For the past four months, both my church and my neighbor’s house have been under renovation. The scope of work on my church is fairly simple: new parking lots, new landscaping, new carpet, new paint, new fixtures, and some light remodeling. The scope of work on my neighbor’s house is more extensive. He’s demolished everything to the foundation (except one wall) and started over.
Watching these two works in progress, I’ve come to realize that I don’t know how to do a lot of stuff. Oh sure, I can read a book or deliver a speech with the best of them. But I have no idea how to rewire an entire building, frame and install doors, float concrete, and texture walls. And that’s the short list derived from the work on my church. If you include the work on my neighbor’s house, the list of my ignorance becomes very, very long.
Proverbs 24:3-4 speaks of the skills necessary to build a house:
By wisdom a house is built,
and through understanding it is established;
through knowledge its rooms are filled
with rare and beautiful treasures.
Notice three important words in these verses: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. These words primarily describe practical knowledge, not theoretical knowledge—how to, not what or why. Interestingly, Proverbs 3:19-20 use these same three words to describe God’s skill in creating the universe.
By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations,
by understanding he set the heavens in place;
by his knowledge the deeps were divided,
and the clouds let drop the dew.
If you think it takes skill to rewire a building, try wiring an electron! If you think framing a house is hard, trying framing a mountain! Floating concrete is child’s play compared to floating a galaxy in the vast expanse of empty space. And texturing a wall is nothing like texturing the rings of Saturn.
Construction workers have skills that I might learn, but God’s tradecraft is proprietary. He alone possesses the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to build the heavens and the earth. He alone knows how to create.
But since we are created in God’s image, we have a measure of his wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. In Exodus 31:1-3, God says of a man named Bezalel: “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts.” (In Hebrew, these are the same three words as wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.) Bezalel constructed the tabernacle at which Israel worshiped in its sojourn through the wilderness. (He also establishes the point that construction work can be a spiritual gift, not just a form of employment.) According to 1 Kings 7:14 (ESV), Huram of Tyre was “full of wisdom, understanding, and skill”—again, the same three Hebrew words—and he used that skill to construct the temple in Jerusalem.
Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge: The skills God employed for creation are the skills we must employ for living. Only fools try to build a house any other way.
GeorgePWood.com 