Instruction, education, or discipleship can sometimes be reduced to the transference of ideas from one brain to another. The young person who needs to learn needs to read a book, listen to a lecture, and follow commands, we think. Teaching of this sort is indispensable to learning wisdom. God, after all, gave us a book of books that we are to hear and read to know him, to understand his works and his will.
If left to mere talk, the communication of information, our teaching is truncated and insufficient. The goal of education in wisdom is about formation not merely information. Teachers are looking to capture the disciple’s heart, shaping his desires as well as his ideas, forming habits as well as inculcating facts.
Desire is key. What you desire you will pursue, love, and cherish.
What do we desire? We desire that which we believe is beautiful. What is beautiful is the highest good. What we consider beautiful draws us to itself promising us, with and without words, the good life.
Solomon wants his son to desire wisdom’s beauty. So, in Proverbs 3.13-18 he paints a portrait of wisdom’s beauty for his son. This little section might even be considered a hymn of praise of Wisdom. There are no commands in the section. There is only the portrait of the beauty of Wisdom with the promise of the blessedness for those who lay hold on her. There are commands, exhortations, and admonitions elsewhere in Proverbs. All of those are needed, but they need to be conjoined with why we are doing all of these things: the pursuit of the beautiful.
Because of the foolishness that is bound up in our hearts from conception (Pr 22.15), our visions of beauty are distorted. We will tend toward the superficial, vaporous beauty of Harlot Folly. We need our vision reordered to see the beauty of Wisdom; the beauty of a well-ordered life that lives at peace with God, others, and the non-human world around us.
Instruction in wisdom, therefore, is not merely explicated but demonstrated. For our children to learn wisdom, wisdom needs to be exemplified in our well-ordered lives as parents. It is not enough to have strict rules, stridently catechizing children, and rigidly doing all the right things. Rules are needed. The discipline of catechesis and doing the right thing even when you don’t feel like it are needed. There will be times you will need to fight the distorted visions of beauty that come from the heart of foolishness in a child. But there must be more. Wisdom’s beauty must be exemplified in the home in affection between husband and wife, parents and children. There should be hefty bouts of laughter as well as non-anxious quiet that comes when people are at ease with and around one another.
I’m not talking about putting on sappy, superficial, over-the-top, fake acts, but training your own hearts to love wisdom’s beauty so that the genuineness of your love so pervades your life that your children want to grow up and be like you. As your children grow, they can see the contrast between the life that they see in you and what is going on in people who give themselves over to sin. As you have instructed them along the way about why you are the way that you are, they know how to lead the life that will direct them to be like you.
This wisdom must also be portrayed in the church for the sake of the world. The church is, after all, Lady Wisdom, the helper of the eternal Son in ordering the world under his lordship. Because we are Lady Wisdom as the church, we are to be the embodiment of beauty. The church is to be living a well-ordered life with proper relationships in authority, serving one another in love, maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, exuberantly worshiping our God.
As we adorn the gospel in wisdom, with our well-ordered lives, in union with Christ we become “the Desire of all nations” (Hag 2.7), the beautiful bride of Christ to whom the nations come for healing and to bring their gifts (Rev 21.9—22.5).
The incarnate beauty of Wisdom is key to discipling the nations.
