God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin (1 Corinthians 1:30).
For the most part, school came fairly easily for me. I don’t recall ever getting a poor grade on a test or paper unless I purposefully chose to blow it off (which is a whole nother story). As long as I paid attention and read my assignments, I could get a decent grade without having to put in too much effort.
For an overly imaginative and creative kid like me, this was both a blessing and a curse. Sure, I could breeze through my homework quicker than most kids, which was a good thing. But then what was I supposed to do with all my free time?
In my younger years, I would typically play with Legos, read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, or draw epic Ninja Turtles vs. Star Wars battles. As I got older though, my decision-making skills seemed to regress.
Instead of building robots, I decided to stink-bomb the school cafeteria.
Instead of reading books, I chose to look at porn.
Instead of battling with action figures, I broke into cars for drug money.
The irony is, no matter how much trouble I got myself into, my grades never dropped. I remained on the honor roll at school despite all my poor decision-making.
I may have had a ton of knowledge, but I clearly didn’t have enough wisdom.
Wisdom is “the knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”(1). You can know true facts about a million different things, but if you don’t know how to apply that information to your life, it’s just knowledge. Knowing facts and information may get you into the final round of Jeopardy, but it won’t help you navigate life unless you pair it with wisdom.
True wisdom, however, isn’t something you generate on your own. As Paul shows us in this verse, the source of true wisdom is Jesus: “God made [Christ] to be wisdom itself.”
Once again, Paul is speaking in the past tense. God made… It’s been done.
Furthermore, God did this for our benefit. He knew that many of the decisions we would be faced with in life would far exceed our pay-grades. Which is why He made Christ to be the embodiment of wisdom, placed Him within us, and granted us full access to everything we will ever need to know.
As Charles Ellicott says in his Commentary for English Readers:
“Christ became to us God’s revelation of Himself, thus giving us a wisdom from the source of all wisdom, which surpasses utterly any wisdom we could have derived from nature or from man” (2).
You can rest assured that God will never bring you to a tough decision only to leave you hanging. If you find yourself in a situation where you need wisdom, remember that Wisdom itself already lives inside of you. All you need to do is ask for it. He will make your path clear or give you the words to say.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that God’s widom far exceeds my own. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I have a feeling my decision to stink-bomb the school cafeteria wouldn’t have seemed like such a great idea if I’d sought the Lord’s wisdom first.
But then again, if I had asked Him, I probably would have missed out on all those fun hours I spent staring at the wall of the detention room.
