“People, I call out to you; my cry is to the children of Adam. Learn to be shrewd, you who are inexperienced; develop common sense, you who are foolish. Listen, for I speak of noble things, and what my lips say is right. For my mouth tells the truth, and wickedness is detestable to my lips. All the words from my mouth are righteous; none of them are deceptive or perverse. All of them are clear to the perceptive, and right to those who discover knowledge. Accept my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than pure gold. For wisdom is better than jewels, and nothing desirable can equal it.” (Proverbs‬ ‭8‬:‭4‬-‭11‬ ‭CSB – Read the chapter) ‬‬

We live today in a world in which truth—real truth—is becoming ever more important. Because of the rise of AI and the creation of phantom facts and increasingly sophisticated fake photos videos it is difficult to know if what we are seeing with our eyes on a screen is real. This unmooring of our lives and our culture from truth leads to a degradation of trust which in turn makes everything we do more difficult. We need the foundation of truth more than ever before so that our entire culture doesn’t give way to cynicism, doubt, and a host of other civilization-destroying traits. In this kind of a world, godly wisdom is vital. Let’s talk about wisdom’s self-description and why we can trust it even when we can’t trust anything else.

It used to be that seeing something with our own eyes was the ultimate way to test its veracity. The old atheist’s line was that unless I see it, I’m not going to believe it. Today, though, if seeing something involves a screen and a digital image at all, that mindset just doesn’t hold anymore. And with as much of our world happens through engagements on a screen today, this presents us with a real problem.

When I first started publishing this blog, one of the bits of counsel I received was that I should always include some kind of a thumbnail image for it to help grab the attention of potential readers. I started with simply taking pictures of the passage I was commenting on with my phone and uploading that. Then, I started searching for free images online that captured the theme of whatever I was writing. Sometimes that was fairly easy to do, but other times it was no small task. This was even more difficult when I was creating artwork for a sermon series.

But then, a couple of years ago, WordPress introduced an AI image creator into the slate of editing tools they offered. You simply described the image you wanted to have created, and it did all the work for you. In the beginning, though, I only used the tool sparingly because it was not good. Especially with people. If I tried to include people in a particular image they regularly had extra heads or arms. Hands often had odd numbers of fingers. It really was not a reliable tool.

Over time, though, it has gotten better. A lot better. And not over very much time either. After the first wave of improvement, when you could start to count on it to put all the right parts in all the right places for people, you could still tell the images were created by AI. There was just something about them that you instantly recognized as not real. Today, that’s not always the case. As the technology has improved, the photorealism of the images it generates has gotten much, much better.

I can’t think of the last time I didn’t use an AI generated image for one of my thumbnails. And while I suspect you have been able to tell some of the time, I’ll bet you haven’t been able to tell all of the time. But the thing about AI images is that they are all fake. All of them. All of the time. The same goes with AI generated essays and poems and songs and videos. They don’t come from a place of careful, rational thought. They come from a program designed to be really, really, almost unimaginably good at recognizing patterns of rational thought we have created and copying those patterns in new ways that are increasingly difficult to differentiate from things that are really real.

Friends, this is the world we live in today. And, if we are not careful, it is frighteningly easy to get lost in this world and to begin to lose our sense of what is real and what is not. Our ability to discern truth is weakening. What makes all of this even more dangerous on a cultural level, is that it is all developing at the same time that we are losing our connection to a worldview that is foundational rooted in truth and which helps us discern truth and righteousness from anything contrary to that.

It is more important than ever for us to be equipped with the tools we need to be able to quickly and effectively discern what’s real from what’s not; what’s true from what’s false. The trouble is that we won’t find those in the world. Oh sure, we can develop more sophisticated AI detection tools…which are, ironically, driven by AI. But when it comes to detecting truth in our lives generally, we need something entirely more reliable than that. We need wisdom.

Now, wisdom like this isn’t necessarily going to help us be able to tell more easily when an image is a picture someone took versus a photoshopped image versus an AI creation. But in rooting ourselves more deeply in the capital-T truth, we will be able to discern whether or not something coheres with reality generally, and that’s our greater need.

Well, by God’s design, this is all what wisdom offers us. The same wisdom that is actively seeking us out like we talked about yesterday offers us a host of truth-detecting tools. Look at all the things Solomon puts on Wisdom’s lips here.

She calls us to gain shrewdness in our inexperience. Godly wisdom is not just about religious things. It offers us the ability to see the best way from where we are to where we are trying to go including how to navigate through the various obstacles in our path. And it can do this using the world’s own means all while never once leaving its foundation of righteousness. It is not book smarts that God offers us in His wisdom. It is common sense. “Learn to be shrewd, you who are inexperienced; develop common sense, you who are foolish.”

But that’s not all wisdom offers. It calls us to nobility, not as a means of being then able to look down on others who are now beneath us, but to root us in what is right. “Listen, for I speak of noble things, and what my lips say is right.” In any situation, wisdom will tell us the right path from here to there. It is always the path that is rooted in the love of Christ and the righteousness of God.

Wisdom also helps us know the difference between truth and wickedness. Now, perhaps you expected the contrast there to be truth and falsehood rather than wickedness, but I think Solomon has things right here (and not just because this is Scripture and thus always right in what it affirms). Things that are evil are never rooted in truth. That’s a more important idea than perhaps we realize. There is a great deal of evil around us and sometimes it convinces us that it is true and an accurate description or assessment about the nature of the world God made. Well, it’s not. Wisdom can help us see through those lies.

“For my mouth tells the truth, and wickedness is detestable to my lips. All the words from my mouth are righteous; none of them are deceptive or perverse. All of them are clear to the perceptive, and right to those who discover knowledge.” Godly wisdom won’t lead us down a false path. Ever. When we learn to see the world through His eyes, the ways of wisdom will begin to become clear and obvious to us.

Look at all the benefits of godly wisdom here, especially when it comes to contributing to the truthfulness of the world around us. All words spoken by wisdom are righteous. When you speak from out of a place of wisdom, your words will advance and improve your relationship with both God and people. When you speak with wisdom, nothing you say will be intended to deceive. It will be simple and honest. It won’t be offensive. It will be clear and right. Think about the impact it would have on the world if believers got this right. Imagine the impact on your community if just the members of your church got this right. This would be revolutionary. It is our call and duty as followers of Jesus to interject truth into a world wracked by lies and other falsehoods. Wisdom is how we can accomplish this.

And this is indeed Wisdom’s invitation. “Accept my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than pure gold. For wisdom is better than jewels, and nothing desirable can equal it.” There are a whole lot of things we can pursue in this life. There are many different things that promise to give us the kind of life we desire. Only one can actually deliver on this. Let wisdom be your pursuit and you will find all these other things.