Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is found in the book of Isaiah chapter 11, verses 1 to 10. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Isaiah 11:1-10

“There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.

His delight is in the fear of the Lord, and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his loins, and faithfulness the belt of his waist.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze. Their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play by the hole of the cobra’s hole, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain. For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And in that day, there shall be a root of Jesse who shall stand as a banner to the people. For the Gentiles shall seek him and his resting place shall be glorious.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for the truth of this passage. We thank you for the wondrous advent of the Lord Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago. We thank you, Father, for the movement ahead of history that his atonement and resurrection provided. We thank you, Lord God, that what we just read has been fulfilled in the coming of our Savior and will continue to show its manifestation as the years in history roll forth. We thank you for your ordering all things rightly through the spirit of wisdom. Bless us now as we consider that spirit poured out upon us.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, we’re still a month away from Septuagesima. I’m kind of known for rushing the season or extending the season, particularly at Christmas time. And Septuagesima is not something you probably have ever heard before, and I didn’t hear it until this last week. In the Church of England, also in the Roman Catholic Church and in various communions, the seven or eight days—depending on the particular way this is done—leading up to the celebration of Christmas would involve a recitation of the seven “O” antiphons, so-called, and we’ll talk more about those in a little bit.

I’ve talked about this before and handed out lists of them before, and next week I’ll have a handout for you about the seven “O” antiphons. But the first of the antiphons is the one we want to consider today. The next sermons as we come into the Christmas season will be on the seven “O” antiphons. And the first one is “O Sapientia,” which is Latin and I’m probably not saying it correctly—for wisdom. So, “O Wisdom.”

And so the season of the seven “O” antiphons leading up to the celebration of the birth of Christ on December 25th begins with Septuagesima, the day of the “O” antiphon of Sapientia, or wisdom. It is a good thing to listen to the church. For the last 500 years the church has had various voices and manifestations, and I suppose it had before that, but we live in a time when there is no “the church” anymore—where it’s been shattered, the diversity has occurred, and we have millions of communions now, so to speak, if we include every church that’s not affiliated in that list. It’s good to look at our forebears of the faith and to see the united voice of the church’s witness, at least of particular times of the season. And this is one such thing. The historic church has given to us the seven “O” antiphons, and so it’s the voice of the church to us.

We’ll spend these next sermons preparing for Advent. Now Advent is a season where, you know, sometimes we get confused with—Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year of the church. The first half of the liturgical year is a remembrance of the life of the Savior, beginning with Advent and going through his birth and then his Epiphany to the nations, his preparation in the Lenten season for his death, and then a celebration of his resurrection and his ascension.

And so the life of the Savior is the subject of the first six months of the liturgical year, and the second six months is the life of the church—or the life of the Savior lived out through the church. And so the liturgical year begins with Advent. Now Advent isn’t trying to pretend like Jesus didn’t come 2,000 years ago. We just say, singing “Come, Emmanuel.” We’ll sing it a lot in the next four or five weeks.

It actually is a reflection of the seven “O” antiphons. It originally was written in the form that we sang it today—well, at least in terms of the subject of the seven verses that match up with the subject of the seven “O” antiphons. So if you read through this version of “O Come, Emmanuel” and sing it in your homes, you’ll become familiar with these seven antiphons. In a way, they’re just seven names for the Lord Jesus Christ.

So I mean, if you don’t want to think about it as Septuagesima and antiphons and all that stuff, just think about it and talk about it in your families as getting to know the Savior using a document from the early church. These antiphons go back probably to at least the 8th century—maybe back as far as the 6th century. We don’t know, but they’re part of the historic church for over a millennium now. So it’s getting to know Jesus by looking at specific titles that the church gleaned from the scriptures in terms of who Jesus is.

Advent is remembering the birth of Christ, of course—the great coming the world waited for 4,000 years. But it also celebrates the second coming. It looks forward to the final coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we pray for wisdom and ask for wisdom to come, we acknowledge that wisdom did come 2,000 years ago. But we also know that wisdom will be manifest and fully formed in the earth at the second coming of our Savior.

So we also look for and pray for the second coming of the Savior. And then finally, Advent is also a time when we look for the coming of Christ in history to do these things as well. So we live in the midst of a nation that is awash in folly, and our hearts cry out for wisdom to know what to do. Would that it were more of a public thing in our country—a crying out for wisdom. If there has ever been a situation that is clearly more folly-ridden, this financial crisis we’re in seems to be it.

The leaders of our nation in terms of those who are trying to help in the financial crisis are beginning to look and are being talked about openly as fools—foolish people, not because people hate them, but because they look so foolish changing tactics and strategies about what to do in terms of the global economic crisis. Well, that’s the beginning of wisdom: to know you’re a fool and to cry out for wisdom, as we’ll see in a couple of minutes.

So Advent is about praying, crying, realizing our own individual and our own collective need for the coming of the spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, to bring us wisdom in our particular settings as well. So Advent has those aspects to it. It looks to the past, it has a present situation, and it looks to the future as well. And these “O” antiphons are one way—a useful way—to do that.

The antiphons: some comments on the seven antiphons. See them, and this may sound a little odd to you, but historically the way they were used—and continue to be used in thousands of churches across the world today—during the last seven days leading up to Christmas, the seven antiphons would be sung in connection to the Magnificat, either before it or before and after it. The Magnificat is Mary’s great song: “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” And we’ll be practicing that the next couple of weeks and singing that in our liturgy as well.

Mary’s song. Well, some people see in the seven “O” antiphons—we can see in a way the voice of Mary as she is pregnant with the Lord Jesus Christ, or as the Annunciation has come to her, praying for the coming of the child who will bring wisdom and every other virtue and name that’s given to us in the antiphon. So in a way, “antiphon” means back and forth, responsory. And so there’s this kind of view that what we have going on there is Mary representing the church praying for these things, and then the church bursts forth in song. Mary bursts forth in song with the Magnificat, the recognition that God has answered these prayers in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So that’s one way they’re used.

Seven antiphons also—another thing that’s interesting to note about them is that they do track history. Some of you know that the seven letters to the churches in Revelation track Old Testament history very specifically. The citations that are used in the seven letters to the seven churches track chronologically the history of the Old Covenant coming up to the time of Christ. Well, the seven antiphons do the same thing. It begins with wisdom—”O Wisdom” or Sapientia—and the next “O” antiphon is Adonai, and it speaks of the coming of God as Lord on Mount Sinai to give us the law. And then the next one is “Root of Jesse,” Radix Jesse—the root of Jesse, again a designation of Christ which we saw in the text we read this morning. The next one is the “Key of David.” And then the next one is Oriens, referring to the sun rising in the east. And then the next one is “Desire of the Nations.” And then finally Emmanuel.

So what we start with is creation. Wisdom is linked to creation in the scriptures, as we’ll see in a little bit. And then we see the coming of the Mosaic covenant and the giving of the law. And then we see preparation for the coming of the Davidic covenant through Jesse. And Jesus is the root of Jesse. And then we see the coming of David. Chronologically, we’re tracking through the Old Testament. And then we see the sun beginning to shine, announcing the advent of Christ coming, and that the Gentiles will come to the light of his uprising. He’s the desire of the nations. And then finally, Emmanuel—Christ is with us.

So the seven “O” antiphons, as we meditate upon them and what the scriptures teach about them, they remind us of the whole flow of biblical history, our history, world history from creation and wisdom, and then to Emmanuel, God with us, that we celebrate at Christmas time. So as we look through these antiphons and spend a week on each one, those are helpful things to remember. This is what it means.

Next week I’ll mention this more specifically, and I know it’s hard to keep it in your mind without having the names in front of you, but the Latin names are Sapientia, as we mentioned, and then Adonai, Radix Jesse, Clavis David—key of David—Oriens, meaning sunrise, Rex Gentium—the desire of the nations or ruler of the nations—and then Emmanuel. Now if you take the first letters of those seven Latin words—the antiphons—is it backward masking going on? Some of you remember from the ’60s and ’70s, people played songs backward and you hear a different message.

Well, if you take the first seven letters, the Latin letters of the seven “O” antiphons and read them backwards, it says “Ero Cras”—”tomorrow he will be here,” “tomorrow he will come,” or “tomorrow I will come.” And this is thought by historians to be deliberate. You know, in most of human history, and at least in a good portion of literate human history, the teaching of the alphabet was both forward and backward. Children were regularly expected to be able to recite forward and backward just as well as forward, because Jesus is this Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end. And it thinks that way.

So it I know it sounds a little odd that there’s backward masking in the historic church in the 7th or 8th century, but I think that’s really what it probably was—deliberately put forth that way.

Well, today we want to begin by talking about wisdom. And as I said, this is what we’re going to do: we’ll look at four specific texts. And the first two we’ll look at in combination—from Isaiah, the text we just read from Isaiah, as well as James 3, “Wisdom from Above.” And then we’ll look at Proverbs 8, and we’ll look at 1 Corinthians 2 as central texts in the scriptures about wisdom, and we’ll note some things about them as we go through them. That’ll be kind of the approach.

The text we read, Isaiah 11:1-10, without belaboring the point of the seven “O” antiphons: at least four of them or five of them can be intimated as drawn forth from Isaiah 11. For instance, verse one says, “There shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse”—that’s Radix Jesse, the root of David, the root of Jesse rather. Then in verse two, which we’ll deal with in just a couple more minutes in more detail, the spirit of wisdom rests upon him. Verse three talks about him as the judge—he’ll judge the earth by his eyes, the judge of the earth. The beginning of wisdom—the first part of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. We’ll talk about that next week as we consider Jesus as Adonai, the judge of the earth and the giving of the law in Sinai and the external manifestations that went along with that.

Verse 10, that we read from Isaiah 11, says the Gentiles shall seek him. So the themes of the seven antiphons are largely drawn—or maybe totally drawn—from the prophetic literature, the book of the prophets primarily. And in Isaiah 11, this is a good one to maybe read in preparation for Christmas because it contains references to many of the things that we’ll be talking about for the next few weeks. It’s so useful.

So Isaiah 11—we’ll get to that in just a minute.

So we’ll look at these texts and draw out from those texts some things, some application points, and some things we want to thank God for in terms of Septuagesima, the coming of Jesus Christ as wisdom.

All right. So the first thing we’re going to do—well, actually, first of all, before we start that, one last point: Jesus is wisdom, of course. The spirit of wisdom that we just read about in Isaiah 11 is spoken of in John 1:32, that John bore witness of Christ saying, “I saw the spirit descend from heaven like a dove and he remained upon him.”

So the spirit of wisdom, the Holy Spirit, rests upon Jesus, and Jesus is the wisdom of God. Matthew 12:42 we read that the queen of the south will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. And indeed, a greater than Solomon is here. So the greatest of wisdom in the Old Testament is Solomon, but now Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, has come and declares that to us in the Gospel account.

So when we read about “O Wisdom” or Sapientia, as I said, this is really getting to know the Savior. The Savior is a Savior who is full of wisdom and is wisdom incarnate.

So what is it? What are some of the things that wisdom is? A huge subject. We can spend all of our lives and will spend most of our lives considering the idea of wisdom. But I want us to look, as a survey of these several texts that we’ve just mentioned. And we’ll talk first of all about the text that we just read from Isaiah 11, and very specifically, we’ll look very briefly at verse two.

So Isaiah 11:2 says, “The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” And then we have three doublets, right? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.”

So looking at this designation of Christ, we see three sets of two. So there are six elements or aspects of wisdom, but the heading to them is also mentioned. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. So we have a sevenfold designation of the spirit of God and the spirit of Christ. So there’s a perfect seven indicated here, but it’s written in such a way as to have us think about it in terms of the spirit of the Lord being then described with six particular characteristics.

Six characteristics. So if you look at verse two, the first set of characteristics are wisdom and understanding. The next two are counsel and might. And the third are knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Now, just briefly: wisdom is the topic of what we’re going to be talking about today. It involves much more than just facts or data or measurements. Our world is awash in measurements and data. But wisdom is the ability—not just to connect those things together, but then to be able to see them in relationship to the providence and creation of God. And all those things are mentioned in these three sets of doublets.

Wisdom is that overarching movement of how we live our lives in a well-ordered fashion in relationship to the creation and providential acts of God. When we just sang in “O Come, Emmanuel,” we sang about the one who “orders all things mightily.” And so wisdom is this idea that God has both created the world and sustains the world. And his creation and providence are essentially the wisdom of God in terms of the world.

So wisdom is the overarching movement of a wise people in terms of a God who orders things. The word understanding is specifically the ability to take pieces of data and make them fit together in a way that we can understand what just happened. So if we think of particular facts, they’re individual facts or data points. Understanding can connect up data points and understand what’s occurred in the context of what’s observed, or elements of truth. So understanding puts data points together.

Counsel is a word that now is not involved with our own ability interior to us but now it’s a spirit of wisdom—is also a spirit of counsel that speaks in community. And counsel is related to might. Now the antiphon of the church in terms of wisdom says that wisdom is from the mouth of God. He’s the word of God. He’s created all things and orders them in a mighty and sweet way, sweetly and mightily in the words of some translations. There is a beautifulness, a pleasantness to the wisdom of God, and a strength and power. And those things are put together in the antiphon, and they’re put together here at the center of these six attributes.

The counsel of God coming to us is the sweet counsel of God. He brings the spirit—it’s a spirit of comfort and counsel and advice, but he’s also a spirit of might and empowerment. And Jesus Christ is a sweet Savior, but he’s also a mighty and powerful Savior as well. And these two things are linked.

And then in the third doublet, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. Knowledge is that understanding—basically an understanding of data points. Now, knowledge and counsel and wisdom can be somewhat synonymous, but there are specific differences. And knowledge means an ability to see what’s happening, to be able to discern data points. And then the fear of the Lord, of course, is the first part of wisdom.

So when we look at this description of who Jesus is, there is a structure—an ABA structure to this. If we look at the first set—wisdom and understanding—and then look at the last set—knowledge and the fear of the Lord—understanding and knowledge hook up. It’s data points and the ability to connect those data points together. And the wisdom and the fear of the Lord hook up as well, because the first part of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

So there is this ABA structure. There’s two and then another two and then a last two, and the first two and the last two go, you know, wisdom—knowledge, or wisdom—understanding—knowledge—and fear of the Lord, and that leaves us with the middle two—counsel and might—that, as I said, connects up with the sweetness and the mightiness by which Jesus Christ is our wisdom, by which his providence rules in the context of the world.

So again, we can just do an overview today of what wisdom is, but this text, the central text from Isaiah, helps us to put this stuff together, and it reinforces what the antiphons say to us. We can see that the church got it pretty good in the antiphon about Sapientia that we just read, or sang, during “O Come, Emmanuel”—that God creates and sustains things. And so we’re not just talking about the beginning of the world, but we’re talking about the sustenance of the world as well.

And we’re talking about how the world can be understood both in its individual elements, connecting those elements up, and then getting into the flow of the wisdom that oversees all of this stuff, which connects up with the fear of the Lord. And that in this wisdom, the Lord Jesus Christ speaks in both a sweet and a mighty fashion.

Now, we’re supposed to be the wisdom of God as well. Wisdom is given to us. We’ll see that in a couple of minutes from other texts. But this means—this is significant for us. This is who Jesus is, but it’s also describing who his bride is and what we are to become more and more. And so we rejoice today in the coming of wisdom and the coming of an understanding of facts, a linking of the facts together, an understanding of their flow in terms of the providence of God over created history.

And we rejoice in that. We give God thanks for the coming of Christ who is our wisdom. But we also, then, in addition to this Gospel—that wisdom is with the world now in a heightened sense—we want to respond to that by recommitting ourselves to be wise people, to be able to put data points together and understand them. But then beyond that, to be able to apply them in the context of a world, of a life that’s well-ordered and is wise from a perspective of a heavenly perspective.

This also means that if Jesus speaks to us by the Spirit both in a sweet way and a mighty way, it means that’s how we should be as well. For many years, when I counsel dads or other people who have to speak truth to a situation that might be difficult, you know, an expression I’ve used for years is: firm with a smile. So you want—you don’t want to, you know, and what we tend to do is go into one ditch or the other. We’re so mighty that people have lost a sense of the sweetness or the firmness or the smile part of it, or we’re so smiley that we’ve lost a sense of the might and authority by which fathers must rule in families and in other places as well.

So what this tells us is that as a wise people, this is who we should think of ourselves as being. We are people that speak in a sweet and mighty way. So Isaiah 11 reminds us of this essential character of wisdom.

This is kind of reinforced by looking very briefly at James 3. In James 3, verses 13 to 17, turn there if you would please. James 3 in your scriptures, verses 13-17. And what we read there: in verse 13, “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.”

So right away, as James tells us about wisdom, it’s linked to conduct. We think of wisdom as the fool on the hill, the wise sage who knows everything but isn’t speaking much. But remembering that Isaiah 11 says that at the heart of wisdom is counsel, right? And strength. So counsel and might. Wisdom is known by its conduct according to James 3.

Now, the opposite of wisdom is given in verse 14: “If you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.” For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing is there. Wisdom is found in community and found—that’s why it’s linked to counsel and might and works—because wisdom is found in the context of community, not being self-seeking, but seeking the other. And of course, if we think of Jesus as our wisdom, that’s exactly what he did. He came not to be served, but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many.

And then we have a designation in verse 17 of the wisdom that’s from above: “It’s first pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, without hypocrisy.”

Now, those seven characteristics also form an ABCDBA structure—a structure that draws us to the middle. Wisdom is pure, being without hypocrisy. The first and seventh things in the list. It’s peaceable, without partiality. It brings together the world without making—without being partial in its understanding of things. It produces peacefulness, true peace and order, not being given to partiality.

It’s gentle and full of mercy and good fruits. Gentleness, while it primarily may make talk about a characteristic of our character, gentleness means ready to serve, able to do works, quick to help others. That’s the idea of gentleness. It doesn’t just mean, you know, kind of a guy that’s all gentle and soft and never does anything. That’s not what gentleness is in the scriptures. Gentleness is working gentleness, and it’s a working gentleness that actually then becomes full of mercy and good fruits in its pair or its match.

So there’s these doublets again, and that means at the heart of this description of the wisdom from above is what? “Willing to yield.” Now, the idea here is wisdom rules, or wisdom is a ruler, but wisdom is a ruler who is willing to yield. He’s easy to be appealed to. Easily appealed to. You see, and I think this has this same kind of connection, this connotation, that there’s counsel and might. There is this again, sweetly and mightily. Wisdom is the way wisdom works. And so when we speak as wisdom into a situation, we don’t want to be perceived as all authority and no appealableness, so mighty that we lose the sweetness of the counsel of wisdom.

And we don’t want to be perceived as being so sweet that you know you’re not willing to yield if you let everybody else decide what happens, don’t bring your position, authority, wisdom to the table. So, husbands, you know, are you willing to yield? Good masters in the workplace, are you willing to yield? Do you have authority, but exercise it in this sweet fashion of counsel that the Lord Jesus Christ represents to us in these two matchings?

One other quick point about James 3: the seven characteristics there, I think, connect up with the seven days of creation. And we won’t spend more time on that except to say this: the middle of the seven days of creation is the rule of sun, moon, and stars. He puts rulers in the earth to reflect his light, the Shekinah glory, which brings peace and order and beautifulness to the world, in the Lord’s day. And the center of that is the fourth day—sun, moon, and stars—as rulers specifically designated as that in Genesis. So again, we rule at the center by being willing to yield.

So again, the “O” antiphons have it pretty good when they talk about a wisdom that speaks in both a sweet and a mighty way.

I thought of Anselm. Our church is in the Anselm Presbytery. And I thought of Anselm again with this sermon. Anselm was an important historic personage of the past, and he’s known for many things, but he’s only known—he’s only has one song or poem of his that’s extant, or that we still have with us. And I did this several years ago at Reformation Night when we talked about the life of Anselm. But let me just read you Anselm’s only song given to us:

“Jesus, as a mother, you gather your people to you. You are gentle with us as a mother with her children. Often you weep over our sins and our pride. Tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment. You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds. In sickness you nurse us and with pure milk you feed us.

Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life. By your anguish and labor we come forth in joy. Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness. Through your gentleness we find comfort in fear. Your warmth gives life to the dead. Your touch makes sinners righteous. Lord Jesus, in your mercy, heal us. In your love and tenderness remake us. In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness for the beauty of heaven. May your love prepare us.”

What a beautiful poem and song! Anselm was known primarily as articulating why Jesus had to come to earth, why the incarnation was necessary. Why did Jesus become man? Well, he came as man to take upon himself our sins and to satisfy the divine justice of God. So Anselm was no softy. He understood the justice of God as requiring the death of Christ for us. He understood the mightiness of wisdom, but clearly he also understood the gentleness of wisdom.

We had an interesting meeting Friday night—small group of men’s meeting. All my rowdy friends have settled down. I guess we don’t really have big groups anymore. But the older fellas that are there, we end up around 9 or 9:30, and it’s not quite the way it used to be in the early days of RCC, but it’s still able. And we discussed the role of women in the church.

You know, it’s interesting to me that God has our church, in his providence, become part of Anselm Presbyterian and have to focus on the life of Anselm, and then as a church that likes poetry and art and song, we’re drawn to the one song of Anselm. And what are we drawn to? Jesus’s motherhood. And it seems odd to us, but of course he’s building off a Gospel text here—that Jesus said that Jerusalem, I would gather you as a hen gathers its chicks. Jesus compares himself to a mother, and other such references in the scriptures.

And as much as we want to make sure that we support the order, the wisdom of male leadership in the home and in the church, we must be ever so careful to avoid the ditch of either encouraging our men to think that somehow they’re not to act as part of the bride of Christ with gentleness and sweetness as well as mightiness.

And may we also not give the false impression to the women in our church that somehow we disdain their abilities, that they’re second-class somehow and can’t do things. There are very few things that women can’t do in this church. Very few. Just a couple. And those reasons—the reasons for those distinctions—have really nothing to do with women’s intellectual capability or ability to give sound wisdom and counsel. None of that really. There’s representational stuff in worship, I think, that’s bound up in that, and which we can’t get into today.

But the point I want to make here is that if we’re thanking God for the wisdom of Christ, these two texts we’ve just looked at remind us of the correctness of the antiphons—reminding us that wisdom is sweet as well as mighty. And Anselm’s song is a reminder to us of that, that Jesus Christ is sweet and mighty. And women in our lives are a reminder to us of that as well, of the sweetness that accompanies the power of God.

In Isaiah 63, verses 8-10, we read: “For he said, surely they are my people, children who will not lie. So he became their savior. In all their affliction, he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and in his pity, he redeemed them, and he bore them and carried them all the days of old.”

What a wonderful picture of what Anselm wrote about! This is Jesus. This is our wisdom, and our wisdom has that kind of incredible fatherly, motherly care of us. And may the Lord God grant each of us in our displays of the characteristic of wisdom to be in like way.

I learned this text last night from my wife, who’s a well-ordered, wise woman. I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes—orderliness. But she’s a well-ordered woman. And as part of her order is she reads the Bible every day of her life before she goes to bed. And well, last night, as she was reading her scriptures, this is where it happened to be, and she told me she loved this verse, and I had her read it to me.

Well, it fits so well with what we’re talking about today—this great sweetness.

Now, the next verse reminds us of the mightiness as well. Verse 10 says: “But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. So he turned himself against them as an enemy and he fought against them.”

So, you know, there is this two sides of the coin thing—sweetness and mightiness. We don’t want to overbalance on the sweetness side so that we don’t, as fathers, turn against—if necessary—our own children, or turn against congregants who are in rebellion, or turn against employees who are not acting in a proper way. That mightiness is there, but it’s said in the context of the fatherly care, the sweetness of Jesus as well.

So these are aspects of wisdom that we can see from these first two texts.

The next text I want to read has to do with is from Proverbs 8. And one thing that surely wisdom does is discern things. Wisdom has a prudence to us. The antiphon ends by saying, “Come to us and make us a prudent people. Give us prudence that we can live our lives in relationship to this wisdom.” And prudence is understanding the times in which we lived.

In Proverbs 8, wisdom is first of all described as a woman. So, building on what we just said, in Proverbs 8, wisdom is the woman—the good wife, the good woman—crying out to the simpleton. The way the harlot tries to allure men, the good wife cries out. Wisdom throughout the book of Proverbs is this woman. And so this is a reminder to us as well of what we’ve just said—the importance of the feminine aspect of wisdom.

It’s a woman. And specifically, Proverbs 8 indicates a woman who has a well-ordered house. She builds her house, the house is ready, she cries out, she invites people into this well-ordered house in which she’s prepared a feast. And so the church is a representation of wisdom—or to have well-ordered worship services. The order of your life is pegged to 11:00 every Lord’s day morning. This is where you are. And soon the sermon is over and we have a meal together and we have the Lord’s Supper first.

So, Wisdom cries out to you every day from the hill, the high hill in Proverbs 8. The bells ring and you come, and wisdom begins to order your life. And wisdom is this woman, the church crying out. And this woman is a representation to you of what your life should be like. It’s well-ordered. And the meal here is well-ordered. And your home is to be well-ordered. And your soul—the external order of our lives—that is wisdom, I think, according to Proverbs 8. This external order of our lives is to be an internal order as well. There’s a rightness to the world.

Proverbs 8 also talks about creation. The wisdom was there. Wisdom says, “I was there before the Lord made the foundations of the earth.” And the language goes on to speak a creational language. Creation is filled with the wisdom of God.

I was out last night at midnight feeling the cold air and then hearing individual leaves drop—not because there was any wind. There was no wind, but the coldness, I think, releases them. They die, they fall to the ground. A lot of leaves to rake. Thanks so much to the Kings Academy kids for helping me with my raking my leaves this last week. But I’ve still dumped some myself.

And you know, there’s a beauty to leaves. There’s an old song by Van Morrison when the leaves come falling down in September, or in our case October and November. There’s a beauty to it. I had grandkids over raking with me, and oh, this is a lot of work. Well, yeah, but it’s a good thing to do—to enter into the orderliness of the seasons of God. The leaves come, they give us protection from the heat, and then they die away and they give us back the warmth of God through bare trees now to our house in the wintertime.

And there’s a seasonality. There’s an order to this. Wisdom is in the created order. And the order, the season, the created order has seasonality to us. You know, I talked a couple weeks ago about considering—you know, Jesus. That’s what we’re doing in these “O” antiphons. We’re considering who our Savior is. We’re to consider nature and think about the created order. And Proverbs 8 tells us that one of the things we’re supposed to observe in nature is this orderliness, a seasonality, a flow to the created order that we’re supposed to enter into.

It’s good to rake leaves. It’s good to bring orderliness out of the leaves that God has brought down. They’re entering into his orderliness.

So there’s this well-ordered situation, and that is to be part of our souls. It’s not just exterior to us. It’s part of who we are. There should be an orderliness to our souls.

I don’t think—I think well, I should put it this way: I think that because we tend to move away from seasonality, we have no longer developed well-developed time patterns and orderliness to life. Industrialization, modernization, the kind of world we live in now—it’s good data, it’s good technology, but our job as Christians in part is to bring them into the orderliness of what the well soul and the well-ordered Christian life is to be like. What we find ourselves is that we’re giving way to all these impulses. You get an email and you immediately want to respond, and the whole orderly thing is—it gets taken out. Used to be once a day you’d get mail, and that would be the time you’d read it, particular time in your day. So our lives have become less ordered externally, less creational in that way. And I think, as a result, there’s increasing anxieties, depressions, difficulties with people’s interior souls. Our souls have lost their orderliness.

And part of the way of getting the orderliness and wisdom of a well-ordered soul back is producing well-ordered lives. Proverbs 8 tells us that. A well-ordered life listens to the voice of our wives. By the way, you know, the wise person listens to wisdom, which is a woman. And there’s a wisdom to that. And we’re to order ourselves the way the created order is. There’s seasonality to it. There’s an order to it. And our soul should be that same way.

We can look at what’s happening in the world around about us. And right now particularly, people feel a disorientation. I was talking to David H. who brought me to church this morning, and he said, you know, it’s almost like you get that vertigo thing right now. You sort of know you’re on the edge of some big hill. We don’t know what is going to happen in the next few weeks, months, or year, but you sort of get a sense of “whoa”—this could be really different. A shift, some sort of sea change seems to be happening.

I thought of the words of Leonard Cohen. I quoted this verse right after Clinton was inaugurated, thinking of the ascension of Clinton to the presidency. And there’s a song called “The Future” by Leonard Cohen. And here’s some of the lyrics:

“Things are going to slide in all directions. Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore. The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul. When they said repent, repent, I wonder what they meant.”

And that’s repeated then in the chorus: “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, has overturned the order of the soul.”

And we thought that was coming about in spades with the ascendancy of Clinton. And now some people feel very disordered about the state of our souls, our lives, our economy as we slide into the next president.

Just a couple of brief thoughts about the election, by the way, before we move from Proverbs 8 into 1 Corinthians.

Here’s a different take on it. There were two men running for president, and one man’s Christianity was a very visible part of the campaign. One man had written about the importance of the church in his life and actually was pretty well thought of, at least by some—that the church informed his desire to seek wisdom and social organization of the place in which he lived. One man spoke about the need for social justice the way the prophets have, and one man, you know, while it could slip into a kind of—and I’m actually, it was mostly an unhealthy striking out at people above people in station—still there is a sense in which clearly there has been abuse. There’s been rich people manipulating and rigging the system for their own advantages in terms of the economic crisis. And one candidate talked a lot about that, almost from more of a biblical social justice prophetic phrasing.

And one man was the tax cutter. Now, that man in all these cases was Barack Obama. He was, I think, perceived by most people who thought of the thing as more of a Christian. I mean, after all, Obama—we all know that he went to church at Reverend Wright’s church. We don’t like the pastor, but we know he went to church a couple of times a month for 20 years. His kids were baptized, etc. We don’t know anything about John McCain’s church attendance, and he made really very little profession of any kind of faith as it relates to anything.

And so I mean, from one perspective, yeah, difficult times are coming. And I’m not trying to take away that, but what I am trying to say is the nation, while it’s post-Christian—it is post-Christian—and it continues to look upon civil leaders with some connection to Christianity the way the present president has. And its application to what the person does.

Now, you know, it’s status to the right of us, status to the left of us, and that’s a real problem, and you’re going to have to prepare for that. But don’t get so despairing of what has happened here. Mr. Senator Obama had to run as a conservative, fiscal conservative, in order to get elected. Reagan won from that perspective, and the country didn’t strike out and act in an anti-Christian fashion. In fact, you could say that the election was kind of somewhat Christian.

Now, it’s interesting that if you look at the statistics of people that attend church weekly or more than once a week, some 40% of those people voted for Obama. Where is the church? If the church is related to people that attend church—and I think it is—then we could say nearly half of the church voted for the existing guy.

So, I think partly what this tells us is that part of what is prudent and wise about discerning what’s happened is that we have to bring a better educational—we have to bring the prophetic witness of God’s word and his law and what he says about civil government and property and education and all that stuff to the church. The church is still voting in a somewhat Christian fashion, but the church no longer understands what Christendom is all about. It doesn’t understand a biblical approach toward property or education or anything else. That’s our job. We can bring the wisdom of God—that of God’s word and his authority and his law—hopefully in a smiling way, the way Reagan brought his messages—in a way that is winsome to people. But that’s what we need to do.

Okay. Now the other side of it is bad times are coming with or without Obama and Kulongowski. Bad times are coming financially. But particularly because of Obama and Kulongowski, you have to understand the wise man understands what’s happening. And prudence understands that we’re going to be in for one very difficult economic time, folks. There’s just no way around it. Obama will likely not increase taxes from my perspective, but he will certainly increase a great deal of government control and spending. And that’ll have a short-term help, but a long-term bad effect on the economy. It’ll make it worse the way that probably Roosevelt made the Depression last a lot longer than it should have.

And statewide, Kulongowski can’t use debt. States have to balance their budgets. So Kulongowski will definitely increase taxes. He announced a plan just a week ago for transportation that’ll increase gas taxes, triple car registration fees, etc. Taxes will go up in Oregon. Again, there’ll be difficult times for businesses because businesses might be taxed more.

The end result of all this is that it’s a triple whammy going on for us here: the economy, and the orderliness of God shaking out this debt from our lives, and then two Democratic regimes in the state and the federal government. And the end result of all this is that you must be wise and prudent.

As we move into the holiday season, it doesn’t mean having to spend a lot of money. The best Christmas gift, or at least one of the best ones our family ever got, was the year we had no money or very little money. And for all of our kids, they got a joint gift. We spent a hundred bucks on a trampoline. And that thing, you know, continues to be used 15 years later by our grandkids. It’s a gift that kept giving, as they say. You don’t need to spend a lot of money. Some of the most valuable Christmas presents I’ve ever received are the ones that are with me when I put on my slippers at night and walk around the house, or in the morning I think of, you know, my daughters. Joanna and I think Lana also gave me a pair of slippers. When I put on ties, I think of my children. Small things, small gifts, homemade gifts are good ones.

There’s a prudence. We must, as a congregation, be wise and prudent and understanding the facts, interpreting them correctly, and understand that for some families here, it’s going to mean unemployment in the next year or two. For all of us, it’s going to mean us all trying to help step up and care for one another as a community. And for every one of us, it should mean a reduction of spending, a ringing out of debt in our own lives if at all possible, and a provident budgeting perspective on the future.

Proverbs 8 tells us that there’s this orderliness, and an orderliness to our soul as well.

My wife’s been reading this book to me. It’s called “Sanctifying the World.” It’s about Christopher Dawson, who was the preeminent Roman Catholic historian of the last century. It’s interesting. He had a perspective of education and history called “Homo Religiosus”—which sounds a lot like “Homo Sapiens.” The man is first and foremost a religious being. The subtitle of this book is “The Augustinian Life and Mind” by Christopher Dawson. And so this talks about Dawson’s work and writings.

Dawson and some friends have a group of writers formed a club in the ’20s called the Order Men, and they produced a publication called “Order.” Now, at the same time, there was a radical group called the Bloomsbury Group—D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf—other radical sexual libertines and foolish people. Romans 1 says the foolishness—they thinking they were wise, they became fools, and they start doing all kinds of weird, twisted stuff. That was the Bloomsbury group. And the other group that was also meeting at the same time was Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s the Inklings—which was radically conservative and somewhat reactionary, people might say.

In opposition to this, the Order Men of Dawson’s group—who are all Roman Catholics—they thought the need, as I’ve just talked about, was to bring back wisdom and orderliness in terms of people’s souls and their lives. And they actually embraced the creational aspect—God’s providence in bringing new art forms into being, for instance. So rather than react back and just want Reformation period art, they said, no, new art is, you know, part of the providence of God, and we want to embrace it, but we want to Christianize it, to sanctify the world. That’s the title of the book—an Augustinian perspective on what God has brought into pass through his providence. And our job is to bring—is in wisdom—to use these things and to order our lives. And so Dawson and his group put out a publication for, I think, just a year or two—a magazine called “Order.” And this was the whole point of their book—was that, you know, we need—or their publications—we need to see a Christendom that is a well-ordered society based on not the retreat of Christians from culture but rather taking our Christianity into various cultural and political aspects.

Order was defined as that which presents itself—the magazine is that which recognizes the specific end or purpose and places itself in its proper sphere in the divine economy. So by “order,” what they meant was we recognize that God has ordered all things. He’s created all things. Proverbs 8—wisdom—has created the world and orders it correctly. And so we want to know our place in the scheme of things, assume our place with a thankful, sanctifying relationship to whatever place we’ve been given—high or low—in the created sphere, to recognize orderliness.

Their masthead was a quote from Aquinas. Aquinas, writing in his argument against the Muslims, said this: “According to established popular language, which the philosopher considers should be our guide in the naming of things, those are called wise who put things into right order and control them well.” Who put things into right order and control them well. This is what wisdom is according to Aquinas. And as I said, if we look at these summary texts from the scriptures—Isaiah 11 and Proverbs 8—this is the same thing we see there: that wisdom created and orders all things correctly. And we are to be wise in seeing our place in that and ordering our lives.

So here’s what it comes down to. The cash value of this is you can be wise people tomorrow. You can order your life in a little more orderly fashion. Cleaning your house is not insignificant. You see, that’s the point of the Order Men—was to bring back a perspective to Christendom that the simple thing of ordering the house correctly is part of the wisdom of God. It’s a small thing—whether or not you pick up a dish you just ate off of and put it in the dishwasher or on the kitchen counter. But it’s an orderly thing. And we cannot expect our souls to be well-ordered and wise in some spiritual biblical sense if we don’t do the things, the simple things that God has given us to do in an orderly and thus wise fashion.

Jesus is ordering the world, and we’re to order our lives, and we’re to apply order.

This is a wonderful time of year to get back into the habit of family devotions, family worship, regular times at the table. Some of you never left the habit; some of us have. Well, Advent’s a time when we start doing these things again. You know, we have these seven “O” antiphons—a way to structure your week coming up to Christmas. As an example, the CRC—I’ll be having copies of this next week. The CRC, Randy Booth, asked various men to write one-page devotionals for the Advent season and the twelve days of Christmas. So I was one of the 25 or 30 men that did this. And that’s now available to you to use as a daily devotional guide.

You know, Doug H. has that little Advent book. We’ve got an old Lutheran book that we found copies of still printed that we used to use years ago with the kids. Well, to sit down at the table together—either before, after, during, or in whatever time period—as a family and to order your family correctly, bringing to bear some element of scripture in the context of your day. You see, this is wisdom. It’s that simple. It’s ordering your life in its small details in a way that’s pleasing to God. And this is a wonderful time to make a commitment to orderliness.

The blizzard of the world overturns, as Cohen says, the order of the soul. The order of the soul is restored as we see our places in the creational aspect that is wisdom. As we try to order our lives in the same way that we see Jesus ordering the leaves falling, growing a seasonality to things. And so that kind of external placement of order, I think, will result in a proper ordering, a reordering of our soul in opposition to this world as well.

Finally, in 1 Corinthians 2, the last text I want to look at very briefly, we see Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2 says: “I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

So the wisdom of God is Jesus Christ and him crucified. It’s the wisdom of God that Paul pits in opposition to the wisdom of the world. It is a wisdom that’s sweet and mighty. It is mighty, but it’s paradoxically mighty. The wisdom of God is Jesus Christ and him crucified. It’s paradox. And so wisdom understands that wisdom rules and has strength as it enters into the kind of self-sacrificial labors of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So 1 Corinthians pits the wisdom of the world—excellency of speech, persuasive speech—against the simple fact of Jesus Christ being preached and him crucified.

“I was with you in weakness, in fear, in much trembling. I know he was with them in wisdom.” In other words, I mean, Jesus was wise and weak. While weak, “My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

So, see, the Holy Spirit is the source of our wisdom, bringing us the spirit of Christ. Christ—and it’s the spirit of Christ and him crucified—but it is at the same time paradoxically the spirit of power and might. “That your faith should not be in the wisdom of man but in the power of God.”

So wisdom is powerful, but it’s powerful as it embraces, understands that we’re not relying upon great eloquence but rather the simple message of Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Verse six says: “However we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age nor of the rulers of this age which are coming to nothing.”

Look at the wisdom of Mr. Paulson. I hate to be critical of him, but the wisdom of TARP came to nothing within days after it passing. You know, one day Paulson was on his knees literally before Nancy Pelosi begging for the recovery of these toxic assets and money—700 billion—to do it. And within literally days, less than a week, Paulson’s wisdom had become nothing, and that program was totally jettisoned. And now a whole new deal is being used, and people don’t know what the heck they’re doing with that money.

The wisdom of this age is coming to nothing. What we need is Treasury Secretaries, presidents who will, in front of the people of the nation, cry out for wisdom from God and from his word in terms of the financial state of our country.

The wisdom of this age comes to nothing. “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordered before the ages to our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

So this wisdom is for our glory. If you want to be glorious, considered weighty a person of weight and personage—be wise. It’s the wisdom that’s supposed to give us glory, but it is the wisdom that is knowing the reality of Christ crucified and the simple truth, the simple ordering of our lives. This is our glory. It is the glory of a man or a woman to bring order by putting away a dish or by diapering a child. That is God’s glory, his weight to us. Those actions are the answer to the prayer that God would grant us the wisdom of the incarnate Christ in the ordering of our lives and the ordering of our souls and of our family. This is what Paul tells us. This is the wisdom of God.

“Verse 12, now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches—comparing spiritual things with spiritual. The natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord that he might instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

We have the mind of Christ through the indwelling Holy Spirit of God. And we don’t rely upon external power, supposed wisdom of this world. We don’t—it doesn’t keep us from speaking forth truth, from rightly ordering our lives, from speaking the truth of God’s wisdom into our situations in a sweet yet powerful way, paradoxically strong. And this comes to us by the Holy Spirit. It’s foolishness to the world. It may seem foolishness to you that such a simple thing as ordering your life correctly can result in the flow of wisdom in the context of this world. But that’s just what God says.

God says that wisdom has come, that the first creation brought about by wisdom brought about an orderliness to it. And the second creation, the redemption from the fall of man, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ who is wisdom—God says this is the wonderful blessing. The first great antiphon reminds us of the first thing that we seek and which we give God thanks for—coming and then seek in our day and age: the wisdom of God, the right ordering of our lives in all things based upon the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and his word.

May the Lord God grant us lives this week that do not grieve the Holy Spirit. That through our sin we don’t obstruct the work of the Spirit. When we do so, we do so to our own shame. The wisdom of God is paradoxically glory. And we do so to our own weakness. The wisdom of God is paradoxically strong.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the orderliness of the world. Help us, Father, to order our lives, our external life, the order of our soul—to seek it from you, Lord God. We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ who is our wisdom. We thank you for his gentleness and yet his strength. Help us, Lord God, to be that kind of gentle, strong person.

As we come forward and bring you, Lord God, our tribute, we come forward consecrating these and asking from you this good gift that you would give us wisdom. Make us a wise people, a well-ordered people in our families, in our workplaces, and in our communities.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.