Wisdom Is Where You Find It

Another excellent essay from my friend, Lenny Cacchio:

Once I heard a young man waxing eloquent in a practice sermonette about a man named Balaam. Balaam was a prophet who found himself crosswise with God because God couldn’t seem to get through his bullet-proof head. You can read about him in Numbers 22 – 24. God was finally able to get his attention by speaking to him through his donkey. The young man’s point in describing this event got lost in a classic double entendre, perhaps intentional, that “if God can speak through a dumb ass, then why can’t he speak through you?”

Personally, I take a different lesson from that story: Accept wisdom wherever you find it. Sometimes that wisdom can come from an unlikely – or unlikable – source, but it is wisdom nevertheless. That’s what the proverb means when it says that wisdom cries in the street (Proverbs 1:20-21, 8:1-3). Wisdom can come from just about anywhere, but we must have the ears to hear it.

Besides speaking through Balaam’s “beast of burden”, God can also speak through a pompous, religious elitist as he did with the chief priest in John 11. Speaking of Jesus, whose murder he was planning, he claimed, “It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (Verse 50). He could not have been more right in what he said and more wrong in his understanding of it. But as with Balaam, we must take wisdom where we find it.

Here’s another example. Perhaps the most wicked of the Israelite kings was a man named Ahab. This man was putty in the hands of his demented wife Jezebel, and together they introduced more paganism into the nation’s religious milieu than any others in their history (I Kings 16:30). Yet even he mastered the profound when retorting to a threat from the nation’s enemies: “Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off.” Ahab’s enemies would have been well-served had they listened to him, for wisdom is where you find it.

Wisdom indeed cries in the streets, the byways, and the city gates. When James tells us to ask for wisdom, he expects us to seek and find that wisdom wherever it may be rather than waiting for pixie dust from heaven, even if the wisdom comes from an unsavory source.

Interested in attending public Bible studies, where these and other topics are discussed? In the Kansas City area, call (816) 520-1743.

Lenny Cacchio