The idea of secret Christian wisdom makes nonbelievers uncomfortable. It sounds like we’re using it as an excuse to avoid ever having our beliefs challenged. I’ve had one friend tell me it makes us arrogant. But in fact the very opposite should be true! We don’t pretend like we’re smarter than everyone else or in God’s secret club, but rather we humbly take faith in the great, beautiful truths that transcend everything we may think we know.
This wisdom from God is folly to the unbeliever, because by all worldly accounts it makes no sense! It teaches that God is both one and three; that he is eternal and has no maker himself; that he is the king of every moral value, scientific law, and human soul; that such a God would humble himself to the point of death for the sake of love; that we can only find life by relinquishing our own life; and that we are destined for an eternity of indescribable joy. Let’s face it—for one whose worldview is strictly worldly, all of this is nonsense.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato has a famous example of a cave that illustrates this well. He imagines a man who has spent his entire life in a dark cave seeing only shadows. The man’s idea of a tree is really just a silhouette of a tree. But one day he is brought out into the sunlight and sees a colorful, 3-dimensional, frighteningly expansive world that he never could have imagined before. He comes to realize that all along, he had been operating from a very limited perspective, and the real world beyond his cave walls was rife with far greater wisdom than he in his confined world had ever thought possible.
God gives us the great gift of his Holy Spirit who invites us into the mind of God so that we may have the wisdom of heaven, which is far greater than our little planet. It puts even the world’s greatest, most rational, most creative minds to shame. So what parts of our thinking still rely on the world’s wisdom? Whatever those parts are, the Spirit invites you out of your cave. The sunlight might blind you for a minute, but then you’ll see the real things of which you previously only saw silhouettes. And how could you ever go back to the cave after that?
