Thank you very much for your good letter, which came today. You write that love is the head of both wisdom and knowledge. I can’t agree with you on this, although I realize you mean it in a healthy and good way.

Everything had to be created by God’s wisdom; and when everything had been created, He beheld it and saw that it was good—that’s when love came in. So, wisdom is the mother of love, as it’s written in the Apocrypha. God could not manifest His love until there was something tangible for Him to love. But in order to create something out of nothing, this had to be created and formed by wisdom. It is written that God is love. That’s true. God must be described to us in this way so that we don’t become afraid of Him. He draws near to us through love. However, we must not forget that we are formed from the earth, so wisdom dealt with us before we felt the warmth of love.

We agree that love surpasses all knowledge. For knowledge is not life; wisdom is life itself. It’s written that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ. That is to say, Christ is the wisdom of God; so that’s not what this means. Nevertheless, the wisdom and knowledge to which man has attained are hidden in Christ. These are the treasures that have been laid up, which moth and rust cannot destroy. Wisdom begets love, because when we get proper insight into our own depravity, we’ve taken the first step toward wisdom. This first step has such a powerful effect on us that we also automatically forgive and forget our neighbor’s faults, because we are mindful of how awful we are ourselves. This is how wisdom begets love. Wisdom makes us so happy that we wish everyone else could be happy too. So wisdom is the mother of love. The love of God causes us to hate and despise ourselves, because our own hardness is in such stark contrast to God’s unending love. This knowledge of our own depravity is the first step on the way of wisdom, and as our hatred for ourselves increases, our love for love itself increases.

God is not just the sum total of all good things, He is goodness. We may think that we can lay hold of Him by laying hold of glorious things, but He is not divided, because He is glory itself.

Just these few lines to clarify the difference between wisdom and love. Love is greatly misunderstood. The usual perception of love is that it doesn’t punish evil, that it turns a blind eye to a life that is backsliding into the world and ungodliness. Anyone who punishes evil is regarded as unloving and contentious. Mrs. Rasmussen said that she had little love for me because I contradicted her and didn’t regard her to be the prophetess I had heard she was supposed to be. Then I asked her if she had any love for Father. No, she didn’t love him either, and she didn’t love many others, despite the fact that no one in the whole town agreed with her doctrinally as much as he did. Have you ever heard such teaching!? I can’t help thinking that this kind of teaching, which results in such a lack of love, is from one father—the devil! When you point these things out to people, they consider you to be unloving. But doesn’t love rejoice in the truth? We know that we love God because we love the brethren. And yet Mrs. Rasmussen doesn’t love me, even though she believes I’m a brother! Obviously, there must be something wrong in her life, because she can do nothing against the truth—not the nicest place to be! Watch out for such religion. Avoid it.

Your brother,