Wisdom's Delight
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
I have a question for you, but let me tell you right up front that it is a trick question. The question is, "What did God create first?"
If you are like most Bible readers, your mind will immediately jump to the first chapter of Genesis, and then it is a matter of trying to recall which part of the world God called into being first. In case you can't immediately bring that answer to mind, I'll tell you: It was the creation of light. Genesis says that in the beginning, "darkness covered the face of the deep." So as his first step in creating the world, God said, "Let there be light," and, the Bible says, light came into being.
But remember that I said I was asking a trick question, and so light is not the answer I am looking for. My question is a trick one because I did not ask which part of the world God created first, but what his first creative act was. The answer the Bible gives us to that question is found not Genesis 1 but in Proverbs 8. Actually, there may have been many creative acts before God made the world, but the first one the Bible records is God's creation of Wisdom. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom, speaking in the first person, says, "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago."
Taken literally, that verse means that Wisdom was birthed prior to the creation of the world. What's more, in that same chapter, Wisdom, which really is an attribute of God, is personified as a woman. Bear in mind that Wisdom is not really a separate individual, but a characteristic of God on whom the biblical people put a female face to make it more understandable. We do the same kind of thing when we take a characteristic of our own and speak of it as though it were an entity outside of ourselves, such as, "My sense of fair play would not let me do thus and so" or "I had to keep my wits about me."
In any case, this personified-woman, Wisdom, says that while God was marking out the foundations of the earth, she was "beside him." In other words, Wisdom was God's companion in the process of creating the world.
In trying to impose some sense on that claim, we might be tempted to say that before God set out to create the world, he first created the understanding he would need to do the creating. That, however, sounds nonsensical. We are probably better to hear the claim of Proverbs 8 as a poetic way of saying that God imbued some measure of his divineness in the world he created.
In Old Testament Hebrew thought, there was a view that God had built the world and life itself to run best in certain logical ways. The idea was that if you could figure out what those ways were and then do your best to cooperate with them, your life would be happy and you would have well-being. That understanding of life was called "wisdom," and as the word is used in the Old Testament, wisdom can be a skill, a body of knowledge, or, as in the case of Proverbs 8, an attribute of God.
Further, in those times, there were people who devoted their lives to discovering what God's wisdom consisted of. In fact, it became a career for some, so that moral guidance for Israel came not only from prophets and priests, but also from people known as "the wise." Some of these wise people were employed by kings to advise them on affairs of state and on personal matters as well. These wise men (and those who were officially among the wise in that patriarchal society were generally men, although some women were also known to be wise), issued their teachings in the form of sayings, fables, oracles, epics, riddles, poetry, and myths. Thus, eventually there was a whole body of written material called wisdom literature. In the Old Testament, Proverbs, along with Ecclesiastes, Job, and certain of the Psalms, are examples of this special category of writing. And unlike the historical or prophetic portions of the Old Testament, wisdom texts are intentionally instructive. Much of it has an outcome-oriented tone rather than devotional one, and it focuses on how one should act so as to make one's way successfully in the world while remaining righteous. Although not ostensibly religious in its outlook, the central theological claim of the wisdom writings is that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7).
In this section of Proverbs, Wisdom is in effect presenting her credentials. By portraying herself as the first of God's creations and of having been there with God at the birthing of the world, Wisdom is not claiming to be equal to God, but she is telling of her honored place next to God himself. Those credentials are important, for Wisdom wants her audience to heed her instructions, something they will only do if they are convinced that she is right. She wants them to listen, for she knows the value of her teaching. As she states it, "For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord."
All of that is well and good, but does it really have anything to say to us today? We may believe that God has so constructed life that it functions best in certain logical ways. And if that is indeed the case, then it certainly makes sense to try hard to cooperate with those laws of operation God has implanted in life, for we do want to be happy, healthy, and whole. But really, in this complex world, how do we know what all those principles are?
In my book, Roll Around Heaven All Day, I tell the story of my bicycle ride across America. On that ride, I met a young man in Kansas who was on a similar cross-nation trek by bicycle. His name was David, and he was in his early twenties. Since we were following the same route for a while, we spent five days riding together. Although the outward characteristics of our rides were similar, the inward meaning of the experience was significantly different for each of us. For me, the journey was basically an adventure and a way to scratch my life-long itch to see new places. For David, however, the journey was a pilgrimage. He had graduated from high school with no sense of what he wanted to do next. After working for three years at dead-end jobs, he decided he needed to do something to try to find himself, and so he settled on riding his bicycle across America. To help with his inner exploration, he had decided to try to read the holy books of the world's major religions. In fact, when I met him, he had a copy of a Hindu text with him and was working his way through it. I talked to him some about Christianity as we rode, and he listened respectfully, but without being persuaded. I've stayed in touch with David since then, and it doesn't sound as if he has kept up his reading of other religions, or has found the wisdom he seeks.
Perhaps most of us can identify with David, at least at some point in our lives. There may have been a time, especially in your youthful years, when you thought that at some point you'd have life figured out, that the answers to the deepest meaning of existence would be yours. And if you have sincerely embraced the way of Christ, you no doubt found that that commitment did settle some things, especially in the areas of morality, values, and eternal destiny. But if you are like many Christians, you'll also recognize that even following Jesus does not provide all the answers to life. As you get older, the remaining questions may not bother you as much, but they don't all get resolved either. What we call common sense and experience may fill part of the gap, but what the Old Testament calls wisdom remains an elusive quality.
Does that mean that the Old Testament's emphasis on wisdom is no help to us? No. We can read almost any portion of the book of Proverbs and find great pearls of down-to-earth advice about how to get along well in life. But there's more than that. In this section where Wisdom speaks of being beside God while he created the world, there is a statement that gives us another perspective. Here how it reads in the NRSV:
... when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
-- Proverbs 8:29b-31
There is, however, one of those intriguing language puzzles in this statement. As it stands, Wisdom, being beside God "like a master worker" makes it sound like Wisdom helped with the creating process. And I understand that "master worker" is an acceptable translation of the original Hebrew. However, many Bible scholars think that the intent of the Hebrew word, which is admittedly difficult to translate, may instead be more like "little child."1 The Revised English Bible follows that possibility when it renders this section this way:
... when he made earth's foundations firm.
Then I was at his side each day,
his darling and delight,
playing in his presence continually,
playing over his whole world,
while my delight was in [hu]mankind.
In both translations it is clear that Wisdom took great joy in the creation of human beings, but the second version enables us to see Wisdom as a child squealing with great delight as her parent, God, does marvelous things before her eyes, marvelous things like creating humankind. The child has great joy because of what her Father has made, and she finds human beings to be wonderful.
In that scenario, Wisdom is saying, "I remember as a child what great joy it was to watch my Father make you as he intended you to be."And the corollary to that is that God's Wisdom wants any who have strayed from the goodness in which God created us to come back and be Wisdom's delight again. Or, to say it another way, perhaps the greatest benefit of the pursuit of the meaning of life is not the answers we find, but the Creator we meet when we really search for wisdom.
To understand this more, it is helpful to look at Colossians 1:15-20, for in fact, the wisdom tradition continues there. James is the only whole book in the New Testament that fits that tradition, but there are a number of sections of other books that echo the wisdom teaching of the Old Testament, and these verses from Colossians are among them. In these verses, the Apostle Paul identifies Jesus as the "firstborn of all creation" and the one who "is before all things," which would seem on the surface to be a contradiction of Proverbs 8. But when we recall that Wisdom was simply a personification of a characteristic of God, then identifying Jesus as coming from God and participating in the creating of the world is a way of saying that the wisdom that dwells in God also dwells in Christ.
The writers of Proverbs did not have the benefit of knowing Jesus, as they lived centuries earlier, but from their point of view as expressed in Proverbs, they found it perfectly acceptable to urge people to seek wisdom rather than always urging them to seek God directly, for the reality is, seekers cannot go far toward wisdom without finding God.
In one of his books, E. Stanley Jones tells of New York City psychologist, Dr. Henry Link, who, because of his study of psychology, gave up Christianity as outmoded superstition. As he began treating patients, however, trying to help them untangle their snarled-up lives, he realized that he had to give them something outside of themselves to love. That made sense and was a wise decision, but to what should he direct them? As he pondered this problem, he eventually realized that the only permanent thing he could direct them to was God. And after realizing that, he soon found that he had talked himself back into being a Christian.2
This section from Proverbs tells us that God intended us from the beginning to be Wisdom's delight -- God's delight, really. And by planting within us the urge to understand life, he also gave a path that leads us back to him.
To sum up, go ahead and look diligently for the meaning of life and for the principles that make life work best. But be aware that they are not ends in themselves, for the further you go in pursuit of them, the closer you are likely to come to God himself.
__________
1. See The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 4, pp. 832-833.
2. E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living (New York: Abingdon Press, 1935).
If you are like most Bible readers, your mind will immediately jump to the first chapter of Genesis, and then it is a matter of trying to recall which part of the world God called into being first. In case you can't immediately bring that answer to mind, I'll tell you: It was the creation of light. Genesis says that in the beginning, "darkness covered the face of the deep." So as his first step in creating the world, God said, "Let there be light," and, the Bible says, light came into being.
But remember that I said I was asking a trick question, and so light is not the answer I am looking for. My question is a trick one because I did not ask which part of the world God created first, but what his first creative act was. The answer the Bible gives us to that question is found not Genesis 1 but in Proverbs 8. Actually, there may have been many creative acts before God made the world, but the first one the Bible records is God's creation of Wisdom. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom, speaking in the first person, says, "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago."
Taken literally, that verse means that Wisdom was birthed prior to the creation of the world. What's more, in that same chapter, Wisdom, which really is an attribute of God, is personified as a woman. Bear in mind that Wisdom is not really a separate individual, but a characteristic of God on whom the biblical people put a female face to make it more understandable. We do the same kind of thing when we take a characteristic of our own and speak of it as though it were an entity outside of ourselves, such as, "My sense of fair play would not let me do thus and so" or "I had to keep my wits about me."
In any case, this personified-woman, Wisdom, says that while God was marking out the foundations of the earth, she was "beside him." In other words, Wisdom was God's companion in the process of creating the world.
In trying to impose some sense on that claim, we might be tempted to say that before God set out to create the world, he first created the understanding he would need to do the creating. That, however, sounds nonsensical. We are probably better to hear the claim of Proverbs 8 as a poetic way of saying that God imbued some measure of his divineness in the world he created.
In Old Testament Hebrew thought, there was a view that God had built the world and life itself to run best in certain logical ways. The idea was that if you could figure out what those ways were and then do your best to cooperate with them, your life would be happy and you would have well-being. That understanding of life was called "wisdom," and as the word is used in the Old Testament, wisdom can be a skill, a body of knowledge, or, as in the case of Proverbs 8, an attribute of God.
Further, in those times, there were people who devoted their lives to discovering what God's wisdom consisted of. In fact, it became a career for some, so that moral guidance for Israel came not only from prophets and priests, but also from people known as "the wise." Some of these wise people were employed by kings to advise them on affairs of state and on personal matters as well. These wise men (and those who were officially among the wise in that patriarchal society were generally men, although some women were also known to be wise), issued their teachings in the form of sayings, fables, oracles, epics, riddles, poetry, and myths. Thus, eventually there was a whole body of written material called wisdom literature. In the Old Testament, Proverbs, along with Ecclesiastes, Job, and certain of the Psalms, are examples of this special category of writing. And unlike the historical or prophetic portions of the Old Testament, wisdom texts are intentionally instructive. Much of it has an outcome-oriented tone rather than devotional one, and it focuses on how one should act so as to make one's way successfully in the world while remaining righteous. Although not ostensibly religious in its outlook, the central theological claim of the wisdom writings is that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7).
In this section of Proverbs, Wisdom is in effect presenting her credentials. By portraying herself as the first of God's creations and of having been there with God at the birthing of the world, Wisdom is not claiming to be equal to God, but she is telling of her honored place next to God himself. Those credentials are important, for Wisdom wants her audience to heed her instructions, something they will only do if they are convinced that she is right. She wants them to listen, for she knows the value of her teaching. As she states it, "For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord."
All of that is well and good, but does it really have anything to say to us today? We may believe that God has so constructed life that it functions best in certain logical ways. And if that is indeed the case, then it certainly makes sense to try hard to cooperate with those laws of operation God has implanted in life, for we do want to be happy, healthy, and whole. But really, in this complex world, how do we know what all those principles are?
In my book, Roll Around Heaven All Day, I tell the story of my bicycle ride across America. On that ride, I met a young man in Kansas who was on a similar cross-nation trek by bicycle. His name was David, and he was in his early twenties. Since we were following the same route for a while, we spent five days riding together. Although the outward characteristics of our rides were similar, the inward meaning of the experience was significantly different for each of us. For me, the journey was basically an adventure and a way to scratch my life-long itch to see new places. For David, however, the journey was a pilgrimage. He had graduated from high school with no sense of what he wanted to do next. After working for three years at dead-end jobs, he decided he needed to do something to try to find himself, and so he settled on riding his bicycle across America. To help with his inner exploration, he had decided to try to read the holy books of the world's major religions. In fact, when I met him, he had a copy of a Hindu text with him and was working his way through it. I talked to him some about Christianity as we rode, and he listened respectfully, but without being persuaded. I've stayed in touch with David since then, and it doesn't sound as if he has kept up his reading of other religions, or has found the wisdom he seeks.
Perhaps most of us can identify with David, at least at some point in our lives. There may have been a time, especially in your youthful years, when you thought that at some point you'd have life figured out, that the answers to the deepest meaning of existence would be yours. And if you have sincerely embraced the way of Christ, you no doubt found that that commitment did settle some things, especially in the areas of morality, values, and eternal destiny. But if you are like many Christians, you'll also recognize that even following Jesus does not provide all the answers to life. As you get older, the remaining questions may not bother you as much, but they don't all get resolved either. What we call common sense and experience may fill part of the gap, but what the Old Testament calls wisdom remains an elusive quality.
Does that mean that the Old Testament's emphasis on wisdom is no help to us? No. We can read almost any portion of the book of Proverbs and find great pearls of down-to-earth advice about how to get along well in life. But there's more than that. In this section where Wisdom speaks of being beside God while he created the world, there is a statement that gives us another perspective. Here how it reads in the NRSV:
... when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
-- Proverbs 8:29b-31
There is, however, one of those intriguing language puzzles in this statement. As it stands, Wisdom, being beside God "like a master worker" makes it sound like Wisdom helped with the creating process. And I understand that "master worker" is an acceptable translation of the original Hebrew. However, many Bible scholars think that the intent of the Hebrew word, which is admittedly difficult to translate, may instead be more like "little child."1 The Revised English Bible follows that possibility when it renders this section this way:
... when he made earth's foundations firm.
Then I was at his side each day,
his darling and delight,
playing in his presence continually,
playing over his whole world,
while my delight was in [hu]mankind.
In both translations it is clear that Wisdom took great joy in the creation of human beings, but the second version enables us to see Wisdom as a child squealing with great delight as her parent, God, does marvelous things before her eyes, marvelous things like creating humankind. The child has great joy because of what her Father has made, and she finds human beings to be wonderful.
In that scenario, Wisdom is saying, "I remember as a child what great joy it was to watch my Father make you as he intended you to be."And the corollary to that is that God's Wisdom wants any who have strayed from the goodness in which God created us to come back and be Wisdom's delight again. Or, to say it another way, perhaps the greatest benefit of the pursuit of the meaning of life is not the answers we find, but the Creator we meet when we really search for wisdom.
To understand this more, it is helpful to look at Colossians 1:15-20, for in fact, the wisdom tradition continues there. James is the only whole book in the New Testament that fits that tradition, but there are a number of sections of other books that echo the wisdom teaching of the Old Testament, and these verses from Colossians are among them. In these verses, the Apostle Paul identifies Jesus as the "firstborn of all creation" and the one who "is before all things," which would seem on the surface to be a contradiction of Proverbs 8. But when we recall that Wisdom was simply a personification of a characteristic of God, then identifying Jesus as coming from God and participating in the creating of the world is a way of saying that the wisdom that dwells in God also dwells in Christ.
The writers of Proverbs did not have the benefit of knowing Jesus, as they lived centuries earlier, but from their point of view as expressed in Proverbs, they found it perfectly acceptable to urge people to seek wisdom rather than always urging them to seek God directly, for the reality is, seekers cannot go far toward wisdom without finding God.
In one of his books, E. Stanley Jones tells of New York City psychologist, Dr. Henry Link, who, because of his study of psychology, gave up Christianity as outmoded superstition. As he began treating patients, however, trying to help them untangle their snarled-up lives, he realized that he had to give them something outside of themselves to love. That made sense and was a wise decision, but to what should he direct them? As he pondered this problem, he eventually realized that the only permanent thing he could direct them to was God. And after realizing that, he soon found that he had talked himself back into being a Christian.2
This section from Proverbs tells us that God intended us from the beginning to be Wisdom's delight -- God's delight, really. And by planting within us the urge to understand life, he also gave a path that leads us back to him.
To sum up, go ahead and look diligently for the meaning of life and for the principles that make life work best. But be aware that they are not ends in themselves, for the further you go in pursuit of them, the closer you are likely to come to God himself.
__________
1. See The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 4, pp. 832-833.
2. E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living (New York: Abingdon Press, 1935).
