“who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person …”
(Heb. 1:3, NKJV)
What exactly the Spirit of wisdom is, how it works and what it does, in other words an exploration of “the secrets of wisdom” (Job 11:6), is currently our topic of discussion.
In this teaching we want to point out what the Word of God says about the wisdom of the world, in contrast with the wisdom that in nestled in the Spirit of wisdom.
Paul was immensely worried about the church of Corinth when he writes, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” (2 Cor. 11:3, KJV). In the original, the word beguiled means that the snake stole something very specific from her. If we look at the Greek word, exapataō, it consists of two semantic parts – ek or ex (“out”) and apataō (cheat”), or then: to be cheated out of something. It has the additional emotional connotations of being thoroughly deceived, or sold short. What was Eve cheated out of?
The answer is found in the well-known verse Rom. 3:23, where it spells out, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. Our completely uninformed understanding of the glory we’ve lost means that we do not really consider the cost of this. We are crippled by our lack of “the knowledge of glory” (2 Cor. 4:6), without realising that the prophetic word on which the last Reformation is found explicitly notes that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).
Rom. 9:23 speaks about “the riches of his glory … which he had prepared beforehand for glory”. God, the Father of glory (Phil. 4:20), calls you to glory (1 Thess. 2:12). Thus the entire gospel stands in the sign of the “hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2), which is referred to as “the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:14). Thus we need to understand what “the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18) is concerned with. Two facets of this issue, to illustrate:
- The “bondage of corruption” to which the entire humanity is subjected can for instance only be alleviated through “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Selah!
- According to 2 Cor. 4:17 “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding andeternal weight of glory”!
Consider that it is “the Father of glory” who grants us “the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him” (Eph. 1:17). Col. 1:27 thus notes that Christ is “the hope of glory” WITHIN us. From Col. 3:4 we understand that: “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.” Remember: this does not happen in an undetermined “one day” in the future – it happens today when He parousia, appears. (Read the teaching of Day 1340-1341 again.) The knowledge of the glory obviously leads to a manifestation of this glory: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Cor. 3:18).
But you could rightly ask how the knowledge and the manifestation of glory is linked with the spirit of Wisdom. The answer to this important question is found in 1 Cor. 2:4-10: “And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.’ But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.” What the eye has not seen, what we’ve never heard or thought, is specifically this restored glory, and this will become manifest when we have the Spirit of wisdom! This is a wondrous key to the Last Reformation!
It is interesting that Paul speaks of there being a particular charm that is nestled in human wisdom – it is persuasive in nature, which is to say that it easily seduces you into believing it. It is even possible for believers to build their faith on such human wisdom. It is astounding how easily believers “will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears” (2 Tim. 4:3). There are for instance often spiritual arguments about the importance of love, and that someone needs to be “covered”. But the covering of love is not a hiding place for false teaching, unrighteousness, untruth, a bad attitude, or whatever. It is a human or worldly quasi-wisdom that often uses an important spiritual concept like love to “cover” all sorts of unsavoury deeds. Paul does after all say in Rom. 12:9 that love should be without hypocrisy, that we should “abhor what is evil” and “cling to what is good”. Therefore 2 Cor. 8:8 makes it imperative that we test the authenticity of so-called love, otherwise a humanitarian understanding of “love covers everything” can become a manifestation of what Spurgeon called “the iniquity of holy things”.
Back to 2 Cor. 11:3 that we started examining earlier. That which Eve and the entire humanity was cheated out of is the glory of God. Therefore 2 Cor. 4:4 argues that the “god of this world” still blinds our senses, “lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them”. We could grammatically read this section in three ways:
- Christ, who is the image of God
- The glory of Christ, which is the image of God
- The gospel of the glory of Christ, which is the image of God
The glory that man lost is the Image of God, is the Christ (the glory of the Christ, as well as gospel that this glory of the Christ contains). We can regain the lost image of God that we lost with the fall through the KNOWLEDGE of the gospel of glory of the Christ. (Interestingly enough there is not one single Scripture that spells out that man lost the image of God with the fall. Some theologians will, on the basis of Gen. 9:6 and James 3:9, argue that fallen people still carry the image of God, but read within context this is not a valid perspective.) The loss of the image of God in the fallen man is thus clearly linked to the loss of the glory of God, or then – the loss of Christ! This view or interpretation is neatly supported by Heb. 1:3, which says of Jesus the Christ: “who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person”. See how glory and image are placed together here!
After we have lost our glory it is the opponent’s greatest weapon to keep people unaware of this truth. Finding this truth will bring about a Godly synergy of change in your life, which completely changes everything. The restoration of the knowledge of the gospel of glory of Christ WITHIN is also the restoration of the image of God, which we had before time (Gen. 1:27), but which we lost with the fall.
[It is important to remember – according to Col. 1:15 Jesus is sent to enable the restoration of glory for the fallen man, as He alone “is the Image of the invisible God”. This is an immense truth – “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.” (Rom. 8:29). How does this happen? While “we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Cor. 3:18). Take note – we are renewed to knowledge of the image of the Creator (Col. 3:10). The Aramaic Lamsa-translation of this Scripture states it beautifully: “And put on the new life which is renewed in knowledge after the pattern in which it was originally created …” Note the changes that occur as the levels of glory progress: (to be) renewed in (and through) knowledge, the knowledge of the glory.]
Back to 2 Cor. 11:3 – the way in which the old snake, the opponent, seduces Eve, is presented as “beguiled” in KJV. Other translations use “cheated” (ABP), “enticed” (ACV), “deceived” (ALTNT), “tricked” (BBE), “misled” (Lamsa), “led away” (NCV), and that he did thing by employing subtlety. One of the Strong synonyms for this is “sophistry”, which derives from the Greek word for wisdom, sophia. There are a range of words that derive from this, for instance sophomore (“wise fool”), sophistry (“the art of deception through perverted logic”), and sophisticated (“worldly wise”). It is clear that each of these words point to a wisdom that is attractive to natural man, that of carnal thought. Paul very clearly expresses his opposition to this natural wisdom in 1 Cor. 1:20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” Two chapters later he explains in more detail: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their own craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.’” (1 Cor. 3:18-20). In 2 Cor. 1:12 he spells out that the wisdom of the world is “fleshly wisdom”. The dictionary Webster provides a good definition of sophistry: “Reasoning that is superficially plausible but actually fallacious.”
In the teaching of Day 1405-1406 we came to an important conclusion – even though what the snake said to Eve is true, namely that man’s eyes are opened after he eats of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:22 – “Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil …’”), THIS was not the deception – the deception was that man has an immortal soul! This brought about that the entire humanity’s mind became corrupted, and that he started listening to earthly wisdom, which James 3:15 calls “earthly, sensual, demonic”. How ironic this is – man was robbed of the specific thing he desired in Paradise!
- Selah: To what extent does human wisdom direct what you believe?
- Read: Jonah 2-4; Mic. 1-7
- Memorise: 4:2-3
