Isaiah 47:10 For you have trusted in your wickedness: you have said, None sees me. Your wisdom and your knowledge, it has perverted you… : — I. EXAMINE AND VINDICATE THIS DECLARATION. 1. Of what wisdom and knowledge does Isaiah thus speak? It was human wisdom and science in the highest perfection! To this Babylon even the sages of Greece came as learners. 2. Against this wisdom and knowledge the Scriptures bring the charge of perverting men's minds in morals and religion (text; Ezekiel 28:3-7; 1 Corinthians 1:21-27; 1 Corinthians 3:18-20; Romans 1:22, 23). 3. That this testimony is not overcharged, all history proclaims. 4. All this is accounted for by the Scriptural account of the fall of man. Intellectual blindness is upon the heart of man; all his rational faculties are incapable of just conclusions on any religious subject, except they be assisted by a supernatural power. 5. Hence it inevitably follows that the cultivation of the intellectual parts of man can of itself have no tendency towards moral or spiritual good. If all the mental powers of man be in themselves depraved, the increase of his intelligence can only increase his faculty of evil; so that secular education, apart from religious and moral control, must be in itself a curse and not a blessing. It may create a generation of philosophic sceptics and apologists for vice, or even praters about virtue, but a moral and religious people it never has produced, and never can. II. THE REMEDY WHICH GOD HATH PROVIDED AGAINST ALL THESE INTELLECTUAL EVILS. 1. The supreme need is instruction in the wisdom and knowledge which are of God, above those which are of men. 2. This wisdom and knowledge must be imparted by those means which God has appointed. The Bible. Preaching. The instruction of children in Divine truth. (F. Close, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness: thou hast said, None seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me. |
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