Penelope E. - "What is Intelligence to Us?"

To a lot of people, knowledge is everything. I know each of us will all need intelligence at some point, whether knowing the difference between what’s wrong and what’s wrong, or “acing” a test. We will all need knowledge and understanding. People try to figure out what our world would be like without intelligence. But in order to answer that question, we need to know what exactly intelligence is. Intelligence is the ability to learn and understand what a certain thing is or to have a high yearning to learn about factual matters. So, without intelligence, our lives would pretty much be nothing. In order to live our lives as we do every day, we need to know exactly how things work and what we need to do in order to survive. Without intelligence, we wouldn’t know that we need to eat or drink water to live. Sure we might figure it out sooner or later but most of the time we need intelligence right away! It helps us in our lives everyday even though we might not know it. I’m sure that most people don’t sit around all day and wonder what intelligence is and how it benefits us today but learning more and more all throughout our lives is vital. Without the ability to learn, we wouldn’t be able to mature and grow mentally. We would really know nothing about the world we live in today. We wouldn’t be able to teach other people about God. We wouldn’t have languages to learn since we couldn’t communicate, and schools would be utterly unimportant and nonexistent because what we do at schools is, of course, learn. In the Bible there are several passages that mention intelligence and its importance to us in our lives. As a matter a fact, Proverbs 19:8 writes, “He who gets wisdom loves his own soul; He who keeps understanding will find good.” Also, Isaiah 1:17 says, “Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” Another way the Bible emphasizes the importance of intelligence and understanding is found in Proverbs 16:22, “Understanding is a wellspring of life to him who has it. But the correction of a fool is folly. What all of these verses are saying is that understanding is good for you and that it’ll be well for you as long as you always have understanding, knowledge, and intelligence. God’s telling us in Isaiah 1:17 is that we need to learn to do good we need to understand how to do good things and do good towards others. So, if you don’t have intelligence…get some!