No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord (Pr 21:30)
…to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! (Rm 16: 27)
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men …” (I Cor 1:25)
Lord, help me to trust You — to see that Your plans and Your will are wiser than mine. Sometimes I forget that. Forgive me. And open my eyes to see that Your ways are wise because You are wise.
Have you ever met a brilliant fool? A genius professor who couldn’t keep his marriage vows. A businessman who was a money-making machine but also enslaved to the money he made. A judge with a keen legal mind but no real understanding of righteousness. Sometimes we equate knowledge with wisdom. We are prone to admire the wrong things. Knowledge is the acquaintance of facts. Wisdom is the right application of those facts. Both are good things, but there do abound many knowledgeable fools. People can know facts about God without obeying God, but they cannot be wise without obeying God, for wisdom affects life. Wisdom is how we talk, how we think, how we act. It is not just what we know.
Last week we saw that God has all knowledge. This week we take another step. We see that God has all wisdom. He knows all there is to know, but He also knows how to use His knowledge and always uses it the right way and for the best end. God cannot be anything but wise, for it is His nature that puts the wisdom in wisdom. Wisdom is what wisdom is because God is who God is. When God does something, it is wise, not because God follows wisdom but because wisdom follows God. Wisdom is nothing more than the character of God in action. When God acts He knows what He is doing and He is doing what is right. We may sometimes question the wisdom of God. We lose our job or our health or our daughter and cry out, “God, what are you doing? Don’t you know how I hurt?” We do not understand the path His wisdom makes us trod. We do not see now what God is doing through the circumstances and why He allows such pain. But He is wise.
Everyone must grapple with this issue at some point. You and I are very good at ordering our lives, at deciding what we should do and where we should go; but if we are to grow with God, there will come times when we will have to set aside our own wisdom and plan in order to do something we do not understand or care to do. We will have to trust God that His path is wiser than ours. We do not see how, we do not know why, but we will have to trust Him.
God said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1). I do not believe that Abram, Sarai, Lot or any of Abram’s other relatives fully understood what God was doing. Wisdom, as they likely saw it, would dictate that Abram settle down amongst his kin in his homeland and tend flocks and live a nice, secure life. But Abram had a message from God, and Abram had to decide which was wiser — to move though he did not understand why, or to stay with everything he knew. History vindicates the wisdom of God.
Moses said to God, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it” (Ex 4:13). Moses’ plan for his life was different from God’s, and I can’t help but think that in this scene, Moses had his own questions about the wisdom of God’s plan. Moses did not care to do what God had commanded but had to decide which was wiser — to follow his own desire or God’s. History vindicates God’s wisdom in choosing that man for that task.
God still works this way with His people. He has infinite knowledge and wisdom, and He will test the followers of Jesus to see if we thoroughly believe that God is all knowing and all wise. He does not want us merely to be able to write such a thing on a piece of paper. He wants us to order our lives around it. God knows what He is doing, and He is doing the right thing. We either believe that or we don’t. If we believe it, we actually live as if God’s wisdom is true. Our faith changes how we handle money, criticism, suffering, sex, peer pressure, and the rest of life. And the people of this world may think we are crazy. They will think we are fools. But that is OK. After all, “The foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom.” (I Cor 1:25).
