{"id":2904,"date":"2023-08-18T03:40:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T07:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2904"},"modified":"2023-08-18T03:41:03","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T07:41:03","slug":"the-beginning-of-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/18\/the-beginning-of-wisdom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning of Wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>.

Throughout the month of August, we\u2019re looking at Ecclesiastes, that strange and seemingly \u201cmodern\u201d Old Testament book that depicts what happens when humanity searches for ultimate meaning apart from God. <\/em>
 
Fear can lead us to do crazy things. 
 
In 2003, fear almost led the President of the United States to order fighters to shoot down commercial airliners.
 
In his book Pay Any Price, <\/em>Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen recounts the harrowing tale of Dennis Montgomery.  Shortly after the 9\/11 terror attacks, Montgomery approached the U.S. government claiming to be a computer programming savant.
 
He announced that he had developed a magic weapon to stop terrorism.
 
Montgomery claimed that his super-secret computer technology could decipher coded messages from Al Qaeda that were hidden in plain sight in the corporate logo of Al Jazeera, the television network that occasionally aired taped statements from Osama Bin Laden.
 
At this point, a thoughtful person should pause and say aloud, \u201cThat\u2019s the dumbest thing I\u2019ve ever heard.\u201d
 
But America\u2019s intelligence community \u2013 deeply embarrassed by its failures to foresee 9\/11 and to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq \u2013 grabbed hold of Montgomery\u2019s program as if it were the Holy Grail.  In Risen\u2019s words, \u201cIt was too impossible to disbelieve.\u201d
 
Dennis Montgomery convinced key people that Al Qaeda was communicating through bar codes hidden on TV broadcasts.  And only he could make sense of it all.
 
In December 2003, Montgomery\u2019s computer program began to spit out hidden letters and numbers:  AF, UA, AA, followed by two- or three-digit numbers.  The CIA quickly decided these must represent Air France, United Airlines, and American Airlines flight numbers.  Then Montgomery ominously passed along the repeating symbol C4.  Explosives!<\/em>
 
Listening to his advisors, President George W. Bush grounded a number of transatlantic flights, stranding thousands of passengers on foreign shores.
 
Certain CIA officials were so sure that Montgomery\u2019s program was America\u2019s most vital source of intelligence data, and so fearful that another attack was imminent, that the White House even contemplated shooting down jetliners that were already airborne.
 
Fortunately, Dennis Montgomery\u2019s house of cards came tumbling down before that could happen.  It turns out the self-proclaimed genius had no computer programming skills at all.  His services, for which he was paid millions of dollars, constitute \u201cone of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history.\u201d
 
Fear can lead us to do crazy things.  And to believe things that under any other circumstances we would never even consider.
 
How do you impress people who live in our day and age?  Hit them with data.  Inundate them with knowledge \u2013 real or imagined. 
 
But the crying need of our day and age isn\u2019t another graph, white paper, or secret keys to unlocking secret codes.  It\u2019s wisdom<\/em>.  \u201cWesterners live in a culture that has separated knowledge from ethics,\u201d writes author Terry Muck.  Standardized methods for identifying \u201csmart people\u201d \u2013 whether IQ tests, SATs, or beating the rest of your family every night watching Jeopardy!<\/em> \u2013 are not to be confused with measurements of spiritual and emotional health.   
 
Insightful and informed people, in other words, are not necessarily people who grasp the meaning of life.  It\u2019s quite possible to know a great deal about a lot of stuff, yet not know how to live.   
 
Our society is starved for wisdom \u2013 which just happens to be right up the alley of the author of Ecclesiastes:
 
\u201cWisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing and benefits those who see the sun.  Wisdom is a shelter\u2026 Wisdom preserves those who have it\u2026 Wisdom makes one wise person more powerful than ten rulers in a city\u201d (Ecclesiastes 7:11, 12, 19). 
 
Wisdom isn\u2019t about becoming a more intelligent person, or fooling people at the CIA.  It\u2019s a call to become a \u201cspiritual street-smart\u201d person \u2013 someone who knows how to thrive in a culture where listening for God\u2019s voice has become something of a lost art. 
 
It\u2019s worth noting that 15% of the total volume of the Bible is so-called Wisdom Literature \u2013 the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and of course Ecclesiastes. 
 
How in the world do we make sense of such much content?
 
At least we know where to begin: \u201cThe fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom\u201d (Proverbs 1:7, 9:10; Psalm 111:10). 
 
It\u2019s amazing that Scripture never once tells us to fear the devil.  We are not to fear evil.  There is no need to fear death.  Jesus even tells us not to be afraid of people who are seriously intent on harming us (Matthew 10:26-31).
 
Instead, spiritual health is all about cultivating an appropriate fear of God.  That\u2019s not to be confused with spiritual paralysis or a sense of servile terror.  \u201cFearing God\u201d means choosing to take God seriously \u2013 embracing with joy his promises of mercy and grace, even while heeding his warnings when we’re tempted to succumb to disastrous choices. 
  
To paraphrase Augustine, the church’s first great theologian, life really comes down to just two choices:  We can either fear God or fear everything else<\/em>. 
 
That\u2019s a great thing to remember the next time you turn on the national news.
 
Not to mention a reminder that it\u2019s OK to stop looking for hidden bar codes in every morning reflection.

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Throughout the month of August, we\u2019re looking at Ecclesiastes, that strange and seemingly \u201cmodern\u201d Old Testament book that depicts what happens when humanity searches for ultimate meaning apart from God.  Fear can lead us to do crazy things.  In 2003, fear almost led the President of the United States to order fighters to shoot… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2905,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[618,242,122],"class_list":["post-2904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ecclesiastes","tag-fear-of-the-lord","tag-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2907,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions\/2907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}