I have written this book because I am persuaded that the church of Jesus Christ, in this hour, is being summoned by God to a higher operation of mind. Not merely to know more, but to know rightly. Not merely to speak wisdom, but to live as the wisdom of God in the earth. Not merely to grasp truths intellectually, but to practise understanding in such a way that the practice itself produces a new kind of person - a person of intelligence, fitted by the Spirit for global dominion, power, and authority.
For too long we have settled for a church that has information but lacks intelligence. We have memorised scriptures without metabolising them. We have quoted Solomon without asking what Solomon asked. We have admired the sons of Issachar without becoming sons of Issachar. We have spoken of Enoch's walk without walking. We have celebrated Elijah's fire without enduring his cave. And we have confessed Christ as wisdom without sitting down to learn of Him.
This book is my answer to that long settling. I have organised it around three pillars and a result. The three pillars are the Principles of Knowledge, the Principals of Wisdom, and the Practicals of Understanding. The result is the making of intelligence in a man, in a woman, in a people, in a nation. I will show from one hundred and fifty-three Scriptures - not chosen at random but ordered after the pattern of John 21:11, the great net that did not break - that God has always intended His sons and daughters to be the most intelligent people on the earth.
I have chosen to work in three biblical languages: Hebrew, Greek, and the Syriac Peshitta Aramaic. I am persuaded that the English Bible, for all its glory, is a translation, and that translations always reduce. When I sit with the Hebrew of Proverbs, the Greek of Colossians, and the Aramaic of the Peshitta side by side, the text opens for me in ways the English alone cannot. I have brought that opening into this book so that the reader may benefit from it without having to be a scholar.
In this enriched edition I have further added to each of the one hundred and fifty-three entries what I am calling a Scholarly Witness block. In that block I draw on more than a thousand years of Christian exegetical tradition - the voices of Origen and Athanasius, Augustine and Jerome, Chrysostom and Gregory, Anselm and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Bengel and Delitzsch, Edwards and Spurgeon, Bavinck and Owen, Barth and Lloyd-Jones - so that the reader may see the great cloud of witnesses who have read these very texts and who join us in their exposition. I add, where the material warrants, the Jewish rabbinic tradition and modern critical philology, not as competitors to faith but as servants of the text.
I write in my own voice. I write as a man who has prayed for understanding, asked for wisdom, hungered for knowledge, and sought the Spirit's making of intelligence in his own life. I have failed in this pursuit many times. I have also seen God answer. What I share in these pages is not theory but testimony.
My prayer is that as you read, the Holy Spirit Himself will become your tutor, and that by the end of this volume you will be measurably different - not because you have read another book, but because you have allowed God to make intelligence in you.
