There was a man named Harry who was working on a construction site, and to his surprise, he picked up a bottle. And as he was dusting it off, a genie popped out. And he was like, yes, I get three wishes.
And the genie said, hey, I got to warn you, I’m not really that powerful of a genie. And the guy said, OK, OK, I have an important business meeting tonight. I’m trying to start my own business.
I’m meeting with a potential investor. I need you to give me wisdom in the midst of this meeting. And the genie said, well, here’s what I can do.
I can give you this one-time good luck charm. To activate it, you say out loud, one, two, three. You can’t leave it open for too long, so when you finish, say one, two, three, four, and it’s finished.
That night, Harry could not believe his good luck as he was putting on his tie in the mirror. He kept repeating one, two, three in his mind, making sure he didn’t say it out loud until he got there. And he nervously stood before the door and knocked on the rich man’s office.
Come in, the man said with a loud and poising voice. OK, here goes, Harry said to himself. And he stepped through the door and he was making his way to the man’s desk.
He said, he mumbled the words, one, two, three. And he knew at that moment everything would be OK. He knew what he was going to say.
He knew that that wisdom he had always desired was right there on his lips. And he opened his mouth to start speaking. But before he could, the rich man said pleasantly back to him, what did you say one, two, three, four? Not even a smile, Holly.
Often today in our lives, we may seek wisdom in things that are fleeting, in one-time things, in quick things. And we don’t see the long-term benefit of wisdom. We just take stuff in and want to use it right away.
Now, Solomon is who we’re going to look at today. Solomon is the son of David. And Solomon was raised under a king.
And when it was his turn to become king, he was a man of God. Will you stand as you are able? First Kings, starting in chapter 3, verse 3. Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David, his father. Only he sacrificed and made offerings at the high places.
And the king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the great high place. Solomon used to offer a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. And at Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night.
And God said, ask what I shall give you. And Solomon said, you have shown great and steadfast love to your servant David, my father, because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you. And you have kept for him this great and steadfast love and have given him a son to sit on his throne this day.
And now, oh my Lord God, you have made your servant king in place of David, my father. Although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.
And your servant is in the midst of your people, whom you have chosen, a great people, too many to be numbered or counted for multitude. Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil. For who is able to govern this, your great people? It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this.
And God said to him, because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself a long life or riches or the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been seen before, and none like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you all your days.
And if you walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days. And Solomon awoke, and behold, it was a dream. There he came to Jerusalem and stood before the ark of the covenant of the Lord and offered up burnt offerings and peace offerings and made a feast for all his servants.
The word of God. For the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Amen. You may be seated. Solomon, instead of saying like a genie in the bottle, when God came to him to make him rich or anything else, he said, I need wisdom.
I need to know how to be a righteous leader, how to govern these people, how to choose between good and evil. And it pleased God. The Cambridge Dictionary says that wisdom is the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good judgments.
You see the difference between knowledge and wisdom? Knowing something and knowing what to do with it are two different things. Wisdom is what God gives us. There is a gift of knowledge and a gift of wisdom.
Wisdom helps us to discern what is right and what is good. I’m going to do this again. I got to look Earl in the eye or this doesn’t work.
There’s a poem that went like this. A wise old owl lived in an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like this wise old bird? How many of you ever woke up and said, God, make me be wise like an owl? Per the International Owl Institute, did you know there was such a thing? Owls are wise is a myth. Owls are often seen as wise due to their large eyes, their resolute posture, and their relative silence.
Owls are good at doing what they need to do to survive in the wild, but they are quite slow and often stubborn when it comes to training them in captivity. Part of the reason owls are considered wise is because Athena, who was the goddess of wisdom, chose the owl as like her mascot. The challenge we have is wisdom is actually more powerful than money, power, or fame, or acquiring or dispensing information.
But too often we take shortcuts for pride and selfish reasons that impede applying wisdom. You see, there can be two extremes. One extreme means we jump into action or we start telling people what is right and what they need to do and how they messed up before we’ve gathered all the information.
In other words, social media. Another one is that we just sit there and take in information and we cannot make a decision and we’re just stuck. In fact, that can happen a lot today in this age of digital information.
We can have information overload and it’s hard to understand. You would think I would be more understanding on shoe shopping with my son when he doesn’t just decide to get some shoes and go because there was a point in my mom’s life where she quit shopping with me because I wouldn’t decide on the shoes I wanted to get, which for her were usually the cheapest ones. At least that’s what was in my mind.
That’s where I get it from, guys. Wisdom is actually more powerful than money, fame, or acquiring and dispensing information. When Solomon asked for wisdom, God said, that is so good.
You see, that wisdom brings us a little closer to God because God is the source of all wisdom. As we learned in the call to worship where Job talking about seeking wisdom, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge or wisdom at its source is found in the fear of the Lord, in revering God, in trusting in God. Solomon could have asked for money.
He could have asked for power. He could have asked for the heads of his enemies, but he simply asked for wisdom to be a good leader and God blessed that and was so pleased with that choice. As we go on, it shows us in here some of the ways Solomon used his wisdom.
Remember the two women that came before him and they were arguing. One was trying to steal the other’s baby and he said, well, let’s just divide the baby in half and each of you get half and one of the moms said, yeah, that’s fair. And the other one said, no, she can have the baby.
I don’t want the baby to die. And so he gave it to the woman who said she didn’t want the baby to die. And then it built from there.
The Bible tells us that people came from all over the world just to listen to Solomon and hear his wisdom and to hear what he would pour out. In chapter four, it says, and God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breath of mind like the sand of the seashore so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. And he was wiser than other men, wiser than Ethan, the Ezraite and Hermon and Chalcol and Darda, the sons of Mahal and his fame was in all surrounding nation.
He also spoke out 3000 Proverbs and her songs were 1005. He spoke of trees from cedar that was in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He also spoke of beasts and of birds and of reptiles and fish and the people of all nations to come to hear the wisdom of Solomon from all the kings of the earth who heard about his wisdom.
That’s a lot of wisdom that God gave Solomon. I mean, he was basically what you would call a genius in his time, someone who figured things out, but he started doing things eventually that would not have been what God had called him to do. There’s something about wisdom that in and of itself, it’s not better than whether or not you have it.
If God isn’t the source, if God isn’t the source of wisdom, then there’s no Holy Spirit involved in it. Then there’s no glory to the kingdom involved in it. And people can be wise in their own eyes, but not necessarily holy before God.
Isaiah says it like this, woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Has anybody ever experienced that in their lives? Who put out darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitterness for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight.
We have that so much these days. And wisdom of the earthly nature infiltrates the church and infiltrates life. And then you have this perceived worldly wisdom, but it is not grounded in God.
It is not grounded in the spirit of God. So the answer to the struggle we have with religion in the world today by so many is now going to be solved through AI. AI, see that’s a replacement picture that God with Adam.
Paul Kinsworth says, tells us so many examples. In a Buddhist Japan, they now have robot priests. Mindar is a robot priest who has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years reciting Buddhist sutras with which he has been programmed.
The next step that says monk Tensho Gato is an excitable champion of the digital dharma is to fit it with an AI system so it can have real conversations and offer real spiritual advice. Gato is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is immortal. That means he says that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than him.
Meanwhile, over in China, Zanier is a touchscreen robot monk who works in a temple near Beijing spreading kindness, compassion, and wisdom to those, to others through the internet and now media. In India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties of their major ceremonies to a robot arm which performs in the place of a priest. In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits Santo, an AI robot which looks like the statue of a saint and is designed to help people pray by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.
Not to be outdone, a Protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called BlessU2. I kind of like that name. I don’t know why.
BlessU2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can forgive your sins in five different languages which must be handy if they’re too embarrassed to confess their sins to one another. Wisdom is different than information. Have I said that yet? Wisdom is different than knowledge.
Wisdom that comes from God is not just quotes and it’s not just words. It’s backed by the power of God and the Holy Spirit pouring into it so that when we speak with wisdom, we are to speak with the knowledge of God. We are to speak with what God puts in our hearts to choose between evil and good and to say when something is evil and to say when something is good and to help the world untwist where we are at where evil is presented as good and good is presented as evil so people are confused and then they don’t see as much of a need for God in their lives.
1 Kings 10 says, And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen whom he stationed in 12,000 horsemen whom he stationed in the chief cities, chariot cities, and with the king of Jerusalem. And then the psalmist knowing what would happen through the wisdom of God says, Some trust in chariots and some in horses but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. Something happens somewhere.
Just like power, too much power can corrupt too much knowledge and too much wisdom can corrupt if we don’t always humble ourselves before God and trust in God and know that God will give us strength and will give us guidance. As Solomon went on, he had 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines and his wives turned his heart away from God. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart after other gods and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God and was the heart of David his father.
Solomon went after gods, other gods. Solomon thought he was so wise he could expose himself to so much and there comes a point where people may think they’re wiser than God and the Lord was angry with Solomon because he had turned away from the Lord the God of Israel who appeared to him twice. Remember God said clearly, and if you will walk in my ways keeping my statutes and my commandments as your father David walked then I will lengthen your days.
That’s the difference. That’s where we travel from the wisdom of God to the wisdom of the world is when we step away from commandments of God, when we step away from following God, when we step away from humbling ourselves before God and saying the same thing Solomon said early on when he said, I am young. I need wisdom.
I need you. I need your guidance. I can’t do this without you God.
If we ever move to the point where we say I can’t do this, if we say, well, I’ve been through this. I have life experience so I don’t need God in the midst of this. We may not even say that consciously but that’s when things begin to change.
When the wisdom of this age changes evil and twists evil for good and good for evil. How many things in political campaigns do they just outright say this person is evil because they like this thing that once was good. 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says, do not deceive yourselves any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age.
You should become fools so that you may become wise for the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. Sometimes it just seems foolish. I mean we started off this series on great minds with talking about the transformation of our minds and talking about how we have peace that passes all understanding and it means we have peace that passes all understanding because it doesn’t make any sense.
It makes us look like fools if we can have peace in the midst of all the tribulation and all the things going on in the world today. It makes us look like fools if we can have joy with all the heartache and pain that is going on in the world or if we devote ourselves to a God that the world doesn’t understand. If we give sacrificially it seems unwise.
Job is considered by most biblical scholars to be the oldest written book of the Bible. Wisdom that came before all this with David started developing and with Moses and he said these words and he said to the man behold the fear of the Lord that is wisdom and to turn away from evil is understanding. Seeking wisdom can draw us closer to God but we need to check our wisdom, our decisions, our actions with God’s will.
We should seek wisdom in all things but we should seek wisdom through God. That’s true wisdom. That’s when we can have great minds in a world that needs… I think the world needs some great minds today.
Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you for the example of Solomon. At least early on help us to never be too wise in our own eyes.
Help us to be humble before you. Help us to trust in you. Help us to make our decisions knowing that you can show us what we need.
And that it’s not all about us. Help us to seek your wisdom, that wisdom that will help us choose good versus evil. That will help us make wise judgments.
That will help us discern what is right and what is true and what is good in your eyes. We seek your will. We seek to place all information we have given before your throne so you can give us guidance on what to do with it.
May we always remain humble before you. May we always realize that even though the evil and the wrong seems to dominate over what is good and true and right and holy and just, that you are our God. That this is your world.
That we are your creation. So we humble before you. You are the source of wisdom.
In Jesus’ name, all God’s people said, Amen.