Sermon Tone Analysis

*The Blessings of Wisdom and Prudence*

*Eph 1:8*

* *

All right – well as most of you know, we have come now in our study through the book of Ephesians to Ephesians 1:8 – and if you would like to open your Bibles to that verse we will just read it quickly together – beginning in vs 7.  “In him (Jesus Christ) we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of God’s grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight.”

Now there are 3 primary words that we are going to define and spend our time looking at this morning – namely the word *all*, the word *wisdom* and the word *insight*.

All wisdom and insight has been lavished upon those who have been chosen – adopted - predestined - redeemed and forgiven – and this morning I hope to help bring us all to an understanding of just what that means – that we have been gifted with or lavishly graced with all wisdom and insight.

But before we jump right in to definitions and explanations and applications – I would like to take a quick moment and go back to this article about Joshua Bell playing in a subway station in downtown NY and read a short section of the play-by-play.

The article is quite long and gives the play-by-play covering nearly the entire  hour that Joshua Bell played – describing in great detail everything that happened.

And I would like to read just one part from that article as we begin this morning.

“There are 6 moments in the video that Bell finds particularly painful to relive.

"The awkward times," he calls them.

It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing.

The music stops.

The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished.

No applause, no acknowledgment.

So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . .

." -- and begins the next piece.

After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Avay Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary.

This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens.

A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator.

The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child.

She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency.

"I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan.

Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video.

He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door by his mother.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued.

He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do.

She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight.

As they exit the station, Evan can still be seen craning to look.

When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter.

Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us.

It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the few people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding.

Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups.

But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent.

Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.

And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

*WOW!!*  That in my opinion is very, very intriguing.

Jesus said in Matt 18:3 – “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The world is full of all kinds of wisdom and insight.

We have traveled by satellite and telescope 13 billion light years from earth and have discovered vast galaxies – and we have plummeted the depths of both the earth and sea and have found great treasures and beautiful splendors and have learned great mysteries and the secrets of the natural world.

We have opened up the human body and we have discovered so many of its mysteries and we have cured diseases and we have mapped human DNA which puts us on the brink of millions of new discoveries and finding many more cures for many more diseases.

But all of this wisdom and insight is helpless when it comes to eternal salvation.

Jesus said we must become like children – which I will argue today means that we must give up on our natural – worldly wisdom and insight as a way of knowing how to be saved – and we must become like children – admitting we don’t know much at all – in fact we’re really quite foolish –  and we don’t know anything - and if we are going to know such a great thing, such an all important life saving thing - such as how to be eternally saved – we must turn to God and ask Him for that wisdom and insight which only comes from Him and which no man can find on his own apart from God.

And as we’ll see today – God is so very gracious and He not only gives wisdom and insight into grand spiritual realities – life saving realities -  but He lavishes this wisdom and insight upon those He’s chosen according to the riches of his grace.

God purposed in His own mind and according to His own good pleasure the whole plan of salvation – and God has revealed this plan.

He has made known the mystery of His will – the mystery of His good pleasure – and not only has God revealed this plan but He has also done something which makes it possible for us to know it and to comprehend it and to receive it.

He has given spiritual wisdom and insight and so again – this morning we will spend our time looking at just what this means – that we have been given all wisdom and insight - and my hope and prayer for this morning is that every single one of us will realize just how necessary this wisdom and insight is – just how essential – how completely indispensable – how crucial it is – so much so that without it - you will perish eternally.

So that’s what’s at stake here.

That’s how important this wisdom and insight is.

So I hope and pray we will all be like children this morning, setting aside all our preconceived notions and all our worldly learning and humbly submit to the teaching of God’s Word – that it might grab a hold of us like Bell’s music grabbed those children – and that we would listen this morning as one whose life hangs in the balance – as people who know that our destiny all depends on whether or not we truly have this wisdom and insight from God.

I pray it will be proven in the end this morning that you do indeed have this wisdom and insight from God.

 

Now before we jump in and begin looking more specifically at these words *all wisdom and insight* – we need to clear up a little bit of confusion here that has been fostered by the various translations of this verse.

The ESV itself is not totally clear about whose wisdom and insight is being spoken of here.

As you look at verses 7-8 in the ESV I think one could argue either way.

You could say the verse like this – “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he, in all his wisdom and insight, lavished upon us.”

It would not be outside of the rules of grammar to read it like that.

And reading it like that would mean that the wisdom and insight is God’s and it was through His own wisdom and insight that He lavished upon us His grace and it was through His great wisdom and insight that He made known to us the mystery of His will.

And there are a number of translations that do in fact translate this verse clearly that way – saying God did what He did utilizing His own Wisdom and insight.

For instance, Eph 1:7-9 in the NCV – says, “In Christ we are set free by the blood of his death, and so we have forgiveness of sins.

How rich is God’s grace, which he has given to us so fully and freely.

God, with full wisdom and understanding, let us know his secret purpose.

This was what God wanted, and he planned to do it through Christ.”

RC Sproul, whom I respect with the highest regard, agrees with that translation and so he is quoted in his Ephesians commentary as saying, “This wisdom and understanding does not refer to our wisdom and understanding, but to God’s divine understanding – that is, the scheme of redemption He has decreed.”

So that’s 1 side of this – that the wisdom and insight there in this verse is God’s wisdom and insight that He utilized in doing the things He did.

But interestingly, most translations translate this vs in a way that makes it very clear that the wisdom and insight spoken of here are gifts of God’s grace that are given to those who are chosen and adopted, redeemed and forgiven.

The NLT I think puts it most succinctly when it says – “He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.

He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.”

That is why in D.M Lloyd Jones’s commentary on Eph he says, “I argue that we must regard the wisdom and the insight as being applied to ourselves, and that Paul is saying that they have come to us as a result of the working of God’s grace.”

So we begin this morning with *The Dilemma*.

There are two different approaches to this verse and translations on either side to support those views – and so before we get too far into the message this morning I think it would be appropriate for me to give some of the reasons why I believe these are indeed gifts of God’s grace to us - rather than the things God utilizes in the dispensing of grace.

And there are 4 arguments that I want to use and I’m going to rip through these quite quickly so that we can get to the main part of the message this morning .

We’ll look at the Theological argument – the Grammatical argument, the Historical argument ands the Scriptural argument.

So first the *Theological Argument*.

The fact is, although wisdom is certainly attributed to God all throughout the scriptures – one is very hard pressed to find anywhere else in the whole Bible where it says that God did such and such a thing with all wisdom – or with all His wisdom.

The fact is – God is absolute wisdom and we really have no right to say that God did this thing here with all wisdom – as though there are other things that He did in which He did not use all His wisdom.

DML Jones says it in fact lacks reverence toward God to say that “God did this thing here with all His wisdom!”

That in fact becomes even more obvious when we look at the word insight or prudence as the KJV has it.

Nowhere in all the scriptures is prudence or insight ascribed to God.

We can easily say that men are prudent – that they have insight into things – but it is inappropriate for us to say that God has insight.

God is perfect and He has absolute and eternal wisdom.

He does not need insight into things – because He knows all things.

So theologically, this wisdom and insight here cannot refer to God, specially because of the word all that is used – and therefore must refer to the gifts of God’s grace given to those who are His.

*Grammatically* this also makes the most sense.

The word all in the Greek (Pas) can either mean “all without exception” or “all without distinction.”

All without exception in the case of wisdom and insight would then mean all wisdom and all insight without any exception.

It would therefore be the highest and broadest form of wisdom and insight imaginable.

It would be absolute and perfect wisdom and insight.

If that is what the word all means in this passage then we would have to agree that this wisdom and insight is referring to God, since you and I clearly do not have that kind of wisdom and insight.

But the word all – can also means “all without distinction.”

In that case, this wisdom and insight would mean all kinds of wisdoms and insights.

Not complete wisdom and insight – but all kinds of wisdom and insight – a very broad scope of wisdom and insight.

So which definition of all is assumed here by Paul.

Well, I’m not a Greek scholar or even a good Greek student – but according the Expositors Greek testament, the “all” here is an extensive, not an intensive which simply means that the wisdom and insight that is being spoken of here by Paul is all kinds of wisdoms and insights – not perfect wisdom and insight.