God, and therefore when a man steals, defrauds, rapes, kills, and murders that it is of the Lord, the man didn’t have any choice in the matter. Sorry Calvinists, but it just doesn’t. That's not what it's saying at all. It's saying that there are things in this life that the Lord ordains, and no matter what a man does, the Lord winds up by having him painted in the corner that the Lord wants him in. And when the Lord gets him in at the intersection of a rock and a hard place; and all the time the man thought he knew what he was doing. Do you know what it proves? It proves that he doesn’t don't know what he is doing.
This is why we need understanding. This is why sometimes in life we get in a strange place, because we think we know what we are doing, and we wound up in a disorienting place. We thought we had all the steps laid out and the plan seemed to be coming together, but we wound up in this place and it's obvious that we didn't know what we were doing. That's exactly what it's all about! It is why you need the understanding of God. That is what wisdom is all about.
We're talking about understanding here.
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