For the Delight of Small Children

Last week, our DTS lectures focused on the revelation of who Jesus is and who we are in Him. Our study was led by an incredibly passionate and capable teacher, Matthew Jeffares, who despite being an (older) student in the recent Couples DTS knows more about the Word of God as a whole than most anyone I have ever met. He has actually spent the past five years or so not working full time so that he could devote most of his time to the in-depth study of Scripture. Right now, I won’t share much about what he did with us except to say that his teaching and ministry time most certainly did bring revelation of Jesus’ character to many of us. I learned so much from him, but before anything else I wanted to share this specific revelation of Jesus’ glory that I received from God in my own time outside of lecture. It wasn’t anything particularly complicated or profound; it was simply head knowledge moving into my heart and bringing a greater understanding of Jesus in my innermost being.

The revelation started with Scripture. In fact, three specific passages came together with the stirring of the Spirit to make it happen. The first passage was one I had studied a couple weeks ago as I began working through the book of John. In it John expounds on Jesus as the Word of God, through whom all things were made:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.– John 1:1-5 ESV

Then on Tuesday morning during worship I was particularly struck by the fact that Jesus is the one who sustains all things. The following few verses particularly came to mind:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.– Colossians 1:15-17 ESV

Later that same morning in lecture, Matthew mentioned another passage in passing. He specifically pointed out Proverbs 8, verse 31 (which is about how God delights in his children), but then told us to take a look at the whole section beginning in verse 22. I took that to heart and spent some time looking at it that night, which was when God really spoke to me.

 “The LORD possessed me [Wisdom] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command,when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.
– Proverbs 8:22-31 ESV

This was where the revelation really began. I was reading here in three very different parts of the Bible about the divine Person of God through whom the world was created and is sustained. I was reading about the Word that God used to create everything, and the Wisdom that was beside Him at the beginning like a master workman as He made it all. I recalled that in John 1 “the Word” in the original Greek is “logos” which refers not only to spoken words, but also the “Reason” of God – his thoughts and motives in speaking. This Reason (Word) then is directly related to the Wisdom of God which is described in Proverbs. Logos also has a connotation which suggests purpose, as in the reason for the existence of something; thus “The Word” in this passage just might indicate the purpose for which everything was created (“through him and for him”).

This is the Jesus that we worship – the Word, the Wisdom of God, the master workman, the Sustainer of all things, and the Reason for existence, who existed before anything else. In fact, it was Jesus – the Wisdom of God – who thought up the entire concept of Creation in all of its mind-blowingly, incomprehensibly intricate complexity. He thought up the very idea of material things, and how they would be different from spiritual things. He came up with things like gravity and the laws of physics which are why we have night and day, seasons, an atmosphere to breathe in, and basically everything else we know of. He thought up water, which happens to be the perfect substance for allowing life to happen anywhere, and He even mapped out its three phases and their points of conversion perfectly so as to make everything on earth work just beautifully. Then He placed the earth in just the right place in the universe for life to happen, and He conceived the idea of weather and climate, and how these things sustain life on earth and create rhythm and pattern within the continuous change. Nothing remains the same, yet everything follows the laws and guidelines set up by the word of the Creator, unless His Spirit exercises authority over it to change something.

Down to every microscopic detail, Jesus knows His universe and delights in it. He delights in the fact that it is still growing, still being created. He delights in the fact that atoms are fusing together inside the Sun, giving off massive amounts of heat which are warming a planet just far enough away to be the perfect temperature for all manner of creatures (millions of different kinds of them) to live just as they were made. And He is really stoked about how the Sun is so big that other massive objects keep circling around it due to a force called gravity that He made up (and we have yet to understand fully). He is amused to no end that He decided to tilt the Earth on its side a little bit, the simple fact of which would make it really cold part of the year in different areas of the world. And He is so entertained that it gets just cold enough for water in the sky to freeze into tiny ice crystals and fall to the ground so that small children might be delighted by the wonder and fun of snow, and that all of us might be reminded of the pure whiteness that remains when Christ’s blood has washed over our lives.

That is the Wisdom of God, who is Christ our Savior. Human wisdom cannot begin to unravel such a beautifully intricate system. Even today as we pool all of our knowledge together and augment it with computers, we still have barely scratched the surface of what’s happening in our tiny corner of Creation. In fact, if there is one thing I understand after four years of science-based university education, it is that there is an abundance of questions left to be answered, and finding answers usually means uncovering more questions as well. Jesus, however, knows every hair on every head and every amoeba in every drop of water, and He knows how every bit of his Creation works in harmony as He holds it together. Now that is Wisdom, and it’s only a part of the glory of the Son of God.

When you understand this, you begin to see just how much Jesus gave up when he emptied himself and became a servant (Phil. 2:7), basically putting away all of this God-power to live as a normal human being. You begin to see just how ridiculous it is that He loved us enough to be crushed and broken for our sins. Seriously, the wondrous, rejoicing Creator I just told you about is also this man:

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.– Isaiah 53:4-5 ESV 

Jesus, the Lion of Judah, was also the lamb who was quietly led to slaughter for our sakes. Can you believe that? I can’t, except that the Spirit of Truth revealed it to me. And now I see just how much greater His glory is for having become a perfect lamb and not just a lion.    

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
– Philippians 2:9-11 ESV

And so I can look on Creation with wonder at its complexity, revering the Wisdom that alone could have made it so well. And I look on the Wisdom that came up with a redemption plan so wise and absolutely perfect that it looks like utter foolishness to all who aren’t born of the Spirit. Yep, that’s our God.

“Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies--these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.” – C.S. Lewis

How He loves us,
-DJS