Light, Knowledge, and Wisdom

Josh Groban has performed some of the most beautiful music ever sung by humankind.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.

So anyway. Yesterday, after blogging, I spent some time puzzling out the connection between light, knowledge, and wisdom. Here's how it went:

Wisdom is the ability to make good decisions. Such wisdom requires knowledge of choices and consequences.

Picture a man in a dark room. He sees two doors ahead of him and he's asked to pick a door to go through. He flips a coin in his head and chooses the door on the left. Then the light is turned on and he now sees another door even farther to the left. This was not an option before because he was not aware of it. Wisdom requires knowledge of choices.

Then there's another man at a fork in the road. There are two paths (with no hidden third paths), but the trails are obscured, so you can't see far down either of them. From what you can see, the two paths look exactly the same. This time, the man can't decide which path he wants. When the darkness lifts, we see that the path to the left leads to an angry pirate with a cutlass and the path to the right leads to a nice man giving away free balloons. The man at the crossroads couldn't make a wise decision on which path to take until the darkness lifted because, until then, he did not have any knowledge concerning where (or to whom) each path would lead.

In both of these cases, an increase of light increased our knowledge of our choices and the potential consequences of those choices.

Now, let's say that the man at the fork in the road chose the right path (in both senses of the word), and got a free balloon. His friend asked him, "Where'd you get that balloon?" The man with the balloon gave his friend directions, and now his friend goes and stands at the fork in the road. The darkness is back, so he doesn't know where or to whom each path leads, but he knows he's been told to go right, so right he goes, and he also gets a balloon. This friend never learns what was down the other road, and he sometimes wonders if what he might have gotten there may have been better than a balloon, but he doesn't know, and he certainly doesn't know that choosing to go right to get a free balloon was a choice that saved his life.

Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. In this circumstance, I've always taken the term Light to mean Example, and since that matches what I'm going to say next, let's just go with that. An Example is a person we want to follow. Why? The answer I wrote down yesterday is "Because they're going to good places." Which implies that they A: know where they're going, and B: know how to get there.

Jesus Christ went to the Celestial Kingdom, and He told all of us how to get there. We can follow His example (with a picture of two men at the fork in the road, with both of them turning right), and/or we can follow His counsel (with a picture of a man saying to turn right, followed by a picture of a man on the road, turning right). Either way, that'll put us on the right path toward the Celestial Kingdom.

Note that neither the man following his friend's directions, or even the man following the guide, has any more 'light' than they would have had if they went to the fork in the road alone, without advice. Either way, they couldn't see where each path would lead. But they did have other knowledge that helped them to make the right decision.

The same is true with us, with spiritual decisions. We can't truly foresee the consequences of our decisions, but God can. He tells us where we should turn and where we shouldn't, and then puts us on the darkened path and lets us make our own decision. Since we can't really discern between one path and the other, we can't really make our choice based on our own wisdom, but we can choose whether to follow God's advice or not. But there are many other people in the world, giving us advice. Some of them are giving us bad advice. We need to know who we can trust.

We can help others along the path by relaying the advice that we've received from those that we trust to speak for God (like mirrors). And when we've gone far enough down the paths to learn that going right works out better than going left, we start to need other people's advice less and we can make decisions based on our own light (like candles). We may even find that people start to follow us because they think we know where we're going, and as long as we're following Christ when that happens, that's a good thing.

This analogy started simple enough, but progressively got more complicated. I guess the bottom line is that the main difference between spiritual light in the analogy and physical light in real life is that a person can't show another person what they see with their spiritual light, though they can still tell others. Then it's up to the hearers whether or not they will listen.

Psalm 119:105 Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.