“Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me.” (Psalm 119:78)
No one likes to be taken advantage of or tricked. No one likes to lose or come in last. No one likes to give up the fight or surrender the war. So we search for and cling to common sense, insight, wisdom, strength, strategy, even shrewdness. To be wiser, not stronger than our enemies is the desired goal. For God’s people, this wisdom is hidden and found in God’s word.
We are a DIY kind of people, though. “Do it yourself” is a great mindset and motivation for learning new skills, for challenging yourself, for making yourself into something better. But it is not a great mindset and motivation for growing in God’s wisdom. For that you can’t look to yourself.
God spoke through Jeremiah to his people, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’?…they have rejected the word of the LORD, so what wisdom is in them?” (Jeremiah 8:8-9) If you absent yourself from God’s word, you absent your life from God’s wisdom – from God.
God’s people know where to find him. Sadly, “Even the stork in the heavens knows her times, and the turtledove, swallow, and cranekeep the time of their coming, but my people know not the rules of the Lord.” (8:7) There should be within the heart of God’s people an innate, intuitive, instinctual, natural longing for God’s word, and we should know how to get to it. Like birds have a knowledge of seasons and times and respond automatically to these in nature, so God’s people should be sensitive and not insensitive, responsive and not unresponsive to the seasons and times, the movements and patterns of God in and for our lives through his word. It is unnatural for God’s people not to desire his word.
It is not enough to know how to do something. You must actually do it. You must put your hand and feet to the task, your heart and mind into it, your love and commitment behind it. Fighting a war against your enemies is not an easy, quick, comfortable task. But having wisdom, the right kind of wisdom, from above, keeps you one step ahead of your enemies. You can come to know how they think, feel, plan, and move.
For God’s people in our fight against sin, temptation, the devil, injustice, and “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16), the word of God is indispensable and irreplaceable. For this reason it must be “ever with me.”
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