How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?”

~ Proverbs 1:22

Wisdom can be defined as God’s perfect plan, principle, and perception for every situation. Additionally, in the book of Proverbs, “Wisdom” is often personified. And, in our text (above), this personified Wisdom challenges us to answer three questions.

Not so simple

The first question that Wisdom asks is, “How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?” This question can be rephrased as, “How long will you, live according to your own made-up version of how the world, how life, works?”

Life is complex beyond our imagination. There are too many inputs, too many parameters, too many relationships for us to process. It’s even too much for supercomputers or for AI to compute.

Moreover, as humans, we are vulnerable to both our biases and our desires. How then can anyone, by his/her own reasoning, hope to understand life? How can we decipher the right choices to make in each situation that arises?

Scammers, con artists, and their sort know this to be true. They know that it’s hard for people, despite their best efforts, to always see through their schemes. They know that our minds can be manipulated. They know that they can leverage our wants/desires to persuade us to make bad choices. And they prove it every day.

The original gangsta

The original con artist, satan, deceived Eve by preying on her weaknesses (Genesis 3). After talking to the devil, Eve thought that if she ate the fruit, she would become like God. However, she never considered why the devil was prompting her to eat the fruit, or why the serpent didn’t eat the fruit himself. She never considered whether the serpent was lying. She never considered what would happen if she did become “like God”.

Eve not only didn’t think it through, but even if she had tried, it was too complex to work out all the consequences of her choice. She had no way of calculating how her decision would affect all of mankind for millennia to come.

She didn’t factor in her relationship with God, or how her decision would affect her husband. Her only thoughts were, “the fruit is pretty, it looks like it would be delicious, and I could become God”.

However, life reminds us quite frequently that it is full of complexity: there are so many things we don’t understand; so many things happen that we never expected, that we can’t explain. Yet so many of us keep living according to our own understanding. We pretend that life is simple and that we have it “all figured out”.

Know more than God?

The second question that Wisdom asks is, “How long…will…the scorners delight in their scorning?” As before, this can be rephrased as, “How long will the proud love their pride?”

First, we considered danger of relying on ourselves how to make right choices. Now let us consider the problem of pride. Pride tells us that we are right and God is wrong. And, if we are determined to make our own choices, independent of God, we must believe that God is wrong: We must decide that we know how to navigate our lives better than He does. In other words, we cannot simultaneously believe that God is right, and make our own decisions apart from Him.

Therefore, once we decide to go our own way, we must also decide to belittle (i.e., scorn) God’s Word: God’s wisdom. We determine that our wisdom is superior to the wisdom in that outdated book called the Bible.

As for God, His way is perfect; The word of the Lord is proven; He is a shield to all who trust in Him.

Psalm 18:30

Can you handle the truth?

The third question that Wisdom asks is “How long…will…fools hate knowledge?” . First, we pretend that life is simple and we know what’s best. Then to justify our stance, we must our way of thinking above God’s: we know better than Him. Now we come to the final and perhaps the most damaging stage: to “hate knowledge”.

So that we are clear, knowledge here means the truth, the truth according to God, Who is the only one who can define truth.

The fool hates knowledge, he hates truth, because truth constantly reminds him that he can’t make it on his own and that he doesn’t know more than God. The truth must be shunned and despised and shut out of his life just so that he can have some peace, some quiet in order to live the life he wants to live without fear of truth’s rebuke.

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

Psalm 14:1

How long?

Finally, let’s examine the start of the question: “How long…?” The two words at the beginning of the question give us both hope and a warning. First, they tell us that we have a choice, we can turn around we can respond to Wisdom’s call and get off the wrong path. We don’t have to turn away from God’s voice forever. We can repent. We can be saved.

However, the second message from the cry “How long…” is perhaps more arresting. Because it tells us that we don’t have forever to make up our minds. We don’t have an eternity to decide. If we will answer Wisdom’s call, we will respond in God’s time, not ours. There is a finite window (that He alone determines) in which to make the right response to God. And when that window closes, there is will be no turning around.

And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh…”

Genesis 6:3