Humility in Light of God's Revealed Wisdom

Introduction

Our world is confused, and perhaps many believers are confused about what the Bible teaches.

In recent weeks we have learned that:

It is not moral philosophy.

It is not a form of esoteric knowledge.

It is not a form of personal enlightenment through self-investigation.

Too often, believers get caricatured as arrogant.

Perhaps this has been a justified characterization of some believers.

True believers are humbled before God and live humbly before man.

Yet, our world confuses arrogance and assurance or confidence.

Arrogance is an unjustified elevated view of the self and of the self’s importance.

Assurance, given by the Bible, is confidence not in the self but in God.

We are confident not that we are right but that God is.

Humility and thanksgiving should define us as God’s people.

He has made himself known and knowable.

He has graciously atoned for human sin, our sin.

God revealed his wisdom, and we can build our lives upon it.

Prov. 8:15-16 have been a brief foretaste of this larger point that will now be made.

Wisdom, a Pre-existing Possession of the Lord

The wisdom we are called to base our thinking and our lives upon is the exclusive possession of the Lord.

The Lord is now the point of emphasis in the text.

God’s first deed was to possess wisdom.

The basic point seems to be this: before God ever created the earth, his basic reality was that He possessed wisdom.

Thus, wisdom is inherent to God’s person.

Through the Word of God, we have access to this wisdom.

It is something fundamental to God, and thus to know wisdom is to know God, to better understand Him.

Creation: God’s Work through Wisdom

The consistent claim throughout the scriptures is that Jehovah is God, the God responsible for all of creation.

He possess the inherent intelligence to know how to create a universe in which the earth can be sustained for generation after generation.

Present with him in the creation, indeed, essential for understanding it, is His wisdom.

Notice how the text mirrors, at times directly, the Genesis account.

Prov. 8:23: beginning (Gen. 1:1).

Prov. 8:24: depths (Gen. 1:2).

Prov. 8:24: water.

Prov. 8:25-26: dry land (earth).

Prov. 8:27: establishment of the heavens.

Prov. 8:28: skies above

Prov. 8:29: limits on the seas

One key point must be this: wisdom is essential to the existence of the Earth.

To understand how to live, God’s wisdom is essential.

Man’s competing, flawed ideas are intrusions upon God’s creation, not natural to it initially.

An inversion has happened, namely, that God’s wisdom now is drowned out by alien ideas of human beings.

Wisdom Calls to Find Her

Life comes with discovering wisdom.

God’s acceptance as well.

Notice how this language again indicates that this kind of wisdom comes from outside of us. We must find it. It does not lie within.

Prov. 8:36 utilizes the verb “to miss the mark,” the principle word for sin in the OT. However, what it implies is that someone who does not find God’s wisdom has missed the mark, ie. failed to attain the goal of life itself to his own injury.

This corresponds to the previous claim of Prov. 8:35.

Those who hate wisdom love death.

Physical

Spiritual

Job 28

Job and his friends cannot be completely trusted in everything they say, but we know that Job gets God right.

This is part of the third speech cycle, and Bildad has spoken for the third and final time. He has portrayed God as so overbearing that human beings have no hope to right with him. God sees even the moon and the stars as impure in his sight. All humanity, then, is not right with God by default, and nothing can be done about that. God is unfair.

Job responded to this in Job 26 by asking “how does that impart wisdom to anyone?” His point is that there is no reason to come to that conclusion at all, not enough evidence. Notice in Job 27:1-5 he refuses to say that Bildad is right.

Job’s speech ends by implying that in his act of creation God saw wisdom, recounted it, caused it be established or firm, and investigated it. What is point seems to be is that the physical creation is itself a testimony/witness of God’s wisdom compelling man to a single conclusion...”fear the Lord and turn away from evil.” Job 28:28.

Colossians 1:9-12

Here, Paul makes a connection between

Being filled with the full knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.

The result of such a filling is, however, “to walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.”

Note the end result of wisdom and spiritual understanding is obedience. Paul uses a series of participles to explain what that behavior looks like:

Bearing fruit in every good work

Growing in the full knowledge of God

Being enabled in all power according to the strength of his glory for all endurance and longsuffering.

Giving thanks with joy to the Father.

Col. 4:5 gives a similar understanding as Paul exhorts the Colossians to “be walking in wisdom toward those outside.”

On a few occasions, we have already seen the behavior of mature believers expressed as being “wise” in James 3.

All of this is consistent with Proverbs because it is explaining wisdom and understanding that comes from God manifesting itself in characteristics and behaviors that differentiate us, ever more so, from the unbelieving world.