Chapter # 11 Paragraph # 6 Study # 3
July 7, 2019
Humble, Texas
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Thesis: The significance of the wealth of God's wisdom and knowledge for us is that He has made it known to us so that we might possess Life and rejoice in it.
Introduction: In our study last week we noted that Paul's use of the metaphor of "wealth" was intended to give us a sense of the unlimited resources of God in view of the "problems" we have with "demands made upon us" that are significantly beyond our own resources. "Wealth" is supposed to resolve the conflicts that arise when the demands exceed the resources. The main demand that rests upon us is that we refuse the temptation to exalt ourselves over others. But, this demand is made against a backdrop of a myriad of paths to self-exaltation and it has its roots in the most primal appetite of human aspiration: to be highly exalted in the eyes of others. Thus, the "demand" is far beyond any perceived human capacities and that vast distance qualifies us for condemnation.
But, God has a plan to handle this "appetite" in us. This plan is rooted in "Grace" and applied by "Revelation". Thus, Paul is summoning the Gentiles who have become boastful, high-minded, and conceited back to "Grace" and is revealing the superior wisdom and knowledge of God to us.
At this point, we should be aware of the reality that "Grace", properly understood, eliminates the issues of the appetite by fully meeting it: we have already been highly exalted in the eyes of the only significant Other that matters. The love of God, made manifest by the death of His Son in our place, makes us far more important to Him than we can ever really understand and what value, or lack thereof, that men place upon us is of no significance whatsoever.
So, with "Grace" prominently in place, Paul turns to the issue of "revelation" whereby we come to "know" at least a small portion of what God knows and, by that revelation, we come to Life and rejoicing.
- I. Paul's Outburst of Praise in 11:33-36 is a Manifestation of His Life and Rejoicing.
- II. This Outburst is Focused Upon the Limitless Resources of God As An Indication of What He Has Made Available to Us For Life and Rejoicing.
- III. Paul's Description of the Unlimited Resources Zeros in Upon Two Particulars.
- A. The unlimited resource called "wisdom".
- 1. In general terms, "wisdom" is recognized by its ability to actually achieve its goals.
- a. Within this construct, "foolishness" is recognized by the inability of the "fool" to achieve his goals.
- b. But, also within this construct, there are two basic aspects of "wisdom".
- 1) "Wisdom" is most fundamentally concerned with "legitimate goals".
- a) The New Testament word for "goals" is "love", answering the question of what is genuinely valuable.
- b) And the New Testament description of "love" is most fundamentally the willingness to sacrifice oneself in order to genuinely meet a genuine need in another.
- 2) "Wisdom" is next most fundamentally concerned with "legitimate methods" for reaching the established goals.
- a) The biblical concept of "legitimate methods" is "faith" as a dependence upon God's revealed Truth in regard to "means".
- b) And the biblical concept of "faith" always, without fail, inevitably boils down to "promises made by God", not "instructions given by God".
- i. The weakness of "instructions" is that they can so easily be turned into the process of turning to our own resources to follow the instructions.
- ii. The strength of "promises" is that they turn us to active dependence upon God for all "outcomes".
- 2. In specific terms, rooted in our current text/context, Paul sets up a parallelism between "wisdom and knowledge" and "judgments and paths" in a A,B, A,B pattern.
- a. In the A,B, A,B pattern, wisdom is made parallel to "judgments" and knowledge is made parallel to "paths".
- b. Because of this parallelism, we can see that Paul construed "wisdom" as a matter of "making decisions".
- 1) The essence of the term "judgments" is the aspect of a "judgment" that has to do with "making a determination".
- a) Typically, it is this "making of a determination" that sets the stage, then, for the pursuit of a given "outcome".
- b) In the Scriptures, sometimes "judgment" has to do with the "decision part" and sometimes it has to do with the "execution of the decision part".
- c) But, the bottom line is the "decision making" aspect of "judgment" because, with God, omnipotence is His ultimate resource for making the "decision" result in its intended result.
- 2) Thus, Paul's outburst regarding the depth of the wisdom of God has primarily to do with the limitless resources behind God's decision-making activities and, in our text, the "revelation" of this "unlimited wealth of wisdom" is in the "revelation of the mystery" by which God is going to bring the entire process from creation to culmination to pass.
- B. The unlimited resource called "knowledge".
- 1. Again, in general terms, "knowledge" is the accumulation of the "data" that makes up all of the bits and pieces of the whole of "Truth".
- a. Within this construct, "ignorance" is simply a condition of being without what is considered to be "necessary data".
- 1) The word "necessary" strongly implies at least three factors.
- a) The first factor is "a set goal" (Wisdom's domain).
- b) The second factor is "a perceived method of pursuit" (again, Wisdom's domain).
- c) The third factor is sufficient exposure to information so that the particular "goal" and "method" has enough of the bits and pieces of the "data of knowledge" to apply to the processes of "Love" being pursued by "Faith".
- 2) Thus, "ignorance" is simply a condition wherein there is not enough "data" to be able to see either the legitimacy of the goal, or the proper method of pursuit, or both.
- b. But also within this construct, "knowledge" is sufficiently complicated by the enormous number of "bits and pieces" that it has to be simplified by some means to be of any help at all.
- 1) Fortunately, one does not have to have "omniscience" to possess "effective knowledge".
- 2) But, just as fortunately, God does have both the "omniscience" to cover all of the bases and the willingness to impart the particulars that a given "goal" and "method" require.
- 3) It is this "selective imparting" (called "revelation") that simplifies the complexity so that the bits and pieces that are revealed are "enough" to enable setting proper goals and pursuing them by the proper method.
- 2. But, specifically to our context, "knowledge" has a "parallel concept" that is presented as "paths" (ways, highways, roads, whatever indicates a discernible "path" from the setting of the goal to the realization of its fulfillment).
- a. This indicates that "knowledge" can be "arranged" in such a way that certain "bits and pieces" come together as a discernible "path" so that all the complexities can be set aside as not necessary to be able to reach the goal.
- b. With God, "omniscience" is the "resource" to every detail of "Truth" (in terms of "knowledge" He is "wealthy beyond imagining") and "Grace" makes sure that He makes enough of those details available to us so that we can "see" the "way" from goal to fulfillment.
- c. Thus, in our context, we have a "revelation of a mystery" that is a part of God's solution to our penchant for pursuing our appetite for glory along the wrong paths.
- IV. The Outburst of Praise is Paul's Recognition That There Is, Indeed, a Grace-Provision From God For Us to Deal With the Destructive Boastfulness With Which Paul is Most Concerned in This Context.