Month: March 2016

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Gen 1:26)

In the beginning was the Word. (Jn 1:1)

 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. (Jn 5:26)

Praise You, Father, for You have granted me life. I do not deserve it. I did not create it. You have made me and sustained me. You have saved me from death many times, and I am grateful to You and to You alone for the precious gift of life.

Something has always existed. To say otherwise forces the absurd notion that something popped out of nothing. Scripture says God is that something. God is self-existent. You and I are not. God exists on His own, quite apart from the universe and from you and me. God does not need us; He does not need the universe. He is and He always has been. The concept of a being who had no beginning is incomprehensible to us. Everything we see began somewhere; thus, in God, we come up against a Being to which nothing compares. In this area He is not like a watch or a house or a father or the hills or the stars. He is not like an idea or electricity or an emotion or anything else we know. All those things have beginnings and require a source or a medium. God simply is. He is the “I AM.” He is the source. Take Him away and you take away all possibilities of existence. In the beginning the Word was. He already existed when the universe began, and it owes its existence to Him. God has life in Himself (Jn 5:26); no one can give it to Him, no one can take it from Him. He is the Uncreated Creator of all. He has had no beginning, and everything that has had a beginning owes its beginning to Him. Our heart beats because God allows it to, and when our heart ceases to beat, we have no right to demand otherwise. Those decisions are not ours to make. Life is not ours to hand out. Have mercy, O God.

This places us in a particular position before God. We are but creatures and must remember that fact. The rocking chair does not get arrogant before the woodworker; the pot does not talk back to the potter. Rebellion against God is a lapse of memory. We somehow forget that He is the artist and we are the painting. But the analogy breaks down, for the artist had a beginning. When we subconsciously act as if we are the center of the universe, we creatures put ourselves in the position of the Self-existent one. The notion that the world revolves around us lies behind all sin. We subliminally claim for ourselves a throne we have no right to claim. Life comes from God. He gave it to you. He can take it any time He wishes, and when He does so, He will be just. It is His life, not yours. He simply lets you use it. So use it for Him.

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).

…God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. (I Jn 3:20)

Who has understood the mind of the Lord, or instructed him as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding? (Is 40:13-14)

Lord, what do I know that You haven’t known from eternity? What You know surpasses me infinitely, for You know Yourself and You are infinite. Bless You. And You are intimately acquainted with the deepest thoughts of my heart. Yet You love me. Praise You.

We live in an information age. We have more information at our fingertips than people had in all the libraries of a hundred years ago.  We worship information. We think that people who know are the people we should admire and follow. Why then do we not worship God? He has a billion billion times more knowledge than all our universities and computers combined. But we ignore Him. Sometimes we are too smart for God. We are proud of our knowledge, but next to God our knowledge is like the knowledge of a newborn. And the odd thing is that in real life newborns never think their parents ignorant, but we sometimes live as if we know more than God. We are just babies.

God knows all, and what He knows now is no different from what He knew when He formed the world. God does not, God cannot learn. He is perfect and unchangeable, and to speak of a god who has grown to be God (as Mormons teach) is to speak of no God at all. If God has grown in knowledge He is not God. Nothing is a mystery to God, nothing confounds Him, nothing surprises Him, nothing is new to Him. He knew from before the founding of the earth the inner most secrets of your heart right now — secrets which you do not fully understand. He knew then the decisions you shall make next year if, in fact, you get to live till next year. And if you do not live till then, He knew that, too. Everyone faces Him in the judgment, and when we face Him, we cannot hide.  He knows.

We do not know.  The more the sciences tell us about the universe, the more we see we do not know. We discover five facts but learn in the process that we have five hundred new questions that we have no answers for. Such is the immensity of truth. A body of knowledge as immeasurable as truth requires a capacity for knowledge that we cannot comprehend. Yet God, being infinite, can know infinitely. The things that puzzle scientists today do not puzzle God, and He knows now the answers to the questions that will puzzle science five hundred years in the future.

But He knows more than academic facts. He knows the secrets behind the important questions. Why are we here? What are we like? Where are we going? Why is there evil? The great questions of human existence neither surprise God nor stump Him. He has all knowledge about these issues and a perspective that we do not. God unchanging has always and will always know all things. You can hide secrets from your family, but you can hide nothing from God (Ps 139). He sees your secret lusts. He knows your fears of failure. He understands the real motives why you pursue the Phd you pursue. He sees your sin through and through. He knows you better than you know yourself. Might as well come straight with Him.

To the follower of Jesus, God’s knowledge is a great comfort. God loves us as we are.  When Satan accuses, what can he say? “I’m going to tell God about this lust of yours!” God already knows and forgives in Jesus. The one person in the universe that we most need to be right with is willing to be right with us even though He knows every little detail of how we turn against Him. The knowledge of God highlights the greatness of His love and mercy.

To know God is to see that God knows. When we see this, we worship.