The Sufficiency of Divine Wisdom; James
1:5
James 1:5 NASB “But
if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and
without reproach, and it will be given to him.”
Scripture, and Scripture alone,
produces maturity; everything else is a production of the flesh. The doctrine
of the sufficiency of Scripture is important because we live in an era when
people think that the way to solve problems and the way to face the
difficulties and heartaches and adversities in their lives, and to deal with
whatever traumas they encountered when they were children or young adults, is though
psychology.
Psychology derives from two
Greek words, PSUCHE [yuxh]
and LOGOS [logoj] meaning word or
study, reasoning about. So it is the science of the soul. The dictionary says
that it is the science that deals with mental processes and behaviour, and the
emotional and behavioural characteristics of an individual or group or an
activity. So as a science it is scientific only in its methodology because the
focus of what it studies is human beings. And we have volition. There are
psychological theories that treat man as not having volition but that he is
purely mechanical. But as a science it is empirical in nature, So that means
that the empiricist goes out and observes and collects his data. He looks at a
variety of different people and then from these observations draws certain
conclusions. A lot of people think that this can be very objective, but the
problem is that with any sort of empirical study is, you start off with and
study X number of cases and you draw conclusions, and then all of a sudden you
come up with X + 1 observation that totally wipes out all of your conclusions. There
is always something else out there that can change and invalidate whatever conclusions
you come up with and they foul up the whole process. Secondly, the objective student
is not subjective at all. He has a mindset, a framework, and agenda in many
cases, conscious or unconscious, and so this is the bias that he brings to it coloring the interpretation of the data. There is no such
thing as a brute fact. Everybody thinks that the facts are neutral, but there
is no such thing as a brute fact because the interpreter brings his conclusions
to it automatically. When he sees it he is already engaged in the process of
interpretation. Changing from psychology to geology, the geologist is observing
a number of different fossils. He automatically, because of his mindset, has
categorized those fossils within a scheme of historical geology. As soon as he
sees them he says this is an object from 300-million years ago, and he knows
which age and everything else, so he doesn’t see it apart from this framework
he pushes. He looks at the so-called facts but the conclusion he draws are
completely different from the creationist who says the object he sees is another
example of the life that was destroyed in the world-wide flood that God brought
on the earth in Noah’s time. They both look at that same fossil and come to a different
conclusion, and they are 180 degrees apart. This is the same thing as in
psychology and the result is that psychology today there are over 500 different
models of human behaviour, and each has to have a behavioural theory that that
supports the model. So there are over 500 different models, each one espousing
a different theory of what makes a human being a human being and why they do
what they do. Not only are there over 500 different models, there are probably
by now over one thousand different therapies for achieving results of change in
the subject. Which one are you going to buy into?
What really muddies the water
is when some guy who is a Christian takes the Bible and refracts one of these
500 models through his biblical lense and comes out with
something that he calls “Christian psychology.” Then he goes and writes books!
He write on child rearing, marriage, and education theory.
When you go down to the Christian bookstore and see these books because you
have a problem in your life, and you are trying to deal with something with
your kids, something in your marriage, or just some traumas that you have gone
through in life, or some adversity, and there you see a title that just hits
you right between the eyes. You pick it up and in every other sentence there is
a Bible verse and you say this guy has to be right, he must really know how to
help me deal with my problem. You are just sliding down the wrong road already,
because what this person has done is try to take two different opposing systems
of thought, the human viewpoint systems of psychology and the divine viewpoint
system of Scripture alone, and is trying to pull them together. It is no
different from the legalist who is saying you are saved by faith plus works,
or, you grow as a believer by following my legalistic rules. It is the same
kind of thing. You add anything to
the Word of God and you destroy it. Faith plus anything = nothing. We have to
be very, very careful today because this has made tremendous inroads. Human
psychology has infiltrated Christianity and the evangelical church in
horrendous ways today. One thing that is common to every one of these systems
is that they have a biblically-defective view of man. Even the Christian
systems may start off at some point with a somewhat biblical view of man but they
are going over and borrowing from another system—the other system got to that
point on the basis of false conclusions—and they are bringing over false
conclusions and trying to bring them into the Word of God. That is not saying
that some of these people don’t have some good things to say. Mormons have some
good things to say, Hindus have some good things to say, be we are not going to
go to the Book of Mormon to get some good information. Yet that is exactly what
a lot of Christians are doing. Over the past forty years this Christian
psychology movement has led hundreds of thousands of believers down the road
away from pure reliance upon the Word of God.
The Bible says that the
problem we have is not that we have a low self-esteem,
it is that we have a problem with sin. Because of sin in the universe it has
affected all kinds of different areas in our life. It has affected all kinds of
relationships, marriage relationships, family relationships, parent-child
relationships, work relationships. So sin affects all kinds of things in our
lives, we grow up with sinners and are associated with those sinners, and
because they are dominated by their sin natures and may go into all sorts of
systems of evil we may be the victim of their evil. The Bible says there is
only one solution, and that solution starts at the cross—by faith alone in
Christ alone. Because of that we can conquer and have a solution to anything in
life. If we do a study of the great heroes of the Old Testament we find that a
lot of them went through a lot of the problems that people go through today. Just
think of all of the Israelites who grew up under a system of horrible slavery in
Matthew
Another example of this
Christian psychologizing that is very popular today is feminization of males. The
statement is that if a woman truly expects to have meaningful communication with
her husband she must activate the right side of his brain. The assumption is
that the left side is the masculine side, objective, everything else in the
right side is subjective and emotional, women always operate on the right side,
men on the left side; and so if the woman wants the man to understand her he
has to enter her world of emotions. What is this really saying? That is saying
that women have to get their men to think like women in order to communicate
with them. They don’t want a man anymore, they want a man to be a woman, and
act and think like a woman so they can relate. What they want to do is reverse
the roles. The second fallacy is the whole underlying concept which is the left
brain-right brain concept. This is a completely false and fabricated concept.
The basic problem in all of
this is that we are engaged in a battle, a battle between human viewpoint which the Bible calls foolishness. No matter how
erudite, no matter how scholarly, no matter how academic, no matter how many
studies support your views, if the ultimate premise is human viewpoint the
Bible says it is foolishness. What matters is how the view lines up with the Word
of God which is divine viewpoint, and that is called wisdom—absolute Truth. So
we are living in the midst of a battlefield between human viewpoint thinking
which is the operation of the sin nature, and divine viewpoint thinking which comes
under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit in teaching us the Word of God.
James 1:5 NASB “But
if [and it is assumed to be true] any of you lacks wisdom [for handling the
tests], let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach,
and it will be given to him.”
The doctrine of wisdom
1)
Definition: The
biblical concept of wisdom is derived from the Hebrew word chokmah, which is translated “skill
or wisdom.”
2)
We see it in the
Old Testament in Exodus 35:35 NASB “He has filled them with skill [chokmah] to
perform every work of an engraver and of a designer and of an embroiderer, in
blue and in purple {and} in scarlet {material,} and in fine linen, and of a
weaver, as performers of every work and makers of designs.” We could define it
as the skilful application of theory and knowledge to the practical issues of
life. We all know people who can handle a theory or book instruction well but
they don’t know how to take book instruction and apply it to whatever it is,
but this is referring to people who are able to take the theory and knowledge
and skilfully apply that to the practical issues of life. It is very different
from the Greek concept of SOPHIA [
3)
Wisdom thus
begins with making doctrine the highest priority in life. This is what the
Bible means by the fear or respect of the Lord. Fear means to honor, to revere, to value highly because the consequences
of failing to do so are calamitous, so disastrous. Proverbs 1:7 NASB
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom
and instruction.” If you are going to have wisdom in your soul then it starts
with authority orientation to the Word of God, studying the Word of God,
learning the Word of God, because you know that nothing matters more than what
God’s plan is for your life.
4)
Wisdom has its source
in God alone, and it is set in the Bible against the thinking of all the
various human viewpoint thinking. Proverbs 2:6 NASB “For the LORD gives
wisdom; From His mouth {come} knowledge and understanding.”