SERMON: Proverbs 8:22-31 (Creation and Wisdom)

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May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word,.

And may the Lord be with you.

Well, last week, by the grace of God, my family and I were able to get away for a little bit of vacation. I was able, me personally, to return to a place that I hadn't been in nearly 30 years, which is Pigeon Forge in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

The last time I was there, I, out of curiosity, took a mayonnaise packet and smashed it on a table, and it got on someone's jacket, made them very upset, so this was a redemptive trip. I was nine years old or something.

This was a trip of redemption. I didn't do that this time, by the Lord's grace. But it was a wonderful time together. We got to stay in one of those hotels where you have to sit through a sales pitch to be able to stay there, and then we got to play putt-putt and all sorts of different fun things, but my favorite thing on the trip was this ride, this little attraction that was put on by this group called the Answers in Genesis.

If you've heard of Answers in Genesis before, they're the ones that do the Creation Museum, and they're the ones that had the audacity to build a life-size Noah's Ark, and it's either Kentucky or Ohio, but it is massive.

If you've never been, it's a wonderful little family trip to go. We went years ago, and it was glorious. So because I love creation science, because I think that the beginning of the Bible is important just like the beginning of every book, and if you lose the beginning, you lose the rest of the story, because I've been tracking with this ministry for so long, and I found out that it just so happens that the very place that we were going on vacation has their newest attraction.

The Creation Museum, Noah’s Ark, and the Gospel Story Ride

Well, I wanted to go, and it was really cool. They had, it was a virtual reality sort of ride where you sit down in this animated spaceship, and they take you all the way back to the Garden of Eden and give you sort of the gospel story from the very beginning of the Bible all the way to the end where you see the fall happen, where you watch as sin enters into the world and pollutes the fabric of reality, where you see the fall that happens at Babel where the languages are confused, and it goes all the way to the cross of Christ where it finishes on the gospel, and this wonderful little technological presentation of the gospel, it was glorious.

But what it didn't cover is what I wanna cover today. As powerful as the gospel presentation of that ride was, it didn't talk about what happened before creation. Before there was a sun and a moon and a stars, before there were birds and beasts or trees or rivers or mountains or valleys, or before light was even spoken into existence on day one, the ride began in a fully formed garden.

But what about before that? Was there anything there? And if yes, what was it? Today, I want us to talk about what was there before all of that, and we're gonna see that it was the tribe of Israel and the Zion God and wisdom.

The Antiquity of Wisdom

So if you will, turn with me as we're gonna look at four things today. We're in Proverbs 8. We're closing out Proverbs 8 today, and we're gonna be looking at four things. We're gonna be looking at the antiquity of wisdom, the architecture of wisdom, the affections of wisdom, and the advent of wisdom.

And while you're impressed with my A alliteration, let us now read Proverbs 8 to 22 through 31. This is what the text says. The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his way, before his works of old. From everlasting, I was established from the beginning from the earliest times of the earth.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth. While he had not yet made the earth and the fields nor the first dust of the world.

When he established the heavens, I was there. When he inscribed a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed. When he set for the sea its boundary so that the water would not transgress his command.

When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as a master workman. And I was daily his delight rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the world his earth and having my delight in the sons of men.

Let us pray. Lord, it's such a unique passage to consider wisdom even before creation. I know of no other passage in the scripture that talks about it in this way. So Lord help us today to enjoy your word, to savor its truth, to be protected from error that has assailed the church from this very passage.

And Lord help us to see how all of it points to wisdom incarnate, Jesus Christ. It's in your name we pray, amen. Now we're gonna begin with wisdom's antiquity. Verses 20 through 26, I'll read them again.

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his way before his works of old. From everlasting I was established. From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth, when there was no depths, I was brought forth.

When there was no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth, while he had not yet made the earth and the fields nor the dust of the world. All of this, you hear it before, before, before, before.

If you and I were traveling back in time and if there were such a thing, if we could go to moments before the creation began, before light exploded out of the mouth of God, there we would find wisdom.

Before, look at all the befores of this passage. Before the oceans, before the rivers, before the valleys, before the mountains, before the towering giants, before the single grain of dust had made itself upon the ground, wisdom already was there.

Creation and all of its majesty and all of its beauty is young compared to wisdom. Its oceans, its depths are but infants compared to wisdom. The hills and the highest peaks are not even yet toddlers compared to wisdom.

Its fields are still in the very morning of their first day in comparison to the wisdom or the limitless eternality of wisdom. Wisdom therefore is what the ancients would have to call ancient. Its years are both unmeasured and uncountable.

It is eternal because it proceeds from God. And like all good doctrines, this particular doctrine has come under attack in the church really since the beginning. It spawned a lot of debate over the centuries and it's basically produced two camps, the right camp and the wrong camp.

The right camp says that wisdom existed with God. I know you're not supposed to do that, but it's whatever. The right camp existed with God or wisdom. Wisdom existed with God before the very beginning, before time and space, wisdom was there.

That's the right view. That's what the scriptures say. The wrong camp, AKA, if you wanna know their name, the Arians who followed a man named Arius who was Willy walloped right in the face by a man named Nicholas, who became the inspiration later for Santa Claus, which is pretty epic.

It is legend by the way, but it is a great legend. It is a legend that I will fight to the death to keep. The whole ordeal behind this event was that Arius was saying that Jesus Christ was not co-eternal with the father, but that instead of that, he was the first creation of the father, who after his creation, then he partnered with God to make the world.

Modern day Arians that you could look to would be the Jehovah's witnesses, who believe Jesus is not God, but the first creation of God. Now, over time, this controversy, landed in the pages of Proverbs in chapter eight, in verse 22, which became a kind of proof text for the Arians, especially in the Septuagint translation, which if you don't know what that is, it's the Greek translation of the Old Testament, where they argued that wisdom was a creation of God, not co-eternal with God.

And if you don't see why that's so important, Jesus is called the wisdom of God. So if wisdom's created by God, and Jesus is the wisdom of God, then Jesus is created by God. That was their argument, meaning that he's not the infinite, eternal son, who is of one substance with the father.

And as Athanasius put it, and I'm summarizing, he would be not God, not savior, and of no help to us. Now, the entire basis for their argument, at least in Proverbs eight, is the Greek version of the Hebrew word kana.

In Greek, it reads that in the beginning, God created wisdom. That's the way that it reads in Greek. That's the Greek word that was used to translate the Hebrew word kana. It literally is that he created wisdom.

That's not what the Hebrew word is saying. The Hebrew word kana means possessed. It means literally that God possessed me in the beginning, that God had me, that God owned me, that God possessed me, which doesn't actually speak about wisdom having an origination event, but it talks about the ownership of wisdom, namely that wisdom is eternally belonging to God, not temporally created in time.

That is not what the Hebrew word is saying. And this, of course, is consistent with the passage, the internal context in the passage, where it says I was brought forth does not mean that I was created as a creature, not fashioned like clay upon a wheel, but eternally issuing forth from God himself of his very essence as light proceeds necessarily from fire and as word proceeds from the mind.

What we glimpse here in Proverbs is Hebrew poetry that the New Testament makes explicit. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. They have to, Arians, completely mangle this translation of John 1 .1 to support their point.

And if you're a nerd and you're interested, I wrote a 20-page paper on the Granville Sharp and Colwell's rule of grammar on why they can't do that, and I'd be happy to send it to you, but we don't have time for that today, just to let you know they're wrong.

Now, that's not the only proof of this text, that wisdom is not created. Solomon actually hammers the point with his repeated use of before, before the fountains, before the mountains, before the earth, and before the fields.

He's literally predating wisdom before creation. This is putting wisdom in a category all her own, because Lady Wisdom was there before, before the mile-high Rockies, before the widest seas, before the expanse of almost sheer nothingness that we know as the Sahara Desert.

All of them are but infants compared to wisdom. All of those things had their beginning. All of them had an origination event, but not wisdom, because wisdom proceeds from God. Now, why is this all important?

We mentioned it briefly just a moment ago, because if wisdom is not eternal, then neither is Christ, who is the very wisdom of God. And what we're seeing is the necessity here of the eternality of wisdom, because this doctrine affects even your faith.

That's why we're going into it in depth. Because if wisdom is not eternal, your faith is in vain. That's the point. The early church called this doctrine the eternal generation of the sun, that the sun is eternally preceded forth from the Father, which is, that's the right view.

So here, Proverbs is arguing for the eternal generation of wisdom, and we know that Jesus is wisdom incarnate. God has never been without wisdom. Imagine that. God created the world without wisdom, and then he had to create wisdom.

That doesn't even make sense. God's never without wisdom, never without his word. He didn't craft the cosmos and then go bumbling around and search for a manual on how to organize it. Before the stars had light to shine, he had wisdom.

Before gravity set the planets in orbit, God had eternal wisdom. Now, what does this mean for us? It means that knowing what wisdom is is incredibly important for your life. And wisdom, not just that wisdom is Christ, that he is wisdom incarnate, not just that, but wisdom itself is not a malleable standard that goes with the ebbs and flows of societies and cultures.

It is a fixed reality that predates creation. Therefore, it's not up for interpretation. Wisdom, unlike the long history of philosophy, is not contingent upon eras and personalities. It's not contingent upon a supposed shared herd instinct among social primates.

And this is really important that you see this because in our age, the world is attempting to redefine everything. Everything, sex, personhood, gender, morality, and everything else under the sun. They're not participating in wisdom, which is an immutable, unchangeable person.

They are participating in satanic philosophizing, trying to conform the world to their own bent and twisted will. What they're doing is they're saying that they are God and they're trying to create their own co-eternal standard by which the world operates.

And as every single philosophy that has risen, it will be buried in the sands of the earth. Scripture reminds us that true wisdom is not a child of time. It's a standard that is from the very beginning, which means if your so-called wisdom contradicts the wisdom of God, then it is not wisdom at all.

It's a counterfeit. It's a passing fad pretending to have an ounce of sophistication, but what will be revealed as pure stupidity. If you build your life on any of the so-called wisdom of our day, the worldly wisdom that they seek to peddle us, then your life will be as brittle and hollow as the next trend that we and our children will all mock like bell-bottom jeans.

But if you build your life on real wisdom, the eternal wisdom of God incarnate before the world was made, recorded in the words of Scripture, if you anchor your life in that, then you're anchoring your life to something fixed and unmovable, which means you can't be shaken.

Wisdom is not one option among the loud cacophony of voices that are vying for your attention. It is the only source of truth because it proceeds forth from God, who is the God of all truth. That's the first point.

Wisdom is ancient. It's more ancient than us, and it's the only source of truth. The second is that wisdom is active or that wisdom has a kind of architecture or that wisdom is invested in the creation of the world.

The Architecture of Wisdom

Look at verses 27 through 29. When he established the heavens, I was there. Wisdom was there. When he ascribed a circle on the face of the deep, when he made from the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed, when he set for the seas its boundary so that the water would not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, this passage transitions from before, before, before to when, when, when, when.

That's the natural language of the passage. So what we're seeing here is that God is not only active and that wisdom is not only predating creation, but that wisdom is actually participating with God in creation, where he's actually bringing order out of the chaos.

It says he inscribed a circle on the face of the deep. I don't know what that means, and neither do you, but God does. Before the waters were bounded, there was chaos, formless, ungoverned matter. And then God, by his wisdom, ordered it, marking its limits, saying to the sea, thus far you shall come and no further, Job 38, 11.

He fixed the skies above. He set the boundaries for the ocean. He laid the foundations for the earth itself, and he set the foundations for you. This God who made the boundary markers of what was good, don't we believe that he also set limits and standards for his most prized creation, us?

The Hebrew verb here is hakak, which when it is translated means that inscribed or decreed, which is the same word that is used of kings who sit upon their throne and issue forth decrees for their people to obey.

And this is precisely what God is doing in creation. He's not just weighing in on it. He's not just guesstimating. He's not like me when he goes to cut a board. I know you're supposed to cut twice. I know that it's wisdom, or measure twice, and I never do it.

There's so many oddly shaped pieces of wood over the years that I've had to throw away because I don't use wisdom. God's not like that. Every mountain is a testimony of his authority. Every tide that rises and falls obeys his commands.

Creation is not chaos because he ordered it. The New Testament draws this line straight to Christ, the wisdom of God. Paul says, by him, that's Jesus, all things were created, and in him, all things hold together.

Paul is saying that Jesus is the wisdom of God that predated creation, in whom God partnered with to create all things. Hebrews goes even further and says that he, Jesus, upholds all things by the word of his power.

Have you stopped to think how deep that verse actually goes? Jesus on the throne in heaven upholds all things, which means that he upholds societies, he upholds plateaus, he upholds you. Jesus even upholds his enemies.

He upholds the molecular connections that hold them together. If all things are held together by the sovereign will of Jesus Christ, who is wisdom incarnate, there is not a synapse in your brain that fires apart from his sovereign will, which means all things redound to him.

And it also means that it ought to be very scary when we rebel against so great a sovereign. If someone came up to me and said, I want you to do X, and guess what? I hold your synapses in your brain together, so that if you don't do X, you're done.

If I knew that, I would obey everything that that person said, and yet we know that, and we obey so little of what Jesus has said. We deny God's law, but we can't undo it. We rebel against his order, but our rebellion collapses under the weight of reality.

Sin is not only rebellion, sin is not only a mistake, sin is not only a wrong decision, sin is anti-creation. Sin is attempting to unmake what God has fixed with perfect limitations and borders and boundaries.

It is attempting for you to redraw the circle around your world instead of the circle that he has already drawn. This is as futile as trying to win a 50-mile race as a one-legged bicycler, but if you align your life with wisdom, if you align your life with the very architecture of reality, that's why I called this section the architecture of wisdom, because everything redounds to his wisdom.

If you align your life in that, then you will be blessed, and if you align your life with that, you will find peace, and knowing that chaos is not king and that hope comes from God, and I love how this passage ends, talking about its affections, verses 30 through 31.

The Affections of Wisdom

Then I, wisdom, was beside him as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, wisdom was daily God's delight, rejoicing always before him, wisdom always rejoicing before God, rejoicing in the world, wisdom rejoicing in the beauty, complexity, specificity, and orderliness of the world, his earth, and having my wisdom delight in the sons of men.

Look at how sweet the passage comes to a close. As wisdom herself delights in the overflowing love of God, the Hebrew word there, faithful companion, the one who is continually at the side of God is wisdom, the one who has enjoyed the everlasting love of the Father, the one who knows what love is because it's in relationship, he is in relationship with the one who love is.

And what I find so utterly astounding about this passage is that at the climax of it, instead of wisdom saying that I was being delighted in by the Father and I gave my delight back to the Father, it's true, the wisdom of God does this.

But look at where also it lets its delight fall. The text says that he was having his delight in the sons of men.

That's astounding.

It means that there is a waterfall of delight that's pouring from God onto the wisdom of God.

And that you and I are caught in the overflow,.

Which is astounding because we don't respect wisdom. We reject it.

We don't obey it, we rebel against it.

And all of this foreshadows the cross of Christ because how can you and I experience the delight of God underneath the flow of God's love from the wisdom of God when we are such fools? How could God be just if he poured out his delight on people who perpetrate so much injustice?

How could God be righteous, which notice where that word comes from, right, if he loved and celebrated people who were so wrong? I look at the way that protesters often protest and there was this event during COVID, I believe it was, where you celebrate your abortion and you just look at these ladies who are dancing, drinking, celebrating, even having little tombstones with fake blood on the tombstone, celebrating, trying to convince themselves of this and no one would look at that and say that that was righteous.

No one would look at a judge who looked at a convict or a criminal or someone who created all sorts of devastation and say, it's okay, I forgive you because we all know there's a standard and that standard is wisdom.

That standard is immutable and unchangeable, fixed even before the creation began. So how can God be right, pouring out love on those of us who are so wrong or to say it like Thomas Brooks, again, I'm paraphrasing, if God poured out his mercy on the deserving, no one would have mercy.

So how does God do this? It's through Christ and Christ alone and that's where we get to the advent of wisdom. 1 Corinthians 1 .18 says, the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

The Advent of Wisdom

1 Corinthians 1 .18, because the rulers of this age are blind and they're arrogant and they look at the wisdom of God as a rival to their own lifestyle, that's wrong and yet Paul also declares that Christ Jesus became to us the wisdom from God.

He became to us and for us the wisdom of God. He became the righteousness and the sanctification and the redemption, 1 Corinthians 1 .30, because we're not wise, we're not righteous, we're not right in God's eyes.

So the only way that you and I can be in relationship with this holy God is if he comes down and meets the standard for us. Because we were weak, he was strong. Because we were wrong, he came and he was right.

Because we were broken, he came and mended it. He came and did what we could not do so that we could have what we do not deserve. At the cross, wisdom reached down into the mire and mud pit and slime of our rejection and he pulled us out.

In the tomb, wisdom took our place because that tomb should have borne our name. In the resurrection, wisdom triumphed over folly and secured our future forever. And now in the ascension of Jesus Christ, wisdom reigns, calling all God's people everywhere to come unto him and live.

And this is so important. I've spent most of my time in ministry being in angst over this error that has creeped into the church. That because Jesus has saved us by his grace alone, then we therefore have nothing that we're supposed to do about it.

That's not true.

He didn't come down to meet a perfect standard so that you and I could live without standards. He didn't come down to meet the requirements of the law so that we could live lawlessly. By his grace and by his mercy, he met the standards of wisdom so that we could begin living our lives in wisdom.

That's the gift. We always think that the gift is the salvation.

That's the starting line.

The gift is not just that you were saved. You were saved unto something and you're saved unto a life that you could have not lived apart from the spirit of God. Do you know that the same spirit that now lives in you is the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead?

I don't think I can be nice to my spouse.

What?

You're saying that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is not enough to make you a pleasant person? I don't think I can work for this boss.

Really?

You are in slavery to Satan. You've been delivered from your chains and now you can't deal with someone who has some idiosyncrasies that you don't prefer? We live so low below our calling, don't we? God of God saved us.

He has given us an entire book filled with his wisdom. 31 chapters, a chapter for every day to teach us his standards that will bless us if we do them, that will keep us if we do them. And we live, as C .S. Lewis said, like orphans making mud pies in the slums when a holiday at the sea has been promised to us.

I wanna finish with the gospel that you were saved, but I wanna push into the gospel and remind you that you were saved unto something. And you're saved unto the very wisdom that created the world. Look at what the book of Proverbs, this is a, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, this is a summary.

You are saved to do what? To be a wise man who leads your life with godly counsel. To be a wise woman who builds her house. To have wise children who hear instruction of their parents and listen and obey.

To be wise workers who labor diligently and don't cut corners. To be wise with the ways that you speak, truth and not slander. To have wise communication that is slow to anger, quick to hear, careful with your words.

To have wise marriages that are built on faithfulness,.

Purity, and joy.

Wise families that forgive each other. Friends that sharpen one another. Rulers that love justice. Citizens that honor authority. People who use their money with generosity and not stingily and greedily or miserly.

Merchants who deal honestly. Kings who establish godly order. People whose tempers are slow and their grace is liberal in the application. Prayers that are honest. Diets that honor the body. Vigor that creates jobs and work and life in the world.

Self-control that resists the adulterous. Could go on and on and on. The book of Proverbs is wisdom from God for us that we have been saved unto to now live. So yes, cling to the cross and your salvation, but also cling to the mission that he has saved you unto.

Don't resist his wisdom. Live in light of his wisdom and I promise you, the light and momentary afflictions that you feel will fade. Your marriages will heal. Your ability to work will be exponentially increased.

Live a life of wisdom because Christ, the very power of God and the wisdom of God died unto it for you.

Amen?

Amen.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you did not only die to save us from our sins, although that would be grace upon grace that we could have never possibly imagined or deserved, but you've died to turn us into something, to make us into something, to make our lives a living expression of the gospel, to make our marriages a demonstration of you pursuing your church and your church submitting joyfully unto you.

Lord, I pray, I pray fervently, God, that when the pagans of our area look at us, that they don't see the same strife, the same pains, the same brokenness, the same sin, the same selfishness, the same pride, the same bitterness, the same disgusting addictions to pornography, but Lord, I pray when the pagans see us, they would see a people who are and are being transformed in heart, mind, body, and behavior.

I pray that when they look at our marriages, God, I pray, please, that when they look at the divorce statistics in the church and they see that there are none, and Lord, I'm praying a future-oriented prayer that Christians would repent and actually have good, godly, faithful marriages.

Lord, I pray that they would say, I don't believe what they believe, but what they believe has done something great in them. I pray that when they see us deal with frustration, that we would be different.

I pray that when they see us deal with someone who stabs us in the back, that we would be different. I pray that they see us in our pain and in our joy, in our ups and in our downs as people of wisdom.

I pray that they would come to us for counsel. I pray that men in this congregation would be lifted up in their companies like Joseph in Egypt because of wisdom. I pray that you would strategically place families and people in this congregation to have an impact on Chelmsford and beyond.

I pray, Lord, that your people would see the great, holy, joyful burden, and I mean burden in a joyful way, of following you unto all wisdom, in Jesus' name.