-The manifold wisdom of God... The manifold wisdom of God. How ‘manifold’ is it exactly? poly-poikilos in the Greek, it means many-colored. Used only here in the NT, the root is used in the LXX for Joseph’s coat of many colors (Genesis 37.3). Beautiful, fascinating, glorious, mind-blowing, unsearchable, inscrutable - far beyond the capacity of finite man to even comprehend (see Paul’s mind blown in Romans 11.33). Layer upon layer upon layer of beautiful, many-colored wisdom, God’s knowledge and His ability to apply it is inexhaustible, never waning or wavering or failing, always and forever infinite, glorious and unfathomably creative. He knows the name of every star in the universe (since He made them), He knows every hair on the head of every person on planet earth (since He made them), He knows every thought in my head and every word I speak before I speak it, He knows every single thing that has ever happened, and every single thing that ever will happen, and some suggest that He even knows every possibility of even what could happen. But wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge, and this too God possesses in vast and beautiful infiniteness, multi-layered and many-leveled and breathtakingly beautiful. What’s more, He shares it with His image-bearers, and that generously (James 1.5). Wisdom comes to us from God Himself (Daniel 1.17, 2Peter 3.15, James 3.17, Ephesians 1.17) and from His Word (2Timothy 3.15, Colossians 3.16, Psalm 19.7, Psalm 119.98). That relative morsel of wisdom He bestowed on Solomon made David's successor the wisest person who ever lived, amassing for him vast amounts of wealth and land and power as well as favor (1Kings 10.23-24). But this is about God’s wisdom on display in all it’s wonder, a beautiful tapestry of color. This is certainly seen in the creation (Proverbs 3.19, Psalm 104.24), where God out of His manifold wisdom has OUT OF NOTHING made indescribable beauty and fascinating complexities. An evening sky; the human eye; flowers and birds and trees in the fall - a wondrous cavalcade of flora and fauna (too many to list); the daughters of eve; the way of a man with a woman - who could ever imagine all these things, much less engineer them for real? Man, for all his pomp and posturing, can merely try to study and explain it all and at some point perhaps he sits back and marvels (or scoffs - haters gonna hate). This is the manifold wisdom of God on display, and it is now on display through the church, the body of God’s people...
-Get your arms and mind around this - the glorious breathtaking mind-blowing many-colored wisdom of God that we see manifested in all its slendor throughout the entire universe is now being shown off THROUGH THE CHRUCH! This church, the beautiful bride of Jesus Christ, the worldwide assembly of those of truly follow Him and the localized expressions of this Body - this is now providing a glimpse into the mind-boggling wisdom of our amazingly creative Creator. The glimpse apparently is primarily for angels, those rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, and no doubt they are amazed, but we here on earth also get a glimpse. Having already witnessed a handful of what eventually turned out to be less-than-stellar beta versions of God’s people (1.0 - Adam’s wicked descendants were destroyed in a global deluge, 2.0 - Noah’s haughty descendants were deposed in a global dispersion, 3.0 - Abraham fathered a nation whose own prophets repeatedly berated it for being stiff-necked, half-hearted, self-righteous xenophobes), we now see that what God has been working towards through all of created history has been to ultimately gather to Himself a diverse many-colored congregation of contrite and faithful worshippers who freely humble themselves in His sight and whom He is transforming by His now-indwelling Spirit to be able to truly devote themselves to loving Him, to loving one another, and to loving their neighbors and the nations. In the end these will have surmounted seemingly unassailable obstacles of sin and pride and of opposition and persecution and of language and culture and geography to reach and bring in a vast multitude which no one will be able to count, but ultimately it was God’s Who did it - no sweat. and it was His idea - mind blown...
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