“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. For by me your days will be many, and years will be added to your life. If you are wise, you are wise for your own benefit; if you mock, you alone will bear the consequences.” (Proverbs‬ ‭9‬:‭10‬-‭12‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

Who has your highest respect? Who is the person you look up to more than any other; whose opinion controls your decision making most of all? That person will direct the course of your life. That person has a power over you that will make your life either happy or terrible. Choose that person wisely, because if you don’t, the consequences will be awful. Solomon has a suggestion of who that person should be here. Let’s take a look.

What we are seeing here are themes we have already encountered more than once over the course of this opening section of Proverbs. Solomon keeps coming back again and again to these ideas, though, because they are so very foundational for us to understand if we are going to gain all of the benefits of wisdom. If you want to have wisdom as a major guiding force in your life, the entrance onto that path starts with the fear of the Lord.

Think for a minute about why this is. Wisdom is not simply knowing the best path to take as you navigate your way through life, but also having the courage and discipline to take that path. It is knowing the thing that is not only the smartest thing to do, but the morally superior thing to do in a given situation. Well, unless and until you know the God who created the world and everything in it and who understands more intimately than we could begin to fathom how it works, wisdom will be off the table for us. And unless and until we have a sufficient respect for and recognition of who He is, we aren’t nearly as likely to be willing to accept His counsel and correction when we veer off course.

Now, this doesn’t mean that when a person becomes a follower of Jesus they immediately become wise as if a switch was flipped. Wisdom is still something that grows in us over time. But that follower of Jesus in having a basic recognition of who God is combined with an eager willingness to do what He says will be wise in a way she was not the day before making that decision. Then, as she continues to live into that decision, meditating each day in God’s word, and putting into practice what she discovers there with the abiding help of the Holy Spirit and the accountability of the church helping to keep her growing understanding on the right track, she will become wiser over time.

This same thing goes with knowing God. When you know God, you begin to understand the world in a way you didn’t before; in a way you couldn’t before. And because God is the one who created the world and everything in it, you will understand the world in a way that is more correct than you did before. The skeptic who refuses to acknowledge God’s involvement in creation has a truncated understanding of the world relative to the believer. Oh, you won’t be able to convince the skeptic of that. That’s why they are skeptics. And, there are some believers who have adopted very narrow or simply incorrect parameters for the nature of God’s involvement in creation such that their understanding is mostly incorrect as well. But the one who is willing to accept the idea of God’s involvement and activity along with His character in ways that are properly shaped by the Scriptures is going to be able to understand the world better than the one who isn’t.

So again, who has your highest respect? Who is the person you look up to more than any other? Who is the person whose opinion controls your decision making most of all? The identity of that person matters a great deal because you are going to allow that person access to direct and even control a great deal about your life. If that person is someone other than God (and that includes you), you are going to set your life in a direction that isn’t going to lead you anywhere good. The identity of that person has the power to lengthen or shorten your life.

“For by me your days will be many, and years will be added to your life.” Now, this doesn’t mean that believing in God is going to give you a longer life. There is zero empirical evidence supporting such a proposition. Neither do I think that’s what Solomon means here. The “me” here is his personified Wisdom character, not God. You gain access to wisdom when you are willing to accept God for who He is, yes, but this is wisdom speaking and boasting that she will give us a longer life than we will enjoy without her company.

So then, wise people live longer than unwise people? No, we can’t very easily say that either. Then what does this mean? Well, keep in mind once again here that proverbs aren’t promises. They are descriptions of how the world often works, all things being equal. When someone commits to a life of wisdom, that person is going to be more likely to make decisions that will avoid behaviors that could artificially shorten his life. More positively, he is going to do things that will be likely to add years to his life. Of course, we live in a world that is broken by sin such that all things are not equal. Sometimes death comes for us earlier than our lifestyle would suggest anyway. But in general, people who make wise choices throughout their lives are going to have a better chance to live longer than those who don’t.

What this means, Solomon says, is that we have to live with the decisions we make. “If you are wise, you are wise for your own benefit; if you mock, you alone will bear the consequences.” Yes, our decisions affect other people. This verse isn’t saying otherwise. What Solomon is telling us through Wisdom’s voice here is that each one of us is ultimately responsible for the choices we make. When we reach the end of our lives and stand before the great throne of judgment, God isn’t going to hold us accountable for someone else’s decisions. Maybe their decisions affected us positively. Maybe they affected us negatively. But we are ultimately the ones making the choices we make.

Just because someone close to us makes poor decisions doesn’t mean we have to follow in their suit. And, just because someone close to us is making wise decisions doesn’t mean our decisions will automatically be wise. We have to choose to follow suit. We make our own choices, and we are responsible for those choices before God. If you choose to cynically reject God’s character and command as a mocker would, you are going to be held responsible for that. If you choose to make wise decisions, even if no one around you is or does, you will gain the benefits of that. Indeed, the person we choose to follow most closely will affect our lives powerful for the good or for the ill.

So then, who is your person? A parent? A friend? A social media influencer? Yourself? Or have you aimed higher than that? The difference here is between a life of wisdom and its blessings or one that is going to take you in all sorts of directions you don’t really want to go. The choice seems easy to make in this moment, but it takes courage and discipline to make it in real time. That’s why it all starts with knowing and respecting God for who He is. What are you doing to get to know Him better? That will be effort and energy well spent.