Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 8:22-31

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
I have been established from everlasting,
From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, I was brought forth;
While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields,
Or the primal dust of the world.
When He prepared the heavens, I was there,
When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,
When He established the clouds above,
When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,
When He assigned to the sea its limit,
So that the waters would not transgress His command,
When He marked out the foundations of the earth,
Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in His inhabited world,
And my delight was with the sons of men.

Proverbs 8:22-31 (NKJV).

It is easy to believe that Genesis is the only place in the Bible which talks about creation. While certainly the most obvious place, there are passages throughout scripture that speak to one aspect of the creation process or another. These passages, all together, paint a picture that can sometimes be overshadowed by the well-known narrative involving Adam and Eve.

What I mean by this is how intentional God was, and how little an impact sin really had on the design of this reality. So often people will speak of a "fallen world", and not quite specify what they mean. We hear about "suffering and death" or "thorns and thistles", all sorts of "bad" things which were "caused" by sin, yet this is about as "true" as humanity currently being responsible for the entirety of climate change.

It's not humility, but arrogance, to presume that because of the sin of humanity, God struck the remainder of reality from its place of supposed perfection. It makes too much of our influence on anything, and yet when you don't put the collected verses regarding creation together, this message can be entirely missed.

Some Christians assert, for example, that "death and decay" were a result of the fall of Adam and Eve, yet without death and decay, a stable ecologic system cannot ever form. Scripture is clear that the physical and spiritual death among humanity is a result of Adam, but the Bible does not claim that everything we deem "wrong" with the world to be the result of our actions.

This is highlighted in how all the passages extol God's designs, God's intent, God's ordering of everything into independent systems that could, at least materially, persist for very long periods of time, and were almost entirely self-regulating. God set boundaries, defined relationships, and did all of this to glorify God.

Why would that glory be marred by our sin, especially if it was ever genuinely perfect, without flaw?

Why would our disobedience change the rules that our reality operates by?

Why would God scuttle all the work of his hands as a means of exacting punishment on sin?

Read the passage, and contemplate the planning that went into all of creation. If you've ever been involved in setting up anything, be it a party, a doctor's appointment, or an entire manufacturing system, there are a lot of details that need to be coordinated for everything to go smoothly.

Imagining how drinkable water would need to be made available to all the creatures other than humans. Think about the water cycle, and how our ecosystems balance themselves based on the availability of water. Think about how creatures are adapted physically to the resources available in their climate. Think about how the "cycle of life" operates, where plants grow from soil, animals eat the plants, other animals eat the animals that ate the plants, and eventually even those animals die and return to the soil.

Do we really want to assert that the sin of humanity is responsible for that instead of God?

Because that's what end up being the logical conclusion if our sin "broke" the world. No longer do the heavens declare the glory of God, but instead they bear our graffiti, our corruption. No longer is the world as designed but now it has been remade by our sin into something else. No longer are God's invisible attributes capable of being understood from what God has made, because the destruction of our sin has overshadowed God's work.

Do you see how disrespectful it is to God when we make so much of our sin instead of making much of God? Do you grasp how arrogant it is to presume that God's designs can be foiled by our efforts? Do you understand how God's sovereignty is challenged when we explain the dynamics we see in front of us as the result of our own hands instead of God's?

Wisdom is being described as having been there "since the beginning", before God started work on shaping this world we currently inhabit. Much is said about the intent of God, about the establishment of the dynamics we now see, and this is a very common theme in passages about creation.

There's a reason why those who act in accordance with wisdom find material benefit, because this world was designed through wisdom. Wisdom still works among us, and still looks favorably on those who respect her lessons, and rewards them for their work. The role of wisdom in existence has never changed, never been successfully challenged, let alone replaced, even as a consequence for sin.

All that's changed, all that's ever changed, is the connection between us and God, and even there only from our side of the relationship. God has always been reaching out, whether to correct or to reward, but we turn away, we ignore, we reject, thinking that we can do better.

The truth is that we can't, not on our own.

Woe to those who will resist wisdom, resist God, unto death.

Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 3:19-20

The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;
By understanding He established the heavens;
By His knowledge the depths were broken up,
And clouds drop down the dew.

Proverbs 3:19-20 (NKJV).

It can be easy to forget that the Bible wasn't written by a single person in a singular effort, but that it is instead a collection of writings from various authors over a rather long period of time. The reason that I bring this up is that this little passage appears to be a non-sequitur of sorts, and while a bit jarring, squeezed right in between two longer writings on the value of wisdom itself, that's probably just the order that it was recorded.

We can still glean practical information from even a short passage like this.

The most obvious takeaway to me is that the design and operation of this world is not an accident. It was not the product of mere chance, and while the naturalistic probability of any certain event may be calculated, when you start to compute the odds of everything being just the way that it is, given all that it could be, and even on a naturalistic standpoint our existence becomes miraculous.

There is order in the world despite the regular appearance of chaos, and there is a reason that God arranged things in the order what we discover them to be in. Of great importance I think is noting that this was written long after The Fall. It is common to presume that the "curse of sin" extended from humanity to all of creation, but that ignores what scripture actually states.

This world, this reality, was never designed to last forever. God wasn't caught off guard by Adam and Eve's sin, nor does scripture indicate that the consequence for sin required God to create that which did not already exist, but that God would no longer protect humanity from that which God had already created, that humanity would have to struggle instead of being able to enjoy the benefits of being in direct relationship with God.

That pattern would be repeated by Israel, where God would remove protection from them when they disobeyed to motivate them to correct their behavior and return to God.

It is rather difficult to explain in what ways Adam and Eve would have been "perfect" and yet account for their behavior. The more perfect God's creation must be, the less intelligent, wise, or understanding Adam and Eve need to have been to explain why they gave it all up after such a simple deceit, and without any real coercion at all. This paradox is just one of the reasons that the assertion creation was "perfect" in any sense, instead of just "very good", is something I don't support.

When you parse the language back in Genesis, the original word "towb" most closely translates to "beautiful", and when you look across all the times it's used in the Old Testament, the connotation of perfect, of lacking flaws, does make sense when you understand that it is talking about beauty and not a moral or physical perfection.

Creation would also respond to God's interactions exactly as God intended, not just because God was acting, but because the systems were designed to work in a specific fashion and God's use of those systems as intended only speaks to the quality of the design.

That the natural world could exist and operate without constant intervention is not a denigration of God, in that it is always harder to create a system which can operate independently and without constant maintenance. Look at the difficulty in raising a child to become a "healthy" or "well-adjusted" adult.

This also does not exclude God from continuing to interact, to shape, to guide, but it would mean that God wouldn't be necessary to explain every interaction at every level of creation. God may be the root explanation for all the causes that produce an effect. Salt and chlorine can combine because of their electron patterns to make salt, and they can do so because God designed it that way, not because God wanted to combine them in that moment.

Reflect on this passage in that it is giving God credit for both the design and for how that design works, and to use that as part of the necessary humbling of oneself in order to pursue further knowledge.

When we are tempted to believe that we know more than God, we have a nearly infinite number of examples of things that we do not yet really understand, and yet God not only understood, but beautifully designed all of it.

I don't have to denigrate myself to understand how God's intellect so greatly exceeds anything I am capable of, and why understanding that is a necessary prerequisite for genuine humility.

Put differently, it is not that I know so little, as much as God knows so much more than I could ever imagine.