Men's Devotional Bible
Operating System
Recommended Reading: Proverbs 1:1–7; 2:1–22; 4:1–27
Do you stay up on New Year’s Eve to wait for the clock to strike midnight? If you do, you probably don’t care that much about when the New Year begins in places like Fiji or Auckland, New Zealand. However, maybe you’ve heard about the fervor that happened on December 31, 1999, as TV cameras captured the stroke of midnight in those locations to see whether the world had avoided the Y2K disaster. As clocks struck 12:00, 12:01, 12:02 in each time zone around the world, people around the globe breathed a collective sigh of relief that televisions still functioned, nuclear power plants hadn’t failed, and cars continued running.
This may sound like ancient history, but the glitch that companies and governments spent billions of dollars to hire software programmers to correct had to do with the switching of the year. Not all early computer programmers made allowances for the year 2000, and the world feared a looming catastrophe if computers were to misread the last two zeroes in the year 2000 as 1900. Could the operating systems that interconnected the globe manage that? Would they shut down because the year 1900 had already passed?
Ironically, even though people knew of the problem, most of them had zero understanding of computer code. Before that particular night, people and organizations had to rely on other knowledgeable people to look “under the hood” of this potential glitch, interpret the issues resident within the problem, and fix it.
The apostle Paul wrote that understanding God’s wisdom is much the same. Unless we have the Holy Spirit to help us understand the language of God’s wisdom, we won’t really grasp it. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
People who don’t have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them quite naturally struggle to grasp spiritual wisdom—God’s Word, his desires, his character, his values. In fact, God’s wisdom often seems foolish to non-Christians. It’s like a foreign language to them—as confusing as millions of lines of dense computer code to the uninformed during Y2K. But when people trust in Christ as Savior, God sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within them (see John 14:16 –17). They can begin learning God’s wisdom as the Holy Spirit helps them understand it.
If we believe that true wisdom comes only from God, where should we turn when we seek wisdom? Paul provides the answer: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9–10).
In the Bible God speaks the language that drives us—he knows all things about our spiritual operating system. If we want to know God’s wisdom so that we can appropriately process the joys and trials of everyday living, we need to turn often to God’s Word and ask the Spirit to help us understand it.
To Take Away
- Do you ever struggle to understand thoughts and concepts from the Bible? How do you think the Holy Spirit can help?
- Are you growing in your understanding of God and spiritual truth? When was the last time you asked the Spirit to help you understand God’s Word?
- What practical steps can you take to grow in God’s wisdom?