01.07. Christ As The Preacher Of Gods Wisdom
Christ As The Preacher Of God’s Wisdom But how can we become partakers of this divine wisdom, which surpasses human thinking? How can we ever come to know this eternal wisdom of God, if it is incomprehensible and imperceptible to man? This obvious question is dealt with in the following verses (1 Corinthians 2:10 ff.).
God has revealed the mysteries of His wisdom and the secrets of His heart through His Spirit. These things have been communicated to us by divine revelation. But before saying more about this, we should like to point out that, in the first place, God’s wisdom has been revealed in Christ. This has to do with the first chapter of the letter to the Corinthians, which portrays Christ as the incarnation of the wisdom of God.
Without Christ it was entirely impossible for us to come to know the wisdom of God. Man has alienated himself from God, he has turned his back upon God. Being in such a state, how could he ever be able to acquire God’s wisdom? Man needed a Messenger from God to give him a clear insight into God’s wisdom, a Person coming from God to preach this wisdom to him. This is hinted at in the book of Job, where Elihu speaks about the need of a Messenger, a Mediator, to mediate between God and man and to pay the ransom that is required to reconcile fallen man with God (Job 33:23-24).
Now who could act as God’s Messenger to redeem man’s sin and to open his eyes for the riches of the wisdom of God? It had to be Somebody who was with God and who knew all the mysteries of God’s wisdom and who, at the same time, was able to meet man’s needs. He had to represent God in the right way, and to have acceptance with man.
It could not be an angel, for how could angels (ministering spirits) gain an insight into the secrets of God’s heart? Angels obey God’s commandments, but the secrets of God’s love are hidden from them. Angels cannot come down to fallen man’s level in order to provide for man’s greatest needs and to deliver him from sin. Having been created by God, angels have to keep their proper domain, their own original state. They are unable to pay a ransom for any of God’s other creatures, just as man himself is unable to pay a ransom for his brother (Psalms 49:7-8). Therefore no angel could lower himself to man’s level in order to lift him up, so that he would be able to understand the riches of God’s wisdom.
Scripture teaches us that the right Messenger from God could be none other than the Son of God, the beloved One in whom God is well pleased. Christ is the perfect expression of God’s thoughts, and the full revelation of God’s nature. He is the eternal Word, and He was in the beginning with God. He is God the Son, and all things were made through Him. All things were created by Him: the angels, the cosmos, as well as man. He alone could reconcile all things to God, whether things on earth or things in heaven. For the whole creation had been alienated from God by the fall of Satan and of man himself. So Christ was the only One who was able to pay the ransom for fallen man and bring him back to God - redeemed. Only He was able to come down to man’s level, without losing His Godhead because of this, in order to lift man out of the misery into which he had sunk. Only the Son could explain the Father to us and reveal the secrets of the Father’s heart. Only the Word could become flesh in order to suffer for us and to unite us with Himself as redeemed children of God in the glorious results of His work (John 1:1-51, Colossians 1:1-29, Hebrews 1:1-14). And God sent forth His Son, when the fullness of the time had come (Galatians 4:4), after the ’trial period’ of the first man was over. Then the time had come to put aside the first man and all his wisdom, and to replace him by the second Man and the wisdom of God as displayed in Him. Divine wisdom can be known only in and through Him. Christ is both the power and the wisdom of God, and He became for us wisdom from God (1 Corinthians 1:24; 1 Corinthians 1:30).