Wisdom's Call: 30 Days in the House of LifeSample

THE WORLD RUNS ON WISDOM

The Lord founded the earth by wisdom and established the heavens by understanding. By his knowledge the watery depths broke open, and the clouds dripped with dew. Proverbs 3:19-20

The psalmist marvels aloud at creation around him: Christ has created everything seen and unseen. We live in an ordered, intricately interdependent yet harmonious universe.

Even though our age is one of cynicism, even pessimism, every one of us still feels our breath catch at the sight of a shooting star, or when the curtain of the northern lights descends and dances, or as we survey the wonder of tiny nails, eyebrows, and toes of a fresh, newborn babe.

The foundation of this ordered world stands so firm with the imprint of its Creator’s wisdom that even though the destructive folly of Satan would mar its beauty and introduce decay, the principles of physics still define and drive it.

We see numerous affirmations scattered throughout Scripture that Christ is the wisdom on which our world rests. These assurances exist as our treasure, like iridescent pearls scattered across the page. The letter to the Colossians declares that Christ is the Creator of all things in the universe (Col. 1:16), and the Corinthian epistle likewise draws on Solomon’s treasury with this truth: Christ Himself is our wisdom, and our way of understanding the world (1 Cor. 1:16–31).

Even though it is a fallen beauty, it is a majestic beauty still, with human beings as creation’s pinnacle: a marvel of divine engineering, living, sentient machines that run independently and are capable of worship, living beings with souls, each possessing a curious battery called a heart that runs without a plug, and cease at the Creator’s determining.

We run alive, with the breath of our Creator in our lungs. And yet there are terrible things marring the beauty of all that is made—people, flora, fauna alike. Nothing has escaped the effects of the fall.

Scripture tells us that if we get wisdom, understanding follows. Apart from Christ, our wisdom—what we are able to know and do, anything that builds life—is an act of His grace. Proverbs tells us more about wisdom. The book tells us that the Lord, who is Wisdom Himself, used the innate qualities of wisdom to lay the earth’s foundation. In truth, the Creator is why the world, for all its brokenness and destruction, still makes sense and hangs together as a whole, since wisdom was the foundation of the cosmos design. Seasons still color our landscapes; spring still predictably follows winter in the places where it should.

Day follows night, and the sun hangs in the sky and marks our time. Animals, fish, and fowl remain fed and true to their nature. Kingdoms still rise and fall, and here is humanity in the middle of it all, despite the fallen nature of the world as we know it . . . His world crafted by wisdom, founded on wisdom, still sings.