The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 5 – 6
Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom
Proverbs 2:6 For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.
God doesn’t stutter. These are not three words for the same thing. Wisdom, knowledge, and understanding are different. Each has a unique purpose, and each has a special connection to each of the fractions of your mind.
In Genesis 3:5-6,22 eating the fruit gave them the knowledge of “good and evil”, hence the name God gave the tree (Genesis 2:17). What’s interesting is that Eve ate the fruit because it was“…a tree to be desired to make one WISE”.
So knowing the difference between good and evil is wisdom. Now read the story of Solomon’s wisdom in 2 Chronicles 1:7-12. Solomon wanted wisdom so he could JUDGE God’s people. What do “wise men” in the church do? 1 Corinthians 6:5.
What do judges do? Exodus 18:16. How should judges judge? Amos 5:14-15. What was Israel’s wisdom? Deuteronomy 4:5-8. Wisdom means being able to look at any random set of facts, at any situation, at any choice, and being able to say “this is what the law says”. In other words, wisdom is the ability to judge well!
“The knowledge of good and evil” is an awkward phrase that obscures what should be a very obvious meaning here; wisdom is not simply knowing what good and evil are, but how to tell the difference between them! How to judge which choice is good, and which choice is evil –which, of course, means that wisdom is the prerogative of the soul.
Hearts aren’t supposed to judge! (Job 34:17). They often do, in this corrupt world. But when hearts judge, that “wisdom” is devilish! (James 3:14-16,17). Does verse 17 describe a good heart… or a good soul? Obviously, it describes the soul because that’s where wisdom is SUPPOSED to dwell!
The spirit isn’t supposed to judge; if the spirit gets involved in judging, it ceases to be a good spirit and treads upon the territory of the soul! (James 4:11-12). Determining the difference between good and evil –wisdom –is something that should always and only be done by the soul! It should be the only judge in your body!
To do otherwise is devilish –hearkening back to the very first lie the devil told mankind, when he taught their HEART to judge instead of their soul!
THE FUTURE OF THE TREE
The world assumes that tree was there simply to tempt them; that the tree would always be off limits to Adam and Eve forever. But we are supposed to be able to judge; shame on us if we can’t! It is not merely allowed, it is the entire purpose for our creation –to judge the world by Jesus’ side! (Revelation 20:4).
Satan’s promise “that you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” wasn’t a lie; God confirmed in Genesis 3:22. In fact, it’s exactly the same as God’s promises in 1 John 3:1-2, Revelation 3:21, Daniel 7:22, 27. Satan wasn’t lying about the promise; he was lying about the method required to receive it! Just as he does in the world’s churches even today!
So if God always intended to give them the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, why forbid them to eat it? Hebrews 5:14. You tell your small children not to use sharp knives; you don’t let your ten-year-old drive a car; you don’t let your fourteen-year-old date; you make hundreds of arbitrary rules for your children not because they are never going to be able to use a sharp knife or drive or go on dates… but because you know they simply aren’t capable YET!
Adam and Eve were, in effect, newborn children; they were not yet equipped to judge for themselves, and decide for themselves the difference between good and evil! But God put them in the Garden to teach them! In time, they would have been able to learn the difference.
And when that happened, God would have given them the fruit Himself!
FEAR OF THE LORD
But before they could eat of that fruit, before they could exercise wisdom, they had to learn something else! Psalms 111:10. Look closely at that verse, and you’ll see that before acquiring wisdom, two other things are required; “understanding”, and “fear of the Lord”. You can’t just go out and pick wisdom off a tree or buy it in a market!
Is there a place where everything comes from? Job 28:1-11. So where does wisdom come from? Can you buy it? Job 28:12-19. Who has it? Where can you get it? Job 28:20-28. How did David get it? Psalms 119:98.
According to Job 28:20-21, no man or bird (angel) can just go out and be wise. It must be built upon a foundation of something else, something given by God –“the fear of the Lord”. What does that mean exactly? Deuteronomy 5:29.
Fearing the Lord leads you to learn about Him; it leads to KNOWLEDGE of God’s laws! (Proverbs 1:7). And if you hate God, you will reject that knowledge (Proverbs 1:29), and become a fool! (Jeremiah 5:4). And fools are by definition unwise! (Deuteronomy 32:6).
We are all fools at first, because we don’t know the law! But by learning the law, we learn the fear of God and start a path that may end in wisdom! (Deuteronomy 17:18-20). Wisdom is the measure of your soul’s ability to take knowledge and use it to make a judgment!
So before you have wisdom, you must first have knowledge, and the fear of God, something Adam and Eve clearly did not have or they wouldn’t have eaten the fruit! Which, ironically, is exactly WHY God didn’t want them to eat the fruit!
WHERE ARE KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
In Proverbs 8:20 wisdom says “I lead in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of judgment”. Is that not exactly what a wise soul does? So if wisdom is a skill of the soul, then where does knowledge dwell? Deuteronomy 4:39.
So what part of you must fear the Lord? Proverbs 23:17. Why was God grieved by Israel? Psalms 95:10. Where does the law dwell? Isaiah 51:7. Where is it written? Psalms 40:8. What is it that learns knowledge? Proverbs 18:15. Where do you learn it? Proverbs 22:17.
So clearly, knowledge is the heart’s domain, just as wisdom is the soul’s domain. But while wisdom is the ability to rightly choose between facts, knowledge is the ability to memorize facts. Your soul, like any leader, doesn’t need to be bothered to remember the value of pi; the smell of Camembert; what color mauve actually is.
When the soul needs to know things like that, he asks someone. He asks the heart (Psalms 77:5-6). But that’s just for knowledge. Where is understanding? Read Job 20:3, Proverbs 17:27. Where does God put understanding? Job 32:8.
So it is the soul which has wisdom, the heart which has knowledge, and the spirit which has understanding.
To give a practical example, knowledge is knowing WHAT a ditch is, and HOW to dig one; something the dumbest beast can learn (take dogs, for example). So the heart records knowledge – simple facts.
Understanding lies in knowing WHY a ditch is needed, WHERE it should go, HOW BIG it needs to be for this application, and so on. The words “need” and “should” imply a right way and a wrong way, which show that this is the realm of the spirit.
Understanding merges and applies the facts about drainage, location, and purpose that the beast learned, but can’t really express as a meaningful whole. The summary of the information that the beast knows and the lesson we can take away from that experience is the job of the spirit.
But wisdom is only required of the boss; his job is knowing WHEN to dig a ditch. His job is to take all the spirit’s advice, all the beast’s concerns and complaints into account, and then decide that we WILL dig a ditch today.
Put differently, the beast stores the information, but the spirit creates a web of connections tying that information together to make it make sense. We call that “understanding”. For instance, memorizing that 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4 is a fact that any beast can, in theory, learn.
But understanding – see, we use the word correctly most of the time – understanding that a half of a pie, shared between two people, gives them a quarter each is a different sort of information. The abstract knowing of the laws of fractions is different from the understanding of the meaning of those same laws!
So while it is the beast’s job to store knowledge; it is the spirit’s job to index it; and it is the soul’s job to use it. The soul is the one who encountered a problem, and asked his heart for the fact and the spirit for the meaning and used them to decide how to slice the pizza.
ALGEBRA
Any beast can memorize algebraic rules (A × B = AB), but if you ask most teenagers what that means, you’d get a blank look or a dumb answer because they don’t understand algebra! If their spirit understood algebra, if they knew what it really WAS, it would be easy to explain.
In a spreadsheet, column A is next to column B. If A is the price, and B is the quantity, then in order to get a meaningful conclusion from that information, you must multiply – not add – the information together!
Then the teenager should, and probably would, ask: “why call them A and B, why not just use the actual numbers?” This is their broken spirit trying to understand something the beast was forced to memorize.
A typical (bad) teacher with an unbroken spirit will say “because that’s how it’s done”, and try to force the student to accept the facts, to just memorize the answers to pass the test, without giving them the meaning so necessary to understand and USE these facts!
But a teacher who actually understands algebra would explain that we use letters because they work with any number. “A” could be 10, or 46, depending on how many boards we have to buy to build that deck. “B” could be $2.57 or $17.43, depending on the price of the wood we use.
By writing it as a formula “AB”, we can make a universal rule that applies to all future situations, so that one rule can be used anywhere, anytime! Because A and B are just placeholders, we use them because they hold the place of the numbers we need, and when we’re ready to use the formula, we swap out the letters with the numbers we’re working with at that time.
(In case you’re wondering… yes, the teenager with a bad algebra teacher who wanted him to memorize rules of algebra without understanding it… was me. This is the conversation I’d like to have with my 15-year-old self. Well, one of many conversations.)
So the heart memorizes the rules, facts, and knowledge; that’s its job, and what it’s good at. But the spirit understands what those rules mean. And it’s the soul that decides when they apply and when to use them.
It’s the soul that realizes “I want to build a deck. I’m going to put my quantities in one column and add them up – call that column A – and then my prices in column B, then apply that algebraic formula AB and come up with the price I’ll need! Then I’ll tell that pimply teenager ‘In your face! SEE, you DID use algebra when you grew up!’”
YOUR LIBRARY
As you’ve seen, the heart stores knowledge, the spirit stores understanding, and the soul stores wisdom. But there’s a problem; the heart is a beast. It’s not that smart and it’s lazy. A cow can sit and chew the cud for days, and never really see what it looks at.
It can seem to be looking at, say, a group of trees or a cluster of feed buckets, and if you were to ask it how many there were, it would have no idea. This information is not processed by the beast, because even though it looks at things, it rarely sees them.
Are you so different? How many steps are there in your house? How many sheets of toilet paper do you pull off the roll at a time? What is the order of the colors in Google’s logo? Your beast has seen these facts a thousand times but it doesn’t remember them. Just like an animal staring blankly into space while it chews the cud.
Yet even though the beast can’t access them, it doesn’t mean they aren’t stored in there somewhere. The human brain has the capacity to store almost unlimited amounts of information indefinitely. Neurologists generally believe that forgetting is not so much a losing of a memory, as it is losing the ability to access it.
We’ve all had a day when we swear we’ve never seen a movie, then after some prompting we remember – or maybe it just pops into our head days later. Clearly, the information wasn’t lost. It was just irretrievable using those search terms.
As with any subject, experts disagree but trend towards the belief that all data we ever process is stored somewhere, but if we don’t care enough about it to review it a few times, we stop indexing it and “forget” it.
Think of it like a library with practically infinite storage space, where each memory is a saved as a book. The heart is the author of the books of memory; the spirit is the librarian who indexes them with a quick summary; and the soul is the patron who comes into the library wanting to check out a book.
Your most recently “written” books are on the newest shelves; but gradually, as they are hidden behind the ever-increasing store of new memories, you “lose” them. Not that they stop existing, you just can’t find them among the mountain of books written since then.
Your favorite books, the ones you review all the time, are kept track of so you can always go find them when you need them. Your mind knows this memory is on shelf 117, row 5340, in book 1249; so a memory from first grade might be easier to recall than a memory from yesterday, if your librarian put more effort into filing it better!
Given this metaphor, the problem with memory is not so much the actual storage process, as it is the filing system. Not so much a problem with the author it is with the librarian. Not so much a problem with the beast as a problem with the spirit!
Now if your beast truly is staring blankly into space most of the time, it must be taught to write better books; to see what it looks at. A strong soul can make the beast learn these things, because the beast will have to be taught to see what is right in front of it.
But if your spiritual librarian is too lazy to be pried off his chair to go look for the memory your soul asks for, your soul will get the response “no! I don’t remember!”, when in fact you do have that memory, you spirit just isn’t meek enough to go down the library shelves looking for the memory!
Maybe the spirit will get around to looking for it in a few weeks, and the memory will pop into your head far too late to do any good. Or maybe your friend’s continual nagging “Don’t you remember? We were there, with that thing, and I had that…”, so that the librarian will grudgingly go call up the memory.
But rest assured, your memories have not been lost, if they were ever recorded in the first place. You just have to break your spirit enough to get it to index the memories better, and to humble itself under your soul’s commands enough to put forth the effort to access them.
INDEXING UNDERSTANDING
When the soul comes to the library looking for an answer – a memory, a fact it remembers learning, and so on – like anyone who googles something, it’s usually looking for a very specific answer, but it often isn’t quite sure how to ask it.
This is why the filing of the spirit is so important. But that only helps if the soul remembers the exact event where this fact was learned so the memory can be accessed. This is where the spirit’s other job comes in – the creation of “abstracts”.
In scientific terms, an abstract is a summary of the conclusions drawn in a paper they published. It is the “TL;DR” for each experience. In this case, after the heart experiences and writes the memory, the spirit reviews it. Then it should take the facts in the experience and boil it down to the summary.
What can we learn from that experience? What should we do differently next time? What was the point of that story? How can we use these facts we learned? Remember, in our life we have seen, heard, and learned a LOT. And no soul can process every fact ever learned every time it must make a judgment!
Just as the heart must learn knowledge, the spirit must put the pieces of that knowledge together and draw conclusions from it. Its job is to streamline knowledge to make it quickly available; to boil it down to the essence of the experience so it can be easily used.
And just like Google’s crawling bots, it should also cross-reference that knowledge so it can be accessed from related facts when needed. If I need a memory involving a watermelon, for example, my spirit promptly accesses the beast’s knowledge to provide a list of fact-memories about watermelons (color, shape, cost, weight, smell, season, type of plant they grow on, etc.); and will also offer up memories involving “watermelons, eating of”.
But it will also provide a selection of “see also” memories involving the country song “watermelon crawl”, watermelon seed spitting contests I almost competed in as a child, that time we grew 5 acres of watermelons, and so on. Reviewing any of these memories then links to a dozen related memories, and so on.
With an active spirit, it isn’t so much a cruise down memory lane, as it is getting lost in a memory web. And it is these connections which make random facts like “Columbus landed in 1492”, which no one cares about, into a meaningful story explaining the settling of America. This is the difference between knowledge and understanding.
Sometimes these connections the spirit makes form stories; sometimes they boil down the lessons learned from dozens of experiences into a single lesson, which can be expressed as a single principle.
MENTAL BUFFER
The beast’s brain is very efficient at storing information. But it only has room for a few facts at a time on its metaphorical desk. It makes a memory, and passes it on to long term storage. It has a thought, then gives it to the spirit for filing.
So when you give the beast a command, it can only focus on that command and forgets whatever else it’s doing. If you give it several commands in a row, it is certain to forget the succeeding ones. That’s because creating chains of information, things to do in sequence, or if-then functions, is the job of the spirit.
So if someone tells you “call me when you get home”, your beast says “sure!” and promptly forgets it to make room for new information. It is the beast that hears and stores the information, but it is the spirit that gives it the connections which give meaning and context to the facts.
The beast heard the words but plowed right past them without processing it. It was the spirit that “made a mental note” to sound an alarm upon walking in your door. And it will do that… if the spirit is sufficiently awake!
This is why you have some friends who will never remember to do something, and others who will always remember to do it. For some, their beast controls all their thoughts. They are impulsive, rash, hasty, unreliable, late. Others are dominated by their spirit; they are slow, cautious, neat, ordered, obsessive.
One is not necessarily better than the other; one is simply ruled by their heart, and the other is ruled by their spirit. Some strike a balance in the middle, and we call these people “normal”. But true normalcy is found when your soul rules over both the heart and the spirit, and few, if any, do that.
HARMONIZING
The ideas in this lesson will make 90% of the scriptures make a lot more sense; for example, Daniel 2:21. Wisdom is given to the souls; and those who have understanding in their broken spirits will find knowledge easy to acquire (Proverbs 14:6).
Those who control their spirit, and prevent it from getting angry, will have great understanding (Proverbs 14:29). But that requires a dominant soul (Proverbs 19:11). And so on, the Bible is full of verses that fit neatly like these.
Even so, the other 10% of scriptures can’t be ignored. For example, Ecclesiastes 8:16. This seems to show that wisdom is of the heart; but remember, Solomon was sinning! (Ecclesiastes 1:17, 2:3, 1 Kings 11:4).
Specifically, it was his heart that was sinning, which it did by trying to know wisdom, by trying to make judgments about right and wrong instead of letting its soul handle that, which was the original sin of Adam and Eve!
Another obvious objection would come from Exodus 28:3. These “wise hearted” would seem to toss out my whole thesis; yet that’s not the whole story; looking closely, and comparing to Exodus 31:6 and Exodus 35:31, the wisdom in their hearts was because of the spirit of God dwelling in their hearts.
Their HEART wasn’t wise; GOD’S spirit was wise, which was IN their heart! God gave them wisdom temporarily, in their heart just like He did Solomon (1 Kings 10:24), because remember – these were Old Covenant people whose souls were not in charge which is WHY they were Old Covenant people!
But this wisdom they had isn’t necessarily the same wisdom as the kind which would go in your soul (Exodus 35:35). Because remember, there are two kinds of wisdom (James 3:13-17).
The wisdom that Solomon gained by “laying hold on folly” allows people to make good judgments to get ahead in this world (Luke 16:8 – read the whole parable to see the deceptive and selfish heart-like practices Jesus was “praising” here, Luke 16:3 for instance).
That wisdom might be good for spinning goat hair or hammering gold, even; but the wisdom that dwells in the heart will be used to make judgments to please the heart, not the soul! That’s why it’s “sensual”!
Another verse to look at is Proverbs 2:6-10. Your soul should love the knowledge of your heart, and it should embrace it; likewise, your heart should welcome the wisdom of your soul and not rebel against it like so many hearts do!
These principles will harmonize, I believe, all the wisdom-related scriptures that might give you pause. For the rest… well, there are a lot of verses about understanding, wisdom, and knowledge, and cross-referencing all of them with heart, spirit and soul – and the various indirect ways God said these things – is a big job I haven’t done yet.
Almost all verses easily fit into the meanings I’ve given you here, but there are a few that seem to imply that the heart can understand; or that the spirit can know; they still need to be harmonized (Isaiah 6:10, for instance).
Understanding those verses will affect how we look at the verses and reasoning I’ve presented in this lesson. I don’t pretend to have done all the work for you, or to have solved all the problems in the universe. I’ve only given you a push in the right direction. Just know that what you’re learning in these lessons is not the final answer.
There is much, much more to know about all of these things, and some of what I’ve said in these lessons is certainly wrong. But wrong is a very relative thing. If I say the Earth is round, that is indeed wrong – it is technically an oblate spheroid (it’s a bit apple-shaped).
Yet saying the Earth is round is not nearly so wrong as saying it’s flat. I believe the things in these lessons are the equivalent of saying the Earth is round. So saying “only the spirit can understand” may indeed be wrong – but I’m confident that it’s far less wrong than what we knew before.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
To sum up what you’ve learned today about knowledge, understanding, and wisdom and their relationship to the heart, spirit, and soul, let’s use the game of chess as a metaphor. Your heart can memorize the rules of chess, how the pieces move and what each piece is worth. These are facts easily stored in the brain of a beast; this is knowledge.
But as the spirit plays games it learns the strategies of chess – the tactics, the pins, the forks; it learns the rules of thumb, like “never have a knight on the edge of the board”, “control the center”, etc. This grasp of the broader principles of strategy is understanding.
Today these maxims are usually learned from other people, or from books, but they are also learned by playing games and trying to understand why you lost. So that you can set a rule, that says “next time I won’t bring my queen out early”.
But these guidelines are not set in stone. It is generally bad to have a knight on the edge… except for those times when it wins the game. And sometimes two principles seem to conflict, and then your soul has to choose between them.
For example “don’t bring your queen out early” might conflict with “always take unprotected pieces”. Which of these general principles is more important? Is one flawed, or does it simply not apply here? And it is deciding which of these statutes best apply HERE, NOW, which is wisdom!
It is the soul’s job to decide, given all the available knowledge and understanding, and make a choice. Souls who make good choices win games. But it’s not just about the choices; the wisest soul in the world would lose his first game of chess because judgments are not made in a vacuum. They require good information; they require good guidelines.
That’s why you must “Apply thine heart unto instruction, and thine ears to the words of knowledge” (Proverbs 23:12). That’s why you should “…be not children in understanding …in understanding be men” (1 Corinthians 14:20).
Because “He that getteth wisdom loveth his own soul: he that keepeth understanding shall find good” (Proverbs 19:8). And once you start doing this, you’ll find that it really isn’t that hard. Because while “A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth” (Proverbs 14:6).
When you understand a web of facts, when you have a framework to hang them on, adding new bits of knowledge is easy. It’s when you first dump the puzzle out on the table that it looks confusing. But the more connections you make, the more understanding you have of what the puzzle is supposed to look like, the faster those little pieces of knowledge go together and create a deeper understanding and, in time… wisdom.
As always… a single verse, properly understood, renders this lesson redundant. This time, there are two… either one is enough:
Isaiah 11:2 (BBE) And the spirit of the Lord will be resting on him, the spirit of wisdom and good sense, the spirit of wise guiding and strength, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;
God’s spirit would give to Jesus three things; to His soul it would give wisdom and good sense to judge; to His spirit, it would give “wise guiding” to create good guidelines for his heart with understanding; and to His heart it would give knowledge and the fear of the Lord. We could have also summed up the lesson with…
Colossians 1:9 …to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will [beast] in all wisdom [soul] and spiritual understanding [spirit];
Either of these shows clearly that there are three types of knowing. Both allow us to deduce their connections with the heart, spirit, and soul. And if you have that understanding… the rest is just knowledge, which is so easy any beast can learn it.