The Wisdom of God Given to Us, Pt. 1

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Some people just seem to navigate things well. They don’t panic when things fall apart. They make good decisions under pressure.  There’s a word for that. It’s not intelligence, talent, or even experience. It’s wisdom. Pastor Nick Gatzke reveals what the Bible says about wisdom and where to get it.

You know, there are a lot of people who are good at a lot of things. A lot of people are good in business. A lot of people are good in sports. A lot of people are good in their hobbies. A lot of people are good at parenting. The list goes on and on. I wonder what you are good at. And here’s a question for you. I wonder if you are good at life. Because everyone wants to be skilled. at living life. Everyone wants to live in such a way that provides benefit for themselves and for their family. And if you know someone who seemingly is able to navigate all of the lefts and rights and the ups and downs of life while maintaining a stable footing, you know someone who seems to be skilled at living life, someone who seems to be good at life, you know someone who seemingly has a level of wisdom.

Wisdom is the capacity of judging matters rightly, matters of life and conduct. Wisdom is related to the ability to cope. Wisdom is experiential knowledge. Wisdom is the quest for self-understanding and for the mastery of the world. Simply put, wisdom is putting knowledge into action. Wisdom is being good at life. And today, as we continue in our series that we’re calling From Old to New to You, see and trace themes throughout the Bible into today. And one area of biblical theology that God gives to us and for us is this area of wisdom. The Bible is replete with passage after passage in this reoccurring theme of wisdom. And as you begin to trace the thread, you see that God gives us opportunity to gain wisdom, and as we gain wisdom, we become more skilled at living the life that he has for us.

And the starting place to consider wisdom, of course, is God himself. Because God is the author of wisdom and is himself all wise. In some of the beautiful expressions of scripture, wisdom is talked about as a person. Wisdom is personified as being in existence before the world began and being under the possession of God. Listen to the words of Proverbs 8, verses 22 through 31.

This is wisdom speaking as a person. It says, “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths, I was brought forth. When there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth. Before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there. When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him like a master workman. I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.”

What an incredibly artistic way to express the fact that God created the world and everything in it in perfect wisdom. He is God. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was haphazard. He was perfectly wise in what he created and perfectly wise in how he ordered that creation in relationship to one another. And perfectly wise in how he ordered… creation throughout the generations of time.

That is why creation reveals something of the character of God, as it says in Romans chapter 1. That is why creation groans for the purposes and the people of God to be revealed, Paul says in Romans chapter 8. Proverbs 3:19 says, the Lord by wisdom founded the earth. By understanding, he established the heavens. Not only is God’s wisdom a possession of his in which he creates the world, but we see that part of God’s wisdom is related to his divine omniscience or his all -knowing power that God knows in wisdom, he knows the hearts and the minds of humans.

Everyone has heard of King Solomon, the wise, who sought wisdom from God and God granted it to him. Solomon’s father, David, reminded him of what God would see as he would take up the mantle of leadership and following him. This is what David says in 1 Chronicles 28, verse 9. He says, “Solomon, my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will cast you off forever.” God sees and searches hearts and understands every plan and thought

of each and every one of us. And this is related to his wisdom. And this means practically that there is nothing you can hide from God. You’ve heard that expression before, and yet so often we are tempted to think that this time he might not be looking. But not only can you not hide anything from God, he knows your deepest thoughts and motives and desires that you are able to hide from. everyone else. I think of the man who was parking his car one evening along the street, and as he was, he scraped the side of a Corvette. And the damage was minor, and it would be covered by the owner’s insurance, but the question remained. Would he leave the man a note? And the answer was, of course. because there were a lot of people watching. And so the man got out of his car. He took out his pad and his pen, and he began to write a note. And this is what the note said. He said, the people watching think that I’m leaving you a note with my contact information, but I’m not. And he put the note under the windshield wiper and walked away.

You know, some of us treat God that way. We think… That maybe he’s not watching or that maybe we can hide things from him or maybe, maybe we can even trick him into thinking that we are really well doers when in fact our motives might be something other. But he is the all-knowing, all-wise, author of creation and he understands every plan and When you begin to think about wisdom and being skilled in this life, the first place that you begin to think about it is with God. And if God is the author, then, of all wisdom, then it becomes self-evident. If you want to have this wisdom, he is the place in which you are to find it.

And throughout the Old Testament, we see that God gives his people the ability to live in a wise fashion. And in fact, wisdom in the Old Testament is often divided into three different categories of wisdom. We have what’s called perceptive wisdom, we have action-related wisdom, and we have the communication or communicating wisdom. Remember what wisdom is. Wisdom is the capacity to judge rightly in matters of life and conduct and to act accordingly. It’s a quest for self-understanding and for mastery of the world. Wisdom is skilled living.

And perceptive wisdom as part of that has to do with comprehending and seeing clearly the world in which we live. There are a lot of examples of this in the Proverbs. Here are just a few in Proverbs 15 and Proverbs 21. Proverbs 15:17: “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it.” That’s perceptive wisdom. You would rather have the lesser meal on the table of love than the greater meal. with the table of strife. Proverbs 21:9: “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.” Amen? That’s perceptive wisdom. They seem obvious in one sense, but when you stop to think about the choices that you make and the ways in which you navigate life and priorities, There’s plenty of times where you would rather have the steak dinner than the dinner of herbs. There’s plenty of times where you would rather have the luxurious surrounding, even if it means strife in relationship. But perceptive wisdom points us to seeing clearly what the values of life really are. The next kind of wisdom in the Old Testament is called action-related wisdom. This is conduct that follows from perceiving rightly. And in the Old Testament, this includes a wide variety of categories. It includes speech and remaining silent. It includes food and drink. It includes sex. It includes avoiding evil. It includes exercising prudence. This is what might we call succeeding at the daily ins and outs of life. Proverbs chapter 17, verses 27 and 28 gives us one example of this action-related wisdom. It says: “Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.” That is a way… communicating when you should speak and when you should not speak, and how people around you will respond. Action-related wisdom. In 1 Kings 3, King Solomon again requests God’s favor. And as he does, he is asking for the combination of perceptive wisdom and action-related wisdom. He says this. He says, God, give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people. that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this, your great people?

The third type of wisdom in the Old Testament is communicating wisdom, and that focuses on teaching and exhortation and the evaluation of conduct for yourself and for other people. And the Proverbs is full of this kind of wisdom as well. This is the type of wisdom that’s passed on from parents to children. This is the type of wisdom that’s passed on from teachers to students. Proverbs chapter 1, Job chapter 28 point to this, and Proverbs chapter 8, verse 10 and 11: “Take my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.” And so when you begin to think about the ways to succeed at life, we’re reminded that wisdom, wisdom that originates with God, communicated to us adopted and engaged and put into practice becomes the way that we succeed at life.

The opposite of wisdom in the Bible is often called folly or foolishness, and the Proverbs are replete with examples of the fool. The fool flaunts his folly, (Proverbs 13). He has a hasty temper (Proverbs 14). He trusts his own mind (Proverbs 28). His heart rages against God (Proverbs 19). The fool returns to his folly again and again and again like a dog returns to his vomit (Proverbs 26:11). But wisdom originates with God. He communicates it to his people, and as a result, we’re able to navigate life in a way that is successful and pleasing to him. That is the dynamic of the Old Testament.

Now, when you turn the page to the New Testament, because we’re going from old to new to you, you see that God communicates his divine wisdom and his plan for us in an even more profound and full measure. And he does that because Jesus himself, as the Son of God, is the embodiment of divine wisdom. In Jesus, we see divine wisdom in his person, we see it in his works, we see it in his teaching, and we see it ultimately on the cross. And 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, shows us how the wisdom of God is expressed more fully than it ever had been in the Old Testament. In fact, 1 Corinthians 1:24 says this, it says, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Christ is the power and the wisdom of God.

And this is not a wisdom that the world can give to us. When you think about the wisdom of the world, I wonder what you think about. I’ve had the opportunity to live. in two of the epicenters of human wisdom that this world has to offer. We lived in Boston, Massachusetts for a number of years, which is considered to be the quintessential university town. We would regularly drive by Harvard University, where students were being trained, where business leaders of the future were attending the business school, where future congressmen and… presidents were being trained in the School of Political Science. And then just down the road is MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where academics are exploring the cutting edge of theoretical mathematics, where engineers are starting robotics companies because they’ve discovered a way to make machines do things that we never thought possible before. Where people… in the aerospace engineering track are designing the next fighter jets for our nation or the next rovers that will land on planets that are currently out of our grasp. And when you’re in such environments, and when you ponder what is happening in these places, and when you think about the people who have gone before us and what they’ve done there, you begin to ask the question, what kind of wisdom do we actually have? What kind of wisdom do we have in a church like this, in a place like this?

Amy and I had the opportunity to live in London, England for some time. And during  our time there, In one square mile of central London, more money passed through in the midst of commerce and trade in that square mile than any other city in the world every single day. I’ve walked the libraries of Oxford University, I’ve been in the shadows of the Towers of Cambridge, where for eight to ten centuries people have been trained for success in the wisdom of the world. And when you think about the acquisition and the application of knowledge and what happens there and who has gone before us and what they’ve done, you’re forced to stop and to wonder, what kind of wisdom do we have compared to that? But all of this worldly wisdom is not the same. as God’s wisdom.

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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.