From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
-Bob Dylan (from the song, It's alright ma, I'm only bleeding)
I am finding an intriguing reality protruding like a persistent flower emerging from the cracks of conventional wisdom.
The wisdom of divine foolishness. There is a way of living in the kingdom of God that runs contrary at times to 1+1=2 type of wisdom. There is a level of living that to the natural mind can seem quite foolish. According to scripture there is a path we must travel that requires us to become foolish for Christ in order to become wise. But who wants to appear the fool on any level? Doesn't that run completely across the grain of our rabid drive to please men or portray ourselves as more than we know we really are?
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in the this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, ?He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness, and again, The Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are useless. -1 Corinthians 3:18
This is a hard line to define: God wisdom vs. man wisdom, divine foolishness and human foolishness.
It seems sometimes that wisdom is only truly understood in the end of a matter.
The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say,'Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' But wisdom is justified by her children. -Matt. 11:19
There have been so many times when the leading of the Spirit runs contrary to the direction my mind or circumstances seem to allow. It's like the vs I read today in Isaiah 55:1 Come buy and eat, you who have no money...now there is a twist for the noggin. How can one buy with no money? In God's economy it happens all the time. One must be schooled in the way of Christ to truly understand and operate effectively in this wisdom.
He who wishes to philosophize by using Aristotle without danger to his soul,
must first become thoroughly foolish in Christ.
-Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 29
Becoming thoroughly foolish in Christ is a mystery to me and yet at times I seem to apprehend though not comprehend it.
I know this sounds like mumbo jumbo but these are thoughts that are swirrling around in my mind of late as we take steps that in the natural seem foolish at times. As we seek to build a church on principles and people that are considered foolish things. And yet I know that God has chosen the foolsih things and base things of this world to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:18-31). Often what we see on the outside is not what lies on the inside of a matter and if we don't spiritually judge the situation or person we will miss something of God's purposes in that moment to our own hurt.
It is argued that the inner essence of any matter is often the opposite of its outer
appearance, to explain that the apparently foolish may actually be wise, the apparently wise, foolish.
This is, to be sure, the basis of her irony; but it is also the burden of her message.
-Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
1 comment:
For me, the challenge to walking in God's wisdom & not mans is that I become my own worst enemy. In trying to follow God's direction & Go "against the grain" of mans wisdom, I doubt myself at every turn & constantly strugle with the urge to look back and question every decision and wonder what would have happened if I had gone left instead of right... .
To walk in this type of wisdom really is an "I'm all in" type of proposition. You either completely walk in that sense of 'ok God, we've come this far and it's too late to turn back so what do you want me to do & where do you want me to go NOW'. If we don't completely sell out to that mindset than we will continue to take two steps forward, one step back...one step forward, two steps back....... . ......or maybe that's just my struggle?.?.
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