Stress Test Devotional May 4
May 04, 2024
PROVERBS 8:1, 4-5, 21, 25-31 | 1 Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
4 "To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. 5 O simple ones, learn prudence; acquire intelligence, you who lack it.
21 endowing with wealth those who love me, and filling their treasuries.
25 Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth— 26 when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. 27 When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28 when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, 29 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, 30 then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, 31 rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.
For the ancient Greeks, the order and rationality of the natural world was a source of endless fascination. The seasons, the movements of the stars, the patterns of growth and development of plants and animals—they saw it all as marvelous and suggestive. They called this internal order, present also in human beings, as reason, the Logos. In the Old Testament, in the back of Proverbs, there is a parallel idea that order and reason derive from God’s wisdom, which is personified in today’s verses. God’s thoughts and speech are given a personality. This wisdom passage lies behind John Chapter 1, and its Logos language. Jesus is the wisdom and speech of God, made human. Now this passage in Proverbs 8 is also intellectually freeing, because it suggests that the order we find anywhere in the universe, through science or any form of study, derives from God’s living wisdom. Wherever we find truth—it belongs to God, but the center of that truth is a person.
Are you a wisdom seeker? Where do you seek?
