Can you have true wisdom without knowing God?
I was pondering the question of whether someone could have true wisdom without knowing God. While I don't have all the answers, I am leaning towards a definite "no" to that question, and here is why.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who doesn't know God has a low IQ and everyone who does will have a high IQ. No. What I am saying is that wisdom comes from God, and it's virtually impossible to have true wisdom without knowing God. I'm not talking about purely book-learning here or ability to do math quickly. I'm talking about discernment as wisdom. The ability to know what to do in a given situation.
All the high IQ in the world will not always help someone to know what to do in a given situation. I'm not bashing people with high IQ's - their IQ is a gift they have been given, just as some people have been given the gift of beauty, and others the gift of charisma.
So, having separated discernment from IQ here, I'd like to keep the focus on discernment. It is extremely hard, I would even say impossible, to have great discernment without knowing God. Certainly we can all think of people who have discernment in many areas of their life even though they don't know God. But at some point, their discernment, will not work well because it is based purely on the physical world and not on the spiritual.
For example, let's consider Noah, who was chosen by God. Why was Noah chosen? Because he was a good man at a time when everyone else was doing evil. Noah was told by God to build an ark for a coming flood. No-one else believed that the flood would happen. Indeed, by the secular standards of the physical world at the time, Noah appeared to be crazy! I am sure he was ridiculed by his neighbors for building the ark. If others had believed the flood would happen, they too would surely have built something to survive on when the flood came, yet they did not. Do you see the difference between Noah and his neighbors? I'm sure they could not all have been of inferior IQ. Noah had the kind of wisdom that came from listening to God. His neighbors only had the kind of wisdom that came from listening to the physical world.
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