The wisdom of God

“Immortal, invisible God only wise

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

Most holy, most glorious, the Ancient of days

Almighty, victorious, Your great name we praise”

These are the first verse from the hymn “Immortal Invisible” by Walter C. Smith which depicts the grandeur of the God we serve. This is not all that God is, for who can know the mind of God? Christians serve a God who cannot be described, cannot be contained in a box, cannot be understood by human understanding. He is majestic and powerful, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end. Is it any wonder that the only response befitting such a God is worship and adoration? Even in our most righteous ways, we are not able to match His understanding. Job, whom the bible describes as a righteous man was unjustly a recipient of calamities after calamities. In his distress, Job asked for an audience with the “immortal, invisible God only wise”, the Creator of heaven and earth and the outcome of that audience was repentance and humility. In his words, Job said “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). This is what the knowledge and wisdom of God does to the human wisdom, it keeps it in submission and humility. One area where we see the gap between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man is in salvation. For today’s post, I would like to marvel at the wisdom of God displayed in salvation as a way to stimulate our praise and adoration to the Lord of Lords and King of all kings.

Throughout Jewish history, God has always been depicted as a saving God. A God who delights to save and show forth His power and might. Jews knew that “salvation belonged to God”, they knew that God saved with “a mighty hand and an outstretch arm”; they had seen the powers of the living God at work in their lives and in the lives of their ancestors. The God who saves was not a new concept for them. How He saved was probably one they didn’t think much of or they assumed. You see, there is something about seeing the hand of God manifested in a certain way that makes us think His hand will always act a certain way. But, we serve a God who is not contained or constricted by anything. He is omniscient, He is not limited in any way so He can choose to work anyhow He decides. Certainly, we see how God has manifested Himself in the past to save. For example, in Genesis, He used Abraham to save Lot from the hands of the kings of Babylonia (Genesis 14), or later He sent His angels to save Lot from the destruction of the city of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). Similarly, God used Joseph to save the people of Israel from famine; He also saved David from the hands of his enemies by allowing him to act insane before Abimelech, the Philistines king as recorded in Psalm 34. Again, the Lord used Gideon to bring victory to Israel while in captivity by the Babylonians; how about the angel of the Lord who destroyed the one hundred and eight five thousands Assyrians soldiers in a night during their siege (2 Kings 19:35)? There are many ways in which the Lord brought about salvation to the Jews and each time it was different, the method was different. My point is, if one were to study God to find out how He would save next, that person’s efforts would be futile. This is where we often fall because we want to know how God will save, how He will bring about His salvation. I believe this was how the people of Israel got numb to the power and might of the Most high God. They became accustomed to the ways of God and expected Him to manifest Himself a certain way. It is not surprising they missed Jesus in the Scriptures and in real life. God’s wisdom is beyond what we can think or imagine. I have always been struck at Psalm 34 and the ways David attributes his deliverance from Abimelech to God. In human terms, David was witty and shrewd, conniving even and that brought him his salvation but in spiritual terms, God gave David the wisdom to act insane in order to escape the snare of the fowler. We often expects deliverance to come in mighty deeds and acts, miracles as we call them but the Lord works in mundane things, using mundane people to enact His purposes. What wisdom! What matchlessness!

Perhaps, the area in the life of the Christian you see this wisdom the most at display is in the message of the gospel. I have been reading 1 Corinthians and one recurrent theme is how the Gospel is foolishness to those that are perishing but the very power of God to us who believe. Paul is adamant that no man can boast of his salvation, no man can receive glory from his salvation, only God can because it is only God who saves. Moreover, before the foundation of the world, God already had in His plans to save His people as well as others who would believe in Him through the death of His son Jesus Christ. Paul received that understanding through revelation as he points out in many of his letters and marvels at the wisdom of God and “how unsearchable his judgements and how untraceable are his paths” as the Romans 11 (Doxology) by Andrew Peterson puts it. Yesterday I attended the bible study as part of the Outreach ministry and the leader brought us through scriptures to see how God’s salvation plan had been announced thousand years ago, how evident the God of the bible is the God who bleeds and how that separates Him from any other god; how God in His wisdom set the stage so that our sins could be forgiven, we could receive God’s righteousness and be adopted into His family through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. The message of the cross brings life to those in death, it brings freedom to those in bondage and it brings hope and joy to those with no joy and no hope. Jewish prophets prophesied about a coming king, one who would restore Jerusalem. Many of them spoke of things their eyes did not see, many of them understood that they knew and prophesied only in parts as the complete understanding belonged to God (1 Corinthians 13:9). Yet, in their understanding of scripture, the people of Israel failed to see the state of man before a Holy God as being of utmost importance for deliverance. Being saved from our sins, the very condition that stopped us from fellowshipping with God and from obeying God was the salvation we needed most. The restoration of our hearts, as God Himself tells Ezekiel that “He will remove our hearts of stone and give us a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26) or with Joel where He says in the last days, “He will pour out His spirit on all flesh, your sons and daughters will prophesy” (Joel 2:28), and again to Jeremiah, “no longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:34) was the what we needed the most. That expression ‘Know the Lord’ is the essence of our purpose in life and it is what the Lord desires from us. God knew we were incapable of saving ourselves for “we were dead in our trespasses” but Christ came and rescued us from our helpless condition, snatching us from the dominion of darkness and bringing us into the Kingdom of God. This was God’s idea and it remains God’s idea. How He conceived it is beyond our understanding. We just know it is marvelous and we rejoice that there is a way and that there is still time for all those that will repent of their sins, turn away from those and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and saviour. So today, “if you hear his voice do not harden your heart”. A day will come where that call will no longer be available.

Therefore, let us continue to thank the Lord for the gift of salvation and for its perpetuity. This is not a gift that can be taken away from us, we receive and received eternal life through this gift, what a gift, what a God! Let us continue to entrust the people who do not know the Lord yet to Him in prayer and let us continue to seize any opportunity the Lord throws at us for the purpose of making Him known and of knowing Him. The Lord is at hand! Amen!