The Wisdom of God

The God of the Bible is all-wise and He has wisdom in Himself. Wisdom is distinguished from omniscience, which means that God has all knowledge, so wisdom implies that He knows how to apply and use that knowledge.

This attribute is present in all three Persons of the Trinity. In the knowledge of God infinite things exist, but He chooses the best means for the greatest end. Through our human experience, we learn wisdom from the counsel of our peers and through our experiences, which ultimately come from the sovereign hand of God. We could therefore truly say that our wisdom is received.

Yet this is not the case with our God, He does not gain wisdom from His creatures or the changing circumstances of the cosmos. When there was no universe or any creature to advise Him, there was only God, and still, at that point, our God had the wisdom to weave together the intricate thread of reality. He made the universe without seeking advice from anyone. By the counsel of His own wise will, He created millions and trillions of stars.

If our God was only wise and not omnipotent, He could not have applied His wisdom and brought His purpose to pass. If He was only omnipotent, then He could have used His wisdom erroneously, bringing incoherent chaos and destruction to the world. However, all the attributes of God work in harmony in His being constituting a perfect being like Him.

Moreover, God has chosen the universe as a stage for the display of His wisdom through the created order. Our God with great wisdom and understanding has intricately designed the minute details that are responsible for the existence of life.

To name only a few examples, He made DNA, which is the code for the function and development of all living creatures on earth. The human body is made of almost 30 trillion cells. These cells have different functions, and DNA delineates to every protein of every cell what function they are to perform. He has also made the universal constants and has given them a fixed and an unchanging value. Any change in these constants will cause all of life to perish because these constants provide a foundation for the laws of physics to exist. For instance, if the gravitational constant 6.7×10−11 Nm2/kg2, was changed to 6.7×10-11 Nm2/kg2, this change will result in the death of all life. The universe will not be able to work in the coherent manner in which the universe works right now.

The Bible tells us that, “And he is before all things, And in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Our God has not only created the universe and its constants to leave them on their own. By His glorious wisdom, He sustains and holds them in the right manner for life to exist and proliferate. The glorious wisdom of God can be noted in numerous other cosmological events.

The wisdom of God is supremely depicted in His work of redemption. He chose the best plan and action to bring about redemption even before the making of the world. He chose a people for salvation and then later brought the world into existence (Eph. 1:4). He knew that man would sin in the garden of Eden, but in His all-wise plan He gave Adam the promise of a future Savior (Gen. 3:15). He then gave His law to mankind in order to reveal their need for a Savior and their inability to meet His perfect standard.

As time passed, God pointed man toward His imminent salvation through different prophets. His plan of redemption reached its crescendo with the incarnation, perfect obedient life, crucifixion, and resurrection of His Son. The execution of this plan by our Lord Jesus Christ merited for His people eternal life through faith in Him and His work on the cross. The Holy Spirit applies this work to the elect by regenerating them (Titus 3:4-5). The Spirit also sanctifies them, and God will culminate this plan by bringing His elect to glorification, so that they may praise His glorious name for eternity.

The natural man believes this plan to be foolishness, but the Bible says that, “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). In this verse the apostle Paul uses hyperbolic language: what he means by the “foolishness of God being wiser than man’s wisdom” is that people deem His plan of redemption to be foolishness, but in actuality, that plan infinitely exceeds the intellectual capacity of man.

When we have explicitly understood through the testimony of the Bible that our God is all-wise, we must believe that truth. We must at the same time accept that we lack wisdom and that all wisdom is received from God. When we learn about this perfection of God, our faith in this attribute should be evidenced by our dispositions toward God and our demeanor. If we believe this doctrine, then our reliance on God must increase as we acquiesce to the reality that God is truly wise and that we can trust Him and His plan for our life and future.

Our prayers must multiply because we seek the glorious wisdom of God in our lives and learn to rely less on our own understanding. We must become diligent students of the Scriptures as we recognize them to be the treasury of His wisdom. I pray that we may see God as He is, and as we see Him in His glorious wisdom, that we may seek true wisdom from Him. Amen.

JOEL RIAZ
1689 Federalism | Amillennialism | General Equity Theonomist
Joel Riaz lives in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with his wife, Irum. Having grown up in a Christian community, Riaz is well-acquainted with the Christian Faith and is the first person in his community to embrace Reformed Baptist Doctrine. He serves as an elder at Jesus The Holy Lamb, a Reformed Baptist Church.