“Lord, I want to understand this.”
I’ve prayed those words more times than I can count. I’ve prayed them over confusing passages of Scripture and over the doctrines Christians sometimes disagree on.
I’ve prayed them over decisions yet-to-be-made and over the parts of life that don’t make much sense to me.
And many times, I’ve seen God answer those prayers by giving me the insight I asked for. He’s opened my eyes to see new aspects of His Word. He’s nudged me in one direction over another. He’s given me a glimpse of how He’s working behind the scenes of my circumstances.
Yet, I also have to admit, there have been times when the answers I craved didn’t come. God didn’t explain to me why the hard things happened. I didn’t see a neon sign telling me which path to take.
Can you relate to any of this?
If you can, just know you’re in good company. Many of us, even as Christians, are walking through life with unanswered questions in tow—and that’s never easy.
But, thankfully, Proverbs 9:10 offers a helpful perspective for times like these. It says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. The knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” (WEBBE)
When we aren’t given the spelled-out understanding we long for, the truths in this verse invite us to do 2 things:
- Seek to know God more than the answers to questions.
As someone who often craves that logical understanding of things, the latter part of this verse gives me pause. “The knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
While there’s nothing wrong with seeking answers (and God delights to answer our questions), true understanding isn’t actually about knowing all the answers. It’s about knowing God.
You know, all of us have assumptions about what God is like. We judge Him based on our experiences, we liken Him to the authority figures in our lives and we generally just underestimate his greatness.
But true understanding is about moving past our assumptions to know Him as He really is.
God is “the Holy One,” who is totally set apart and higher than us. Psalm 145:3 says, “His greatness is unsearchable.” Yet, He is also the One who has revealed His name through Scripture and His gracious glory through Christ.
God wants us to know Him—not just from a distance, but up-close and personal.
So, what if, we traded “Lord, I want to understand this” for “Lord, I want to know you?”
What if, instead of reading Scripture primarily to find answers to our questions, we opened the Bible with a hunger to find God’s heart in every passage?
If we will make this shift, not only will we find the LORD, we’ll also find the wisdom we’ve been hungering for all along.
2. Let worship lead to wise living.
The first part of our verse says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”
“The fear of the LORD” is a phrase repeated well over 100 times in Scripture, yet its often misunderstood. To fear God doesn’t mean to cower in dread before Him. It means to stand in awe of Him.
So, we are not to stop at merely knowing God. We are to respond to what we know of Him with humble reverence and surrendered worship.
This, the writer of Proverbs tells us, is the beginning of wisdom.
Now, I have to confess that “wisdom” is something I’ve always struggled to define, but my grandmother recently helped me understand it better. She said that wisdom is the ability to take what you know in your mind and rightly apply it in your life. It’s knowing how to use the information you have.
And isn’t that what this verse is all about? It’s saying that if our knowledge of God leads to our worship of Him, we have rightly—even wisely—applied that knowledge because God is worthy.
Worship of God is the beginning of wisdom. And as we live lives of worship, where everything we learn about God leads us to deeper awe and surrender, we will find something really exciting:
Knowing God has practical applications in every area of our lives—including those questions we’ve been toting around for years.
You see, the more we know the LORD, the more we begin recognize His ways of working and the things that please Him. Some of our questions about “why” and “which way” become surprisingly clear in the light of who our God is.
And even when that doesn’t happen—when we still have to face things we don’t understand—we find that we can trust Him with our unanswered questions.
Confusing passages of Scripture, doctrines that Christians disagree on, decisions we don’t know how to make and aspects of life we don’t understand—all these may remain.
But we can entrust all our questions and the whole of our lives to the God we know.
His attributes and all our experiences with Him give us every reason to trust and to worship.
This devotion is based on one of the Scriptures from my reading plan: “Wisdom from Above” which covers Proverbs, Ecclesiastes & Job. To receive a copy of the reading plan (and future reading plans), sign up for the email list below. Hope you’ll follow along!
©2024 Paige K. Burhans
Scriptures taken from the World English Bible British Edition. Public Domain.
