“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and discipline.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever known something that turned out not to be true? You were as sure as the world that you had your facts straight until you learned beyond any shadow of doubt that you didn’t. Did you really know it at all? Can you know something that isn’t true? That’s a far more difficult philosophical question to answer than it perhaps seems. All true knowledge is rooted in a foundation of truth. If something doesn’t correspond with reality, we can’t really know it. This means that all knowledge starts with knowing the source of reality. Let’s talk about it.

Humans are an arrogant bunch. We pride ourselves in our knowledge. About what? Well, you name it. Think about how many times down through the ages of history we have confidently declared our knowledge about this or that only to be proved wrong later. For instance, not all that long ago historically speaking everyone “knew” that the earth was the center of the universe. That was simply how the world was designed and anyone who thought otherwise was not only ignorant, but possibly evil.

Just a shade over 100 years ago, and for many years before then, all of the best and brightest scientists in the world “knew” that the universe was eternal. It had always been here. There was no creation point. Perhaps it went through cycles of expansion and contraction, creating and recreating everything we know, but it had been doing that forever. We didn’t need any kind of a reference to a divine creator or any other religious screed to explain how the world got here. It simply always was.

And then Edwin Hubble published his groundbreaking research about his discovery of the so-called red shift. In simple terms, he figured out that the universe is expanding. The stars we can see with our eyes and through our telescopes are actually moving away from us. A few years before this, Einstein developed some equations that seemed to show that the universe had a beginning point, but he introduced a fudge factor into them that resulted in their being solved to show the opposite.

Hubble’s discovery proved he was right the first time and that the universe had a beginning. Secular scientists at the time (and all of the best ones were) who saw the obvious theological implications of Hubble’s red shift quickly moved to downplay and ridicule the idea in hopes that it wouldn’t gain any traction. They derisively labeled this “so-called” beginning the “Big Bang.” Were we really supposed to believe that the universe just exploded into existence with a big bang at some point in the finite past. Well, as it turns out, yes, yes we were…just like the theologians had been insisting for a very long time.

Just because we think we know something doesn’t mean it’s really true. Our perceived knowledge doesn’t necessarily correspond with reality. And, if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t really count as knowledge at all. It was only a delusion that happened to be convenient for a time. For that matter, where this false knowledge kept us from actually advancing genuine knowledge about the world, it really wasn’t very convenient after all. It may have been an active impediment to positive advancement in our knowledge of the world and our ability to benefit from that knowledge.

Today, how many times have we heard some version of “this is just the way things are” from secular scientists who are using one currently accepted bit of “knowledge” or another to argue against the Christian worldview? There are still many secular folks who insist that we “know” that humans evolved from earlier non-human species over time and that we don’t need any kind of a reference to a divine creator in order to explain the existence and nature of the world as we know it today (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). And yet the more we learn about the real complexities of life and the vast amount of information it requires the less and less likely it appears that what we have “known” about evolution for a long time was really knowledge at all.

The trouble is that we are an arrogant bunch. And false knowledge that has taken root is hard to root out.

So, what are we supposed to do in light of all of this? Well, for starters, adopting a bit humbler of a position with regard to what we know and don’t know would seem to be a wise course of action. It’s okay to have confidence in the things we believe ourselves to know, especially when there is plenty of experimental data to back up that knowledge. But we need to be honest enough to acknowledge that our worldview biases color the way we engage with that experimental data. Data is what it is, but as much as we might like to believe otherwise, our worldview beliefs impact how we receive and interpret that data. Worldview beliefs that are false will result in our manipulating that data in ways that are not reflective of reality. An actual commitment to following the evidence wherever it leads is difficult to divorce from a worldview framework that doesn’t support where the evidence seems to be leading.

More than just allowing us to engage with the available data and evidence most honestly, a properly humble outlook allows us to accept the fact that all knowledge has a source. It has a source because all of reality has a source. And unless and until we are willing to accept that source for who He is, there will be a great deal we won’t ever know or that we will convince ourselves we know when the truth is nothing of the sort.

Here at the end of Solomon’s introduction to his collection of proverbs, he identifies for us the source of reality, the source of knowledge. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” God is the foundation of all reality. He created it. It all flows out of His character and at His command. Until we know Him and properly respect who He is, we will play at knowledge, but we won’t really know much of anything. We definitely won’t know the most important things.

Until we know that He is the Creator, we will keep trying to come up with ideas for how the world could have come into existence and become the way it is today all by itself. Those ideas will all be rooted in a lie, though, and will therefore seem more and more ridiculous the more the data simply doesn’t support them.

Until we know that God is good, and that our best flourishing will always and only happen when we are living in obedience to His command, we will keep trying to discover and declare what is good on our own. The problem, of course, is that we are a mess and broken by sin, so our declared goods will never be on the same level as the things that actually are good because they are a reflection of Him.

Until we know that God is both just and loving, we will keep trying to solve the problem of our brokenness on our own. We will try to be and do good by ourselves, always falling short of where we hope to be. We will keep proposing solutions to put a stop to our brokenness that never actually work, but only perpetuate or even deepen the problem. We won’t ever just come to Jesus to receive the mercy and grace He won for us on the cross.

On and on and on the list can go here. Without this foundation of knowing who God is and a willingness to live in light of that, we will keep scrounging around in the darkness of the world, in the darkness of our souls, never quite managing to lay our hands on what is truly true. All the while, we will convince ourselves we are on top of things and have never been so knowledgeable as we are right now. We will be painfully unaware of just how foolish we are. “Fools despise wisdom and discipline.”

What we are going to encounter as we continue forward in our journey through Proverbs is not a bunch of sayings that are right in every single instance. Rather, we are going to find a trove of wisdom for how God created the world to work and how to live in that world in ways that will lead to the most flourishing. Some of it will apply in some circumstances, some of it will apply in other circumstances, all of it will flow from and point us to the God who created the world and sustains it even to this day. It will consistently point us to the truth that if we don’t start from the foundation of who God is, we’ll never really know anything, and we’ll set ourselves up for a life of misery and misfortune.

So then, let’s humble ourselves, open our hearts and minds to ideas that may run counter to what we would rather believe if we were to get our own way, and prepare to receive what God has to give us to help live lives that properly reflect who He is to His glory, our joy, and the benefit of all those around us.