What is God’s wisdom?

Question 2054

God’s wisdom is his perfect ability to choose the highest and best ends and to bring them about by the surest and best means, so that everything he does fits together for his glory and the good of his people. It is not simply that God knows everything, though he does, but that he applies what he knows with flawless skill, never mistaken in his aims and never clumsy in his methods. The Scriptures display this wisdom across the whole range of his works, from the ordering of the cosmos to the strange and glorious plan of redemption.

To speak of God’s wisdom is to speak of one of his communicable attributes, a perfection that he shares in a creaturely measure with those made in his image, while possessing it himself without limit or flaw.

How God’s wisdom differs from knowledge

It helps to set wisdom alongside knowledge, since the two are easily confused. Knowledge is the possession of truth, the awareness of what is. Wisdom is the right use of that truth towards a good purpose, the skill of fitting means to ends. A person may know a great deal and still act foolishly. With God there is no such gap. His knowledge is complete and his application of it is faultless, so that God’s wisdom is knowledge in action, the practical exercise of a mind that sees everything truly and orders everything well. The Hebrew word often rendered wisdom, chokmah, carries this very note of practical skill, the same word used of the craftsmen who built the tabernacle with their God-given ability.

This is why the writers of Scripture stand in awe not only of how much God knows but of how he arranges what he knows. Paul breaks into praise at the end of his great argument in Romans, crying, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” The doxology, which you can read at Romans 11:33-36, places wisdom and knowledge together yet distinguishes them, marvelling that the God who knows all has woven his purposes for Jew and Gentile into a design no human mind could have devised.

God’s wisdom in creation

The first great theatre of God’s wisdom is the world he has made. “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” The Psalmist sees in the ordered abundance of nature not blind chance but the artistry of a wise Maker, every creature suited to its place, every season turning in its course. The proverb goes further and personifies wisdom as present with God at the creation, the LORD founding the earth by wisdom and establishing the heavens by understanding.

When we study the fitness of the created order, the way light and water and life are arranged so that the world is habitable and fruitful, we are reading the signature of God’s wisdom written across the natural realm. This is part of the wider witness of creation to its Maker, a witness we examine in our article on how creation reveals God. The order we see is not the wisdom of an impersonal process but the considered work of a personal God who does all things well.

God’s wisdom in providence and the cross

Greater than the wisdom shown in making the world is the wisdom shown in governing it and in redeeming a people for himself. The long story of providence, with its delays and reversals, often looks tangled to us in the living of it, yet Scripture insists that God is working all things according to the counsel of his will, fitting every thread into a pattern that will one day be seen to be perfect. Joseph could say to the brothers who sold him that what they meant for evil, God meant for good, and that single sentence opens a window onto the wisdom that turns even human malice to a saving end.

The supreme display of God’s wisdom is the cross of Jesus. To the watching world it looked like weakness and folly, a crucified teacher and a defeated cause. Paul declares the opposite, that Christ crucified is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and that what seems foolish in God is wiser than men. The plan by which a holy God could be both just and the justifier of the ungodly, punishing sin in a willing substitute and welcoming sinners freely, is the masterpiece of divine wisdom, hidden for ages and now revealed. You can trace Paul’s argument at 1 Corinthians 1:22-25. No human counsel would have devised salvation by a cross, and that is precisely the point, for God’s wisdom delights to accomplish the greatest good by the most unexpected means.

God’s wisdom personified in Proverbs

The book of Proverbs gives God’s wisdom a voice of its own. In its eighth chapter wisdom stands in the street and calls out, declaring that she was with the LORD at the beginning of his work, before the mountains were shaped, rejoicing in his presence as he marked out the foundations of the earth. The picture is poetic rather than the introduction of a second person alongside God, a vivid way of teaching that wisdom was no afterthought in creation but belonged to God’s own nature as he brought the world into being. To read the world rightly is to reckon with the wisdom that was there from the start.

Many Christian readers have heard in this passage a foregleam of the One whom the New Testament calls the wisdom of God in person, for Paul writes that Jesus became to us wisdom from God. We should be careful not to flatten the poetry of Proverbs into a simple proof text, yet the link is not fanciful, since the wisdom that ordered creation and the wisdom that ordered redemption are the one wisdom of the one God, displayed first in the world and then supremely at the cross. The wisdom literature as a whole, which we survey in our article on how the wisdom books fit the redemptive story, exists to school God’s people in this skill of living before the face of a wise God. Where Proverbs commends the prudent and warns the fool, it is training us to value God’s wisdom above silver and to order our days by the fear of the LORD.

Receiving God’s wisdom

Because wisdom belongs to God in fullness, it is something we must receive from him rather than generate within ourselves. James tells us plainly that if any of us lacks wisdom, we should ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given. The fear of the LORD is named again and again as the beginning of wisdom, which means that true skill in living starts with a right reverence for the God who is wise, and grows as we walk in step with his revealed word. We treat the believer’s experience of the Spirit’s wisdom further in our study of the gift of the word of wisdom.

This guards us from two mistakes. It keeps us from the pride that trusts its own cleverness, since the wisest course is always to submit our reasoning to the God who sees the end from the beginning. And it keeps us from despair when life makes no sense, since the God whose wisdom designed the cross can be trusted to be doing something good even when the pattern is hidden from us. God’s wisdom and the harmony of his other perfections are explored further in our piece on the relationship between God’s attributes.

So, now what?

If God is perfectly wise, then the believer can rest in his ordering of life without needing to understand all of it. The seasons of confusion, the prayers that seem unanswered, the providences that look like setbacks, all of these are being handled by a wisdom that has never once made a mistake. We are not asked to see the whole design; we are asked to trust the Designer, and the cross is our warrant for doing so, since the darkest hour in history turned out to be the wisest act of God.

It also calls us to seek his wisdom rather than lean on our own. The path of the wise is not the path of the cleverest schemer but of the humblest listener, the one who asks God, attends to his word, and fears the LORD. Where we want a skill for living that will not fail us, God’s wisdom is offered freely to all who ask in faith, and the God who gives it does so generously and without finding fault in those who come. The asking itself is the beginning of becoming wise.

"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" Romans 11:33