Through Wisdom: Righteousness, Freedom, Beauty



 A couple of years ago I was thinking about a slogan for my family.  A verse from James came to mind.

James 3:13
Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.


The word “good” there is the Greek word kalos.  It commonly means beautiful like in the word calligraphy, which means beautiful writing.  The “calli” comes from kalos, if that wasn’t obvious.  The idea is that wisdom produces a beautiful life. The idea of living a beautiful life sounded like a really good goal for me and my family. So I started thinking about how I could capture this idea in a short but meaningful statement. I added a few related, key elements to give it some meat.


Through Wisdom: Righteousness, Freedom, Beauty


Thinking through it, the beginning of wisdom is fearing the Lord according to Proverbs, making our relationship to God foundational. Wisdom leads us to God. Then once we have a relationship with Him it informs how we should live each part of our life in Him. More generally, wisdom means understanding what is true and beneficial in life. To be wise is to navigate the difficulties of life with skill.


Flowing out of wisdom, our relationship with God starts when we receive His righteousness through the gospel. When we believe that Jesus paid for our sins on the cross and was raised from the dead, God declares us morally righteous. Righteousness is a gift we hold on to, but it is also a lifestyle based on wise decisions. Paul says, "for the righteous shall live by faith" to the church in Rome, explaining that we can act righteously because we have received this gift.


Receiving God's righteousness also frees us. It frees us from sin. It frees us from having to rely on ourselves or other people. It frees us from customs or traditions that aren't true or good. We are free to leave the things of the world behind and join God in a new kind of life. The end points of that kind of freedom are things like political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, even freedom to pursue your own dreams in the most appropriate sense.


That brings us back to James 3:13.  Wisdom gives birth to a beautiful life.  The existence of beauty or the recognition of it is one of the proofs of the existence of God.  In a randomly occurring, evolutionary world beauty isn’t necessary and therefore evolution will not produce it.  Beauty is a recognition of order in creation, intelligence, skill, fulfilled purpose, or moral excellence (arete).  Beauty is found in art, music, math, science, stories, movies, love, etc. Every human feels it when they see it or hear it.  We experience beauty as pleasure.


Here is the possibility of a disconnection.  Humans can feel pleasure from beauty, even when that beauty is divorced from wisdom, righteousness, and freedom.  Maybe wisdom is still in play in the form of intelligence, reason, or skill.  But the wisdom is a counterfeit because it doesn’t start at the point of the fear of the Lord from Proverbs. Freedom can still be a factor in beauty, even when it is a counterfeit freedom that leads away from righteousness.


I think that is one definition of sin.  We enjoy pleasure that isn't righteous or wise. As an example, drugs can produce emotional or physical pleasure. The chemistry that produces drugs is an expression of wisdom.  Chemistry itself is beautiful, but drug use and addiction isn't wise. Think also of sexual promiscuity.  Think of pursuing the rock and roll lifestyle.  Think of science based on a completely mechanical, deterministic philosophy.  Think of athletes achieving some temporary glory through steroids, but later suffer great mental or physical damage.  Think of economics focused solely on becoming extravagantly wealthy without benefitting other people.  All those things promise pleasure.  They deliver pleasure in the short term, but their continual pursuit ends with pain, loss, and at the end death.  The Bible says the wages of sin is death. The parallels are obvious.


To finish these thoughts: taking wisdom, righteousness, freedom, and beauty together is a framework to describe natural law.  Natural law is a philosophy which tries to identify what is good.  It answers the question, what did God make humans to be?  What is our proper course of life?  Some say it can be deduced by exercising logic alone.  However, logic with wrong assumptions leads to wrong conclusions.  Philosophers who teach about natural law say that right reason uncovers natural law.  But reason apart from wisdom, righteousness, freedom, and beauty can never be right. Natural law is the beautiful life that James writes about.


In other words "through wisdom: righteousness, freedom, beauty" is not just my family slogan but my definition of natural law, a way to filter out the bad from the good in life.

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