22“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. 23 From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. 24 When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. 25Before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth; 26while He had not yet made the earth and the fields, nor the first dust of the world. 27When He established the heavens, I was there, when He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep, 28when He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed, 29when He set for the sea its boundary so that the water would not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth; 30then I was beside Him, as a master workman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, 31rejoicing in the world, His earth, And having my delight in the sons of men.”
Wisdom is timeless, existing from the very beginning of creation; in fact, it existed before creation. Wisdom speaks to us in our passage today about being co-existent with God, for the Lord is wisdom. He didn’t become wise; that is one of His immutable characteristics. In the apostle Paul’s concluding doxology after laying out the great doctrine of justification, he refers to “the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 16:27). All wisdom is derivative of His perfect wisdom.
It is not that wisdom is a philosophical concept that God stumbled upon in the past. He never had to learn wisdom because that is integral to His eternal existence. Wisdom is not a human construct that we superimpose on Him, to which He is somehow subject. It is preposterous to intone the words, “God is right when He says …” as though we are passing judgment on Him and could pronounce Him wrong if we so felt to be the case. He is the author of wisdom, all wisdom.
The passage for today extols the role of wisdom in God’s creative works. Everything He made shows wisdom far beyond what the human mind can grasp. Cosmologists struggle to understand how the universe came into existence, capitulating to the popular notion of a big bang theory, where everything began as an infinitely dense point in space. This singularity (as it is called) allegedly exploded and expanded into our known universe, sending the stars to unimaginable distances. Yet, no one has devised a cogent theory of where that supposed singularity came from or what happened before it exploded. The Bible tells us that great wisdom brought creation into existence and could do it at a mere speaking of His voice. The more scientists study the physical universe, the more amazingly complex it appears. We conclude, therefore, that God’s wisdom is infinitely greater than any human mind can conceive.
Wisdom, personified with a speaking voice, enjoys a satisfying relationship with the Creator God. In other words, God enjoys the wisdom of how He created everything. After the final day of creation, which included the beginning of the human race, God said, “It is very good” (Gen. 1:31).
The wisdom of the book of Proverbs is integrally connected to and sourced in God’s eternal and timeless wisdom. We are not just talking about good advice or throwing out a candidate to compete among many other “wisdom” statements or philosophies in the world. No, we are talking about overriding wisdom from which we derive practical wisdom daily. That is what the proverbs proclaim.
Because God is eternal and the Creator, His wisdom remains true for all time and creation. There is no wisdom greater than His because He created everything. And this means His wisdom takes into consideration the future, even eternity. Our wisdom is short-sighted and limited because we are not omniscient (all-knowing) like God and we have a brief lifespan, unlike our eternal God.
Lord, help me grow in wisdom founded on Your unchanging and timeless wisdom, especially when faced with difficult decisions that seem to have no good solution. Please help me choose the right thing.
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