Day 3: Spirit of Wisdom

For the Lord giveth wisdom: out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.
Proverbs 2:6

The Messiah will have the Spirit of Wisdom. We don’t usually think of ‘wisdom’ in this way. Instead we think ‘with age comes wisdom’, ‘judgement and wisdom’, and if you look it up, a bunch of sayings that are considered ‘wise’. Even the Hebrew word for ‘wisdom’, ‘chokhmah’ translates to…well…’wisdom’.

What wisdom seems to be is an ability to look at things and decide how to best apply them. That might seem a bit simplistic for the Messiah-after all He is God in the Flesh-but because He was both human and divine, He did have to learn. Not right from wrong, but how best to apply things in an orderly fashion. The old adage of ‘knowledge is when you know a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn’t go in a fruit salad’.

Maybe that is why we see wisdom and knowledge going hand-in-hand. Not to make lite of God, but in the form of a man He still needed to understand how best to apply things. We see this in how He replied to Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4:111). He didn’t come up with pithy sayings or argue points. Instead He fell back on His knowledge-and more importantly here-His APPLICATION of the Word of God. It wasn’t enough that He KNEW the scripture-rather that He knew which ones to use, when to use them and HOW to use them. This was the Spirit of Wisdom.

It was the same with Solomon. He recognized that riches, fame, fortune, power-without the KNOWLEDGE of how to use them-without WISDOM, he was just ever so much a rich fool, useless to no-one. This wasn’t lost on the young Messiah. When He got ‘lost’ as a lad of 12 as recorded in Luke 2, his parents found Him in the temple-searching out truth, teaching and being taught. So important was this idea of ‘growing in Wisdom’ that Luke even records that Jesus ‘…grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.’

James will say that the wisdom that comes from the Lord is ‘…first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. (James 3:17)

Colossians 4:5-6
Walk in  wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.