SERIES: The Book of Romans
The Wisdom and Knowledge of God
Introduction: “The chief end of man,” according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” But how do we glorify God? What actions on our part redound to His honor, praise and glory? Well, there are many. For example,
Unity in the Church glorifies God. (Rom. 15:6)
Simple faith in His Word glorifies God. (Acts 13:48)
Handling suffering well glorifies God. (Rom. 8:17)
Our obedience and faithful service glorifies God. (2 Cor. 9:13)
But beyond everything else God is glorified when finite human beings realize that God possesses infinite wisdom and knowledge, and, instead of rejecting that wisdom and knowledge, or arguing with it, simply bow in unqualified worship and praise.
There are, of course, many passages, particularly in the Psalms, which glorify God in that way, but none does so more beautifully or profoundly than the last four verses of Romans 11, where Paul pours out an uninhibited eulogy and an unbounded doxology to God:
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
If these four verses were the only portion of this amazing book of Romans a person had in his possession, he would still have a goldmine. But the deep, rich veins here aren’t fully exposed until we see these verses in their context. After all, Paul didn’t open the book of Romans with these verses—rather he used them to close the tremendous theological portion of his epistle. This eulogy and doxology are the natural response of a heart that has grasped the fabulous truths of the first eleven chapters.
All one needs to do to share Paul’s overwhelming awe of God is to contemplate the awful sinfulness of mankind (chapters 1-3) and the incredible plan of salvation (3-5) that enables God to declare pagan reprobates “not guilty” without tainting His own holiness. I turn your attention back to Romans 3, beginning with verse 10, so that we might be reminded of God’s analysis of man’s true character:
What shall we conclude then? Are we Gentiles any better than the Jews? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written:
There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
All have turned away, they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good, not even one.
Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.
The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
But then just six verses later we read the amazing truth that those same sinful people can be justified freely, as a gift, by God’s grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”
Not only that, but God devised a plan of salvation by which the rich have no advantage (if anything, they have a decided disadvantage). And the brilliant likewise have no advantage, nor do the powerful or the popular or the beautiful. In fact, the poorest, dumbest, weakest, ugliest person in the world has every bit as much opportunity to experience God’s salvation as anyone else. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”
Then in chapter 5 we are told that we have peace with God, access to God, and hope in God. Not only that, but the love of God poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit is a love without cause, without measure, and without end. And this is for people who were powerless, ungodly, sinners, and actually God’s inveterate enemies. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”
And I’ve only touched upon the first five chapters. We could go on and on, giving illustrations of God’s wisdom and knowledge, but the reason I use published outlines is to keep me from rambling. So let’s use them. There are two basic parts to this short paragraph—a eulogy, in which God is praised and blessed, and a doxology in which glory is ascribed to Him.
An uninhibited eulogy to God (33-35)
In the first part of verse 33 Paul affirms the wisdom and knowledge of God. In the last half of the verse, he tries to describe the magnitude of these two attributes. In verse 34 he quotes the Old Testament for support, and in verse 35 he touches upon a related attribute of God, namely His self-sufficiency.
What, by the way, is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? The best way I know to distinguish these terms is to see knowledge as the accumulation of information, while wisdom is knowing what to do with it. Knowledge is a rather common commodity compared to wisdom. The 20th century has seen a great explosion of knowledge, but sadly, no comparable increase in wisdom. That’s why we have the threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads, because mankind has tamed the atom, but no one can tame the human heart. Medicine has achieved for us a greater life expectancy, but it hasn’t given us more to expect from life.
But even man’s knowledge (to say nothing of his wisdom) is terribly limited in scope and perspective. God’s knowledge, however, is infinite and total. He knows everything, actual and possible, equally well and without effort. Here’s how A. W. Tozer describes the knowledge of God:
God knows instantly and effortlessly all matter and all matters, all mind and every mind, all spirit and all spirits, all being and every being, all creaturehood and all creatures, all plurality and all pluralities, all law and every law, all relations, all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feeling, all desires, every unuttered secret, all thrones and dominions, all personalities, all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, motion, space, time, life, death, good, evil, heaven, and hell.[i]
In other words, He’s pretty smart. Still, God is not just a depository of information. He also has infinite wisdom so that He knows exactly what to do with His infinite knowledge. Is it any wonder, then, that Paul opens with the words, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”
In his eulogy of God the Apostle employs two concepts to describe and amplify the wisdom and knowledge of God: His judgments are unsearchable, and His paths are unfathomable.
His judgments are unsearchable. The word “judgments” in the Scripture is sometimes used as almost a synonym for “decisions,” but more often it is used of “judicial sentences.” Perhaps Paul is thinking here of the “acts of God in nature” which God often used in the Old Testament to get man’s attention. One thinks of the great plagues that God brought on Egypt. One thinks of the droughts, famines, hailstorms, and pestilences which God brought upon His own people Israel when they were faithless and disobedient. How unsearchable are such judgments! The victims never knew what God was going to do next. His judgments were unpredictable and devastatingly effective.
In the New Testament Jesus also frequently demonstrated the unsearchableness of His judgments. We can see this particularly in the way He responded every time the Pharisees tried to impale Him on the horns of a dilemma. They came to Him once asking, “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” They thought they had Him. If He said “yes,” the Jews would be angry. If He said “no” the Romans would be angry. If He was indecisive, He would destroy His own credibility. So what did He do? He called for a coin, asked whose picture is on it, and said, “What Caesar has put his image on, give to him. But what God has put His image on, namely man, give to Him.” It wiped them out. How unsearchable are His judgments!
Later some Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery. They brought the woman to Jesus and said,“In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.
Have you ever wondered what Jesus was writing? As far as I know there is only one other time when the Scriptures tell us that God wrote anything. When Moses climbed Mt. Sinai, God wrote the Ten Commandments, not just once but twice. I suggest to you that Jesus was calling attention to the fact that He was God as He stooped down and wrote on the dust of the ground,
You shall have no other gods before me,
you shall not make for yourself any idol,
you shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God,
remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy;
honor your father and your mother, etc.
Certainly, “you shall not commit adultery” is part of God’s Law, but the Law is a unit, and he who breaks one part is guilty of all. Then the text of John 8 says, “When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “‘If any one of you is without sin (if any one of you has kept all ten of these perfectly), let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” How unsearchable are God’s judgments!
God’s judgments are still unsearchable today. We can look at what we call natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and forest fires. We can’t predict them, nor do we know what God is accomplishing through them (at least we can’t know all that God is doing). Or we can look at other kinds of judgments—accidents, fatal illnesses like AIDS, birth defects, the awful effects of war, joblessness, business failures, poverty, broken homes, etc. Why does God allow such things?
In Joni Erickson’s excellent book, A Step Further, she quotes a letter she received:
Dear Joni,
Please understand as I write this that I am not feeling sorry for myself and I am not an atheist. I thought that after I read your story I would be finally able to see things differently. But though I admire you if you honestly believe the way you do, I still have just not been able to understand the cruel things in your life and in the life of my brother.
My brother is 26 years old and has been a Quad (i.e. paralyzed in four limbs) since 1965 due to an auto accident …. Like you, he had quite a bit going for him at the time of his accident. Being a Quad yourself you know what he went through.
He finally made up his mind to do something with the only thing he had left—his mind. He studied Psychology at home, went to work as an aide for the Governor of Indiana and was going to go to college in Ohio for more Psychology. He lost his job after only two weeks because Medicaid could not pay his medical bills if he was working. He wanted to work, but he didn’t want to be dependent on other people, and like you he didn’t want pity.
I talk in the past tense because my brother is now in a nursing home in a comatose state as of October 1976 due to a freak accident. He lived like a normal person the way he wantedto, and he kept his mind alert at all times. Now, Someone (capital S) has decided to take his mind away. If you feel that’s fair or that there’s a reason for that, please help me understand it.[ii]
About ten pages later, following some very personal observations about how she herself often questioned God’s goodness and fairness after her own tragic accident, Joni acknowledges the futility of such thinking:
What made me think that even if He explained all His ways to me I would be able to understand them? It would be like pouring million-gallon truths into my one-ounce brain. Why, even the great apostle Paul admitted that, though never in despair, he was often perplexed (2 Cor. 4:8). Hadn’t God said, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are … my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9)? Didn’t one Old Testament author write, “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (Eccl. 11:5)?
In fact, the whole book of Ecclesiastes was written to convince people like me that only God holds the keys to unlocking the mysteries of life and that He’s not loaning them all out! “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl. 3:11). If God’s mind was small enough for me to understand, He wouldn’t be God![iii]
How unsearchable are His judgments! The more you read God’s Word, the more you see God at work in your life, the more you will praise Him saying, “Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments!”
Then the Apostle goes on to say, “how unfathomable are His ways,” or, as the NIV reads, “his paths are beyond tracing out!”
His paths are unfathomable. The word translated “unfathomable” literally means “impossible to track.” That’s how God’s ways are. You can follow God’s tracks for a little way, but eventually you lose them. You know He’s leading you somewhere, but you can’t figure out exactly where. When you get through the maize there’s a great sense of relief, but you couldn’t adequately describe to anyone else how it all happened. Sometimes it isn’t till much later that you even detect the fingerprints of God in the watershed events of life.
God’s ways are especially unfathomable in respect to the plan of salvation. We commented on this in the introduction, but I think we need to elaborate some more. As you think back over the book of Romans you can feel your head spinning from the tremendous theological truths found in this book. Nothing we humans ever do can frustrate God’s sovereign plan. Men are saved ultimately because God chooses them, sovereignly. Yet nothing God ever planned interferes with a person’s responsibility to believe in Jesus Christ. How can you explain that?
It’s almost humorous that Christians virtually come to blows over varying emphases on God’s sovereignty and human responsibility; they split churches; they refuse fellowship with fellow believers, when if they all grasped the truth that God’s ways are untraceable, they would realize that whatever their own personal understanding is of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility, it is inadequate, for God’s ways are unfathomable.
Now to help his readers realize that the notion that God’s judgments and ways are unsearchable and unfathomable is not just a figment of his own imagination, Paul appeals to the Old Testament in verse 34 to show that even the great prophet Isaiah agreed. The quotation comes from the 40th chapter of Isaiah, which, as we have already seen, is the greatest chapter in the Bible on the nature and character of God. There the prophet asks, “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” And, of course, the expected answer to these rhetorical questions is, “No one!” God is too great in His wisdom and knowledge to need or accept any advice or counsel from men. Why then, do we so frequently feel compelled to tell God how to do His job and chide Him for making mistakes?
His judgments are unsearchable.
His ways are unfathomable.
How desperately we need the message of Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Now thirdly, in verse 35 we are informed that God’s self-sufficiency is unconditional.
His self-sufficiency is unconditional. God’s self-sufficiency is an attribute very closely related to His wisdom and knowledge. After all, anyone who has infinite wisdom and infinite knowledge and infinite power, such as we know God has, obviously does not need anyone else’s help. And that is exactly the case with God. He doesn’t need us.
The point is established by means of another Old Testament quotation in verse 35, this one from the book of Job. “Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?” Job was confronted rather brutally with the fact that God’s judgments are unsearchable and His ways untraceable, for he and four of his friends consumed a number of weeks trying to solve the unsolvable and unscrew the inscrutable. Finally, God told them all to shut up for He had a few things to share. God then proceeded to ask Job a few questions, seventy questions, as a matter of fact.
God quizzed Job about the physical universe—about its origin, its size, its elements and its laws. Then God quizzed him about the animal kingdom—animals whose food does not come from man, animals whose births are unseen by man, animals which have never been domesticated by man, animals whose ways are extraordinary to man, and animals whose flight is unparalleled by man.
Then in chapters 40-41, God gives a second speech in which He focuses on just two special pets of God—behemoth and Leviathan, probably the hippopotamus and the crocodile. His purpose through the detailed and poetic descriptions of these animals is to impress Job with his own insignificance when compared to God’s creative genius. And right in the middle of the incredible description of the wild crocodile, we find God interrupting Himself with these words which Paul quotes (Job 41:11): “Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me.” In other words, “Job, don’t you realize that you can never put Me in your debt, even with your righteous living? I never owe anyone anything. There is nothing you could ever give Me that I don’t already own. If I wanted it and didn’t have it, I would just create it. I am unconditionally self-sufficient.”
Psalm 50:10-12 has God chiding Israel for thinking that their animal sacrifices put God in their debt: “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.”
On Mars Hill in the City of Athens Paul made the same point in his speech to the Greek philosophers, “The god who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”
No wonder Paul broke out in unlimited praise to God! His judgments are unsearchable, His paths are unfathomable, His self-sufficiency is unconditional. I’m reminded of what Socrates said, “Words are foolish things at epochal moments of life.” Paul cannot find words to describe His awe of God
But he isn’t through yet. He has a doxology to deliver to God. A doxology is an ascription of glory. In fact, the very word “doxology” comes from the Greek word for glory, doxa, found right in verse 36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory (doxa) forever! Amen.”
An unbounded doxology to God (36)
This doxology asserts that:
He is the Source of all things. “All things are from Him,” that is, they originated with Him. Whatever else the theory of evolution may explain or may purport to explain (and I think the answer is “not much”), the one thing which it does not even attempt to explain is the absolute origin of matter, of energy, of life. It cannot hope to do so. God is the Source.
He is the Sustainer of all things. “All things are through Him or by Him.” Colossians 1:17 puts the same thought in different words: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Acts 17:28 says, “In him we live and move and have our being.” If God for one split second were to take His sovereign hand off this world of ours, it would self-destruct into utter chaos.
He is the Significance of all things. “All things are to Him,” i.e., He is the end, the significance of all things. Every star, every planet, every mountain, every stream, every flower, every creature is ultimately designed to bring glory to God. And He is able to make even the wrath of men to praise Him. (Ps. 76:10)
Stuart Briscoe has forcefully commented on Paul’s doxology here at the end of Rom. 11:
It is He who originated us,
in order that He might perpetuate us
so that when He is ready He might terminate us (as far as this life is concerned).
As the one from whom we came, we know Him as Source
As the one who keeps us alive in every dimension, we recognize Him as the Force.
And because it is to Him that we are inexorably moving, we gladly acknowledge Him as the Course of our lives.
It is surely to Him that all glory rightly belongs.[iv]
We return to where we started. “What is the chief end of man?” The answer, “To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” When eventually we stand in God’s presence, we will no doubt be given a tour of human history, and we will be shown in one event after another how God was at work in world events, in our national affairs, and in our own personal lives. What appears today as confusing and haphazard, both in theology and in personal experience, will then turn out to be a beautiful mosaic. To see this will be the greatest possible stimulus to worship and praise.
There will be such affirmation of His wisdom and knowledge, His grace and mercy, His holiness and justice, that all the angels of Heaven will be needed to join us in a universal choir in order to adequately express the wonder and glory of God. Here is what it will sound like, only with beautiful music and myriads of voices accompanying:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come…. You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being…. Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!…. To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!
In the meantime, however, those of us who understand in some measure the wisdom and knowledge of God as displayed in the great plan of salvation, need to take every opportunity to express our praise to God. And not only express it but also show it through the very lives we live.
Conclusion: I want to express a warning which is important every time we dwell upon the infinity, the transcendence or the greatness of God. It is possible after one has been exposed to the unsearchable judgments, the unfathomable ways, and the unconditional self-sufficiency of God, and to the fact that He is the Source, the Sustainer and the Significance of all there is, to despair of any hope that such a great and glorious God would be concerned about us, about our struggles, and about our needs.
Paul never despaired. The greater his vision of God, the greater hope he saw for himself and for mankind. For the omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent God of the universe is also a gentle shepherd who has revealed to dumb sheep all they need to know in order to find safety in eternity’s fold. And all they need to know is that Jesus died for them and paid the penalty for their sin, and that by believing they might have life in His name.
DATE: June 18, 1995
Tags:
Wisdom of God
Knowledge of God
Self-sufficiency of God
[i] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the
Christian Life, 62.
[ii] Joni Eareckson and Steve Estes, A Step Further,163.
[iii] Eareckson, 171.
[iv] Stuart Briscoe, The Preacher’s Commentary, Romans, 211.