I wish to encourage you to applaud God’s wisdom
It’s easy to applaud ourselves for being wise in our own eyes. Typically, worldly self-appraisal ends with a hearty pat on the back, and thumbs down to God. Mankind is masterful at conjuring up ideas that appease his own ideology of what he or she wants God to be like. Often, man’s wisdom manufactures a god which accepts us the way we are, and is accommodating of all things self-indulgent.
The apostle Paul, a well-educated man by worldly standards, asked three rhetorical questions in his first letter to the church at Corinth. To which he then gives multiple probing answers; ”Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:20-24).
Here’s the point; despite humanity’s many marvellous accomplishments; we still haven’t produced a single way of entering into a right relationship with God which is acceptable to Him. The fact is, for the most part, mankind ignores God, wishing Him out of existence. While the world applauds indifference toward God, we Christians applaud God who; “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5). Our gratitude flows from realising that God did not respond to our state of spiritual deadness with indifference. Rather, loving mercy motivated God to step into this world through His son Jesus Christ, to accomplish what mankind could not, and has no desire to accomplish.
God’s wisdom is different to ours
We praise God that He initiated a means of restoration that depends totally upon His actions through Jesus Christ. Consequently, mankind can only enter into the benefits of Christ’s accomplishment buy faith, dependent trust in what Jesus has already achieved on the Cross of Calvary on their behalf.
Believers applaud God’s wisdom which is opposite to man’s impotent religious efforts (Isaiah 64:6). God placed our many sins which separate us from Him, in the body of His Son (1 Peter 1:24). God then gave full vent to His righteous indignation against our sin, punishing it in His Son, resulting in the only appropriate reward for sin – death (James 1:15). God now tells the world; if you believe this, trust in this, rely upon this substitutional judgement of your sin in His Son, you shall be saved from receiving that judgement yourself (John 3:18). You shall be set free from the inevitability of certain and eternal death as the appropriate reward for living a life based on the personal wisdom which God says is foolishly unacceptable.
Self-righteous, worldly thinking stumbles over what it perceives as the foolishness of Christ’s substitutional death. But for those who believe in Jesus’ substitutional death, there is forgiveness of sin, there is peace from God, there is joy of restoration with God, and there is certain hope of eternal life. Praise God for His wisdom!
Today, applaud God’s wisdom! Speak well of the Saviour! Live your appreciation through obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ! Live your faith in God’s Son!