Reflections on The Wisdom of God

Have you ever been meditating on a truth about God, say His sovereignty, His wisdom, His goodness, and arrived at a mental ascent to the truth – a place of saying you believe it to be true, and then suddenly to turn around the next corner of your life and find circumstances challenging that belief? It’s not surprising, yet it always seems to catch me off guard. I firmly believe in God’s goodness and wisdom in the sovereign choices He makes for our lives, and yet when faced with a circumstance that threatens to break my heart, I find it all the more difficult to continue believing that truth in the midst the emotional pain the circumstance renders.

George Mueller, in praying for his bed-ridden wife, staked his prayers for her healing on this truth: “No good thing does the LORD withhold from those who put their trust in Him.” Mueller believed that if God should choose not to heal his wife, it was because it was a good thing not to. What I appreciate about this perspective is that Mueller’s prayers were based on a promise of God, not just a general understanding of God’s character (that He is all wise and all good). God promises not to withhold any good thing from those who put their trust in Him. Do you believe it? Mueller did. And that is why he was able to speak at his wife of 30 year’s funeral service and vocalize his faith in God’s promise to him.

I guess to keep having faith in God’s goodness in Mueller’s situation, or in a difficult situation you may be dealing with, means constantly redefining your definition of “good”. “Good” does not mean clean, pain-free, comfortable, much as our culture would like to have us believe. Goodness goes much, much deeper than that. Because it takes into consideration the bigger picture – the picture that more often than not, we’re not privileged to see except maybe sometimes in hindsight. John Piper’s sermon on the wisdom of God keeps rolling around in my head these days – that God’s wisdom entails taking into consideration “billions upon billions upon billions of factors” that you and I can’t even begin to imagine.

Stop and think about it for a second. Think cause and effect. Every action you take has an effect somehow. Stories from 9-11 remind us of that truth: someone chooses to get up in the morning a few minutes later than normal, and that two minutes ends up saving them from entering the building that would be destroyed only seconds before their arrival. Most of us make our decisions based on the consequences we can see and taste for ourselves. We don’t really think about those facts that we think won’t influence any one else. And mostly because our finite brains just couldn’t handle trying to take into consideration all those details.

But God does. He sees them all. He not only sees them all, but He also retains full and complete wisdom in discerning the best course of action to take, and has the power to make that take place.

Oh, let’s not forget how incredible great our God is. He is the One who brought the stars into existence. Human science talks and dreams of cloning a human, but have you ever heard anyone even dream about creating a star?! We simply don’t have that kind of power or understanding about how the world works. And that’s because we didn’t create it. God did. His understanding is infinite. Who are we to question God, the Creator of the universe? And yet how easy it is to do that, isn’t it?

We must trust Him, even when circumstances around us make it difficult to do so. Trust takes humility, vulnerability, and courage. Are you lacking any of these qualities? Pray for it. God is most glorified when we have the guts to trust Him in the most difficult of situations. Not only can we trust that He knows what He’s doing, but we can trust that some day, all these sorrows, griefs and difficulties will be banished: the suffering that we endure now is not worthy to be compared with the glory to come.

May our hearts resonate with joyful faith in our all trust-worthy, most praise-worthy, all-knowing and all-loving Father and Maker.