See Psalm 90:12
In our own times, wisdom has been relocated from the heart to the head. This is based on the idea that an accumulation of information will somehow lead to wisdom if we can just sort through the mass of facts and figures free-floating through our daily lives. But are we right to somehow link “knowing” to wisdom?
David Mamet sees right through the “knowledge conceit” when he points out that to maintain illogical belief systems, the believers themselves “have to pretend not to know a lot of things.”
Adam and Eve changed the very nature of the love of God in their hearts when they fell for the promise that they “will be like God, knowing good and evil” if only they would eat of the fruit of that tree. (Genesis 3:5) It was that tragic act that turned the human heart away from the fullness of the love of God to darker inclinations. By the time of Noah, the infection of the heart had become so severe that God decided to “blot out man who I created from the face of the earth…. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5-6)
After the fall in the Garden, the human heart became overwhelmed with conflicting inclinations. The heart’s natural love of God became corrupted by competing loves that drove out our primary love. Wisdom comes through a deep preference to love God first above everything else, even if that love causes the world to place itself (in small and large ways) in opposition to a believer in Christ. Jesus came into the world to transform the corrupted inclinations of our hearts by restoring the desire “to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37)
—Eric Kampmann, Signposts
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