THE WISDOM OF GOD
After returning from Uganda I have been asking the ‘Q’ Why Lord.…..Why have Uganda had to suffer so much
I’m sure that the people of Uganda have often felt as though they a people left behind. When they see the prosperity that other nations enjoy it must seem bewildering!
When I visited last March the Lord had given me a message to share:
What Uganda has, a people have taken for evil, the Lord is now turning around and using for Good!
It was a word that resonated so well. I could see this was a people ready and eager to receive all that God would be willing to provide. It is this same lack that has sheltered them from much of the culture of excess and depravity that is presently ravaging the western world.
Since my return ……. I have been studying the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.
In the past …. I had purposefully veered away from these two books because understanding God’s purposes seemed to be so far out of my grasp.
Job speaks of the pain of ones man’s life who is feeling utterly abandoned by God.
I think that the people of Uganda have long felt this kind of pain. Why has God abandoned us. It must have been so hard for them to comprehend their own circumstance ….
This was Job’s pain too.
He loved God and he couldn’t fathom why the Lord would have been visiting such punishment on him.
Solomon - The wisest man in the world
……. this wise man was the same the man who sinned so grievously against God that in the end the entire nation of Israel would be removed from the land and its capital and temple destroyed.
God reminded me ….. I always like to make the distinction in my teachings between the: the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man.
Consider these verses for a moment:
The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom (1 Cor 1:25);
The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. (Cor 3:19)
The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise and they are futile. (1 Cor 3;20).
The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. (1 Cor 1:18)
Clearly there is a great chasm that separates human wisdom from the Wisdom of God.
As I pondered these thoughts an image of a hard cover book began to emerge …. A book just like this :
You’ll notice this book has 2 hard covers. One at the front and one at the back and I felt prompted to consider the front cover as the book of Job and the back cover as the book of Ecclesiates. These represent man’s understanding or the wisdom of man. In the book of Job we see how Job’s 3 friends had such great difficulty believing that anything like this could happen to a righteous man and so they concluded that it must be because they sinned. In Ecclesiastes we read that the wisest man in the world concluded that everything is foolishness and nothing makes any sense.
In between the 2 hard covers … we find the heart of the book in the form of 2 writings that reveal the wisdom of God. Psalms and Proverbs
In an instant it was as though the holy spirit was showing me that the reason the books of wisdom are grouped together as one is that they were never meant to be considered apart from each other. They are to be considered as a whole.
You see ….Man’s wisdom by itself will leave us searching for answers we have no way of discovering. Considered through the lens of the wisdom of God however, now that is a different matter.
And what are we to make of the flyleaf. The flyleaf is the beautiful covering that wraps the entire book and it speaks of the amazing undying love that the Father has for his children.
Viewed from man’s perspective life too often makes no sense but as we look inside to the real heart of the book we discover that God is always at work painting on a Canvas far bigger than ever we can see
Sometimes the Lord will choose to allow pain and suffering to fulfill his good purposes!
Just as it was with Job and just as it was with Jesus.
If the Lord will use pain in the life of his own son why would we be surprised when pain is allowed to visit our own doorstep.
The question I had been asking about why Uganda … was not such a big question for me now.
The Lord was showing me …. He is well able to love His people no matter the circumstances. Just look at Israel in Egypt. Had he forgotten their pain. ?
In the book of Ephesians Paul wrote that he prayed for Wisdom and Revelation. Eph 1:17
In the days that lie ahead God is going to be moving us forward together into places that he has prepared for us.
He has told us that He’s doing a new thing now and were no longer to look to the things of the past.
I recognise now that I had no right to question God with such judgement in my heart.
Without the benefit of His wisdom I don’t have the ability to understand and so I must trust Him.
Now I believe that …..
all the pains of the past have been the hot fires of life refining them as His dearly beloved precious children … so that they would be made ready and fully prepared for all that lies ahead in the days to come.
We need to be so careful when seeking understanding.
We can try to move in our own understanding. ….. Very Unwise. OR we can wait on God and seek His wisdom as He reveals it through His spirit.
