The Wisdom of Creation
What if we take our cues from creation rather than leaders or troubling moments?
The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens.
Proverbs 3:19
Creation is the expression of a Creator. Everything that exists has a design and a purpose flowing from non-bodily, personal power—God.
Because it will help us in our followership of Jesus, let’s give attention to two words that describe the underpinnings of Divine Creation: wisdom and understanding.
1. Wisdom: comprehensive knowledge in action
Because God created the earth and human life by and with wisdom, the world has order baked into it. God’s creative order is challenged by damaging storms, destructive leaders, and evil.
Daily life often seems devoid of wisdom. We seem unstitched from the moral fiber that God threaded into creation. For many of us right now, life seems more random, more harmful, more unstable than ever. Daily life feels disordered.
In vain we look for love-based wisdom on our screens. Social and political norms are up for grabs. We hope our various leaders know what they are doing but we fear they lack wisdom that is in alignment with God’s loving, creative intention.
Yet, as unstable as the world’s leadership seems right now, we know some vital things in our deepest being. We have no doubt that daffodils are just a few sunrises away from giving us post-winter assurance. The magical blooms of magnolia trees may even now be blooming in some places.
Flowers and trees are stable in their manifestation of God’s good order. Take your cues from the hope they offer. The One who causes them to push through frozen ground is the same God who holds all things together (Col. 1:17). The daffodils are a model of rootedness in the Creator God.
Our hope is well-placed in the Creator who sustains the beauty of his creation with his wisdom rather than a given leader or a troubling moment. Our rootedness testifies to a faithful Creator, allows us to live into the purposes of God, and offers stability to a doubting and insecure world.
2. Understanding: discretion, comprehension, and intelligence
Understanding conveys that which is fundamental to God’s nature: his intelligence and reason to use his wisdom in love for good.
How many times do we say or hear the words: “I just don’t get it!” or “I can’t understand how…?” Much of current life knocks our souls around. We do not see the full picture, but God, as the Creator, sees and understands what we cannot as creatures.
Proverbs 3:19 offers us the promise that God understands, but in a different way than we do. When we read about a new calamity in the news, we must play an understanding “catch-up” game. We try to understand what happened and do our best to guess at the future based on incomplete knowledge. But God’s understanding is offered to us not as one playing catch-up, but as one with so much intelligence, power, insight, and foresight, that he can establish the heavens by it. His understanding is our great comfort.
Get Wisdom + Understanding
As we await the fullness of re-creation, God’s wisdom and understanding are the stability and healing power that undergird human life. They are also the means for living purposeful, meaningful lives. In Christ, therefore, we are called to live in alignment with the wisdom and understanding of God.
Proverbs 4:7 commands us with authority.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.
National and state capitals may shake. The economy may go up and down. But Jesus is holding the world together in his wisdom. This is just one reason why it is so vital to derive our life from and live it in Christ.
Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:24
The wisdom and understanding that undergirds and sustains God’s creation may be counterintuitive and even dismissed in our age. But to miss or minimize the wisdom and understanding of God is the spiritual equivalent of thinking the earth is flat.
Such a life, being blind, eventually falls off the edge.
Life lived in the fullness of God’s wisdom and understanding is held steady in the gravitational pull of God’s love and his creative purposes.