All the wisdom in the world has been summed up for us in a person. His name is Jesus! Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:24, “Christ is the mighty power of God and the wonderful wisdom of God.” John tells us that no one has ever seen God at any time but that He took on a body of flesh (we call that the incarnation), and pitched his tent with us. The literally rendering of the phrase is “pitched his tent” or “tabernacled” with us. The presence of God was manifested in the tabernacle during the wilderness wanderings which was housed in a temporary, and movable, facility. We call those facilities tents. The Bedouins still live in tents today. We’ll see them next month along the roads when we travel from the northern areas of Israel to the southern ones around the Dead Sea. The tents serve as houses for the Bedouin families. Having seen the tents in Israel, I’ve been very receptive to the writer’s attempt to make John 1:14 come alive for us in the translation that says, “And the Word became flesh and moved into our neighborhood.” He was indeed “God with us.”
Horatius Bonar said, “All that is in God, all that can come forth out of God is contained in Christ. He is the full representative of the invisible and incomprehensible Jehovah. He is the brightness of Jehovah’s glory and the express image of his person. In the works of creation God has displayed portions of his wisdom, but in Christ he put forth the whole of it, so it can be said of Christ, he is the wisdom of God. Thus, the knowledge of Christ not only transcends all other knowledge, but includes them all; the study of this embodiment of all that is in God is not only superior to but embraces all other studies.”
In 1 Corinthians, Paul focuses his lesson by contrasting the wisdom of the world with the wisdom of God. He contrasts the rulers of this world, and their wisdom, with Jesus as God’s wisdom. He says that if the rulers of this world would have “…known the wisdom of God, they would not have crucified the lord of Glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8). John Piper summarizes this by saying, “the rulers who put Jesus to death are probably the most vivid example of the fact that you can measure a person’s true wisdom by whether they recognize Jesus as the Lord of glory…You can tell whether a person’s mind is dominated by the wisdom of the world or the wisdom of God by whether he acknowledges the crucified Christ to be not a criminal but the Lord of glory.”
In the Fall I’m hoping to begin a new series on Jesus. If it’s true, that the entire corpus of God’s wisdom is embodied in Christ, I can’t think of a better subject to study. I’m thinking about calling it “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” I’m going to argue that absolutely everything from the creation of the world in Genesis to the creation of the New World at the end of Revelation can only be understood through the knowledge of Jesus Christ, the full incarnation of God and God’s wisdom.