Wisdom is not in this world simplicity, but leads us into it. Simplicity is the blessed result in the highest way, when God is all to the new nature. But God is wise in His ways in ordering all things, and we are now in a scene of evil and a complication of received good and actual evil in will and fact which needs for him who would go aright a path which the vulture's eye hath not seen. In truth there is none in the world in itself. Where all is morally wrong and departed from God, there can be no right path. Adam did not want a path. As to him he had only to stay where he was. When we have gone wrong and are driven out by God and so need a path, none can be found. There is none. But God deals with this scene—now with man in it, hereafter with the scene itself, and has a path and result which was before the worlds and which wisdom points out to us, calling men into it. Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the path of understanding? It is not to be found in the land of the living. Destruction and death say we have heard the fame thereof with our ears. So they have. They tell us the vanity of all the scene we are in, and above all, of man at the head of it, the sorest place of all. But it is only negative. This is an immense truth, that there is no way for living man, fallen from God. This is what is described in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Man under the sun, his will works. What can his will, multiplied in the contentions of many, do? But God understandeth the way thereof and He knoweth the place thereof. He ordered creation, but to man He said, The fear of Jehovah, that is wisdom; to depart from evil, that is understanding. This, as Ecclesiastes says, is the whole of man. That book does not go farther, and it is a deep and immense instruction to get this by itself, the position and condition of man as such ascertained, bringing God and responsibility to him, without reaching Him, but looking at man as he is here, and without revelation, but knowing good and evil, accompanied by the declaration of judgment.
Proverbs takes a wider sphere, because it is occupied with wisdom, not with man simply as he is. Hence we have always God in Ecclesiastes (save the fear of Jehovah at the end), Jehovah in Proverbs. The sphere we live in is one of a perverse will in man, who will not have God, but a knowledge of right and wrong in himself, of the difference of right and wrong. In a scene where nature retains abundant marks of a wise and good Creator, of almighty power, yet in this its lower part in a state of ruin and corruption, away from God and in what man knows to be corruption about Him too; so that when he has not revelation, i.e., the word, he is false, in hopeless subjection to what is false, to rear his altar to an unknown God. Such instinctive knowledge there must be as makes him feel that he knows nothing of Him—a sad condition for a responsible soul. Wisdom, the word of God, comes into this scene, shows what it is, reveals God in it, the way of truth, but that word shows it existing in God before the world was. It looks back to creative wisdom, but to a purpose then set up which will be fulfilled; but it deals with what it meets with and shows with divine light what is the scene and state of things of which I have spoken. Its utterances are the truth and reveal withal the counsels of God. Christ was, and of course is, this wisdom, but He is more, for He reveals God Himself; and then comes in necessarily another thing—grace and truth come by Jesus Christ. This last we have not here. It was foretold and prophesied of, but could not be till the Lord Himself came, and effectually for us only when redemption was accomplished and He had glorified God. (Comp. Titus 1:1-31Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness; 2In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began; 3But hath in due times manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me according to the commandment of God our Saviour; (Titus 1:1‑3) 2Tim. 1:9, 109Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, 10But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel: (2 Timothy 1:9‑10).) But we have the general truth of the activity of God's testimony, which, after all, is grace, His dealing with the consciences of men, and wisdom in the creation, and in a general way that His thoughts and purposes of divine delight rested in the sons of men, accomplished so perfectly in Christ's incarnation, proclaimed so blessedly in the angels' song, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good pleasure in men;” but here too wondrously set forth, sheaving the dealing in truth by wisdom with men, and the unspeakable testimony of where His delight was before the world was—wisdom having its delight where God's delight in eternity was. Its delight was in the sons of men. Now we say, “Christ the wisdom of God and the power of God.”
But the revelation of wisdom and its exercise is in the midst of an evil world. What wisdom has to say she would not have to say, if the world were not evil; yet it is a strange thing and must be wisdom to speak God's truth in such a world. And such it is. We read in Ephesians “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” “Redeeming the time,” means seizing opportunities, as Dan. 2, which I note because it shows the world to be evil and, though under God's hand, still evil to be in power. And then wisdom has to cry. It reveals surely too all the counsels of God in Christ, blessing beyond the evil. We speak wisdom among them that are perfect, wisdom ordained before the world to our glory; but even this is brought about as to the wisdom of the way by the coming of evil and redemption. It is divine wisdom bringing good out of the evil in accomplishing His counsels towards us. Sin, weakness, guilt was our state, but through redemption issuing in glory according to the display of God in that redemption, whose love, mercy, righteousness, supremacy over evil have been glorified in the work of Christ, and we in righteousness brought into that glory; that as sin appeared sin working unto death by that which was good, the perfect law of right for man, so God might appear God by the display of all that He is in bringing us to glory through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here we have it in its elements. We have seen it hitherto as the order of subordinate authority and parental care, the maintenance of paternal order. Here we have something more. The world is evil and wisdom cries aloud in testimony in the midst of the world as it is, though revealing the grace that accompanies wisdom.
“Wisdom crieth and understanding putteth forth her voice.” Wisdom I take to be the gathering up all that experience can give, so as to judge of all things by it, only that in God it is intrinsic knowledge of all things and all their relations and state. This He furnishes to us as far as we are capable of it as creatures in His word. Every word of wisdom is perfect as to that to which it applies. It comes from a perfect divine knowledge of all and our path in it as God sees it. It applies to what we are in, but it comes from God who knows His own mind, in what we are in, and about it, and that He gives—only we know in part. As baying received it now, we have it all ours. “Ye have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things.” We cannot instruct the Lord, we are told, but we “have the mind of Christ.” As addressed to us, it is the perfect light of God on that of which it speaks to us. The world is in confusion and evil. Grace makes God cry to us in that day. It was present in Christ. (Compare Isa. 1)
Understanding puts forth her voice as wisdom comprehended all and brought divine light to bear on it. Understanding discovered all. Verses 2 and 3 show remarkably the character of this testimony. She meets man where he is, lifts up her voice above the roar and confusion of man's restless activities in this world, meets him in the throng and puts herself forward in the highway of passage to bring in the light of God, and His claim on man for his good. He summons man's ear to hear and think of something besides the urging of his own will and the turbid stream of his passions and earthly hopes. “To you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of man.” So Christ, the life, was the light of man. Christ, though He did not lift up His voice in the streets, but only to be so much the more heard of all that had ears to hear, yet sent it on the housetops by His apostles, Himself the perfect subject and wisdom's self rather than the proclaimer of it, yet sowed the word—Christ, I say, was this wisdom displayed in subjective perfection in this world. Every word He uttered was a part of it, and the right part when He uttered it. How He discovered all I need not say. He did not learn wisdom partially by experience, as that which He had not (though as true man He grew in it); but was that which experience is to learn. Sorrows He learned for us, difficulties opposition; but He was wisdom in the midst of it. However, God in active grace brings this to bear on the conscience and hearts of men—says, “He that hath ears to hear let him hear.” The word was proclaimed, on the top of the high pines, in the view of men, in the thronged resorts of men, and where every one must enter that belonged to a human dwelling-place or home. And her address was to men. God's word and wisdom are formed for and expressed to them. When it was there in life, “the life was the light of men;” theirs in divine counsels and adapted to their conditions.
It came to bring the truth, not to find it. It came to the simple and fools; it brought light and understanding to the simple. The hearing ear, through grace, brought to the simplest and most foolish divine wisdom for themselves—a light and guide in all the circumstances they were in. They were excellent things, for they came from God and revealed Him, and they were right things—put everything in its true moral place with God, and with God's authority. For wisdom's month speaks according to the real nature and state of things, and that as to their relationship with God—tells the truth of everything, and is equally abhorrent from all evil itself. This is the great controversy with man's pretensions. He has his own mind the center of all the confusion, leaving out God, and pretending to judge by it the scene of confusion he is in—yea, even to judge God Himself and what He ought to be. Wisdom is bringing, in applicable detail, the light of God and His authority in it into the scene of confusion which is so as departed from Him. The will of man will not have it; his passions and lusts are dearer to him.