“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”
– Proverbs 9:10
Now we’ve seen this phrase before in Proverbs 9:10, “the fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom”, and then you see the second phrase that kind of parallels the first phrase here. So it’s basically saying the same thing, repeating it, but using different words. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and … So the parallel is the knowledge of the Holy one is insight.
The more we know God, the wiser we will be.
Proverbs 9:10 Helps Us Fear the Lord
So we’re seeing the fear of the Lord in a sense equated here with the knowledge of the Holy One, and wisdom equated with insight. So just as the fear of the Lord leads to wisdom, so the knowledge of the Holy One leads to insight, which just brings us back to if we want wisdom in our lives, it starts … And we’ve seen this from the very first chapter, with the fear of the Lord, and here described as the knowledge of the Holy One. So the more we know God, the more we know the Holy One, the more we know God in all of His holiness, and glory, and majesty, and might, and all of His attributes and all of His characteristics, the more we know God, the wiser we will be. The more insight we will have in this life.
This Verse Leads Us to Pray for Us to Know God More
So we pray, God we want to know You more. Today, this is our prayer. We want to know You more fully, more completely, through Your Word, we want to know You as we walk in step with Your Spirit, we want to obey You. As we obey You, to know You more. God we want to boast in one thing when it’s all over. Just like it says in Jeremiah 9, “Let him who boasts boast in this, that he knows and understands me.” That’s our prayer, oh God. So help us, we pray, to know You more.
Help us to know Your holiness, Your greatness, Your grandeur, Your love, Your majesty, Your mercy, Your justice, Your wrath, all of these things that make up who You are. We want to know You more today and we trust that when we know You more, that we will have insight and wisdom in our lives. We will have a right perspective on all the things around us. So help us we pray, to grow in our fear of You today, and our knowledge of You, the Holy One. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
