Proverbs 8:22-31, Wisdom’s Pedigree!
March 29, Proverbs 8:22-31
John 1:1-4 “These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God” (Rev. 3:14).
Wisdom’s Pedigree!
This is a vital topic and merits a fuller treatment here because of what is at stake. The personification of Wisdom has been “the battleground of controversy since the days of the Arian heresy” (Perowne). The Lord possessed me. It is over the interpretation of the word possessed that the battle still rages.
- The Problem Restated: Derek Kidner put it: “The important and keenly-debated question arises: Is Wisdom here conceived as a hypostasis (i.e., an actual heavenly being) or as a personification (i.e., an abstraction, made personal for the sake of poetic vividness)?” The Arians [who deny the deity of Christ, and therefore, the Trinity] understood possessed to mean created, following the Greek (LXX) not the Hebrew, and “thus they degraded Wisdom to the level of a creature but they did not doubt that this created Wisdom was a real being or person. Modern critics know that if we are to be guided by the clear, certain sense of the Hebrew, we must read possessed and not created, and they admit, without difficulty, that the Wisdom is uncreated by, and co-eternal with the Lord Jehovah. But they resolve Wisdom into an impersonal and abstract idea or quality” (Liddon, The Divinity of Our Lord, p. 61f). Dr. R. L. Alden, seems to prefer the Arian position, “God needed her to help him in the creation of the world, so he created her first, long before anything else came into being”! Confusing, certainly! Created, yet uncreated, eternal yet not eternal, a person, yet not a person!
- The Problem Resolved: “It must be a perverted imagination that can suppose an attribute here. So glorious are the rays of eternal supreme Deity, distinct personality, and essential unity, that the mysterious, ever-blessed Being – the Word, who was in the beginning with God, and was God – now undoubtedly stands before us” (Bridges). E.W. Hengstenberg (1802-1869), a faithful German scholar, dismisses the objection that in Proverbs Wisdom is introduced poetically as an attribute of God. He wrote: “Opposed to such a view is the fact that what is pronounced here of the second Person of the Godhead sharing in the creation of the world, coincides with the distinction occurring elsewhere (in the Angel of Jehovah) between the hidden God and His Revealer. Add to this that it could not be declared of Wisdom, as an attribute of God, that it had been formed and brought forth from eternity.” T. T. Perowne gives his view on this vital issue. “All theological questions apart, it is impossible to understand the word, whatever rendering of it we adopt, as indicating that Wisdom ever had a beginning, or was ever properly speaking created. Wisdom is inseparable from any worthy conception of Him who is the only wise God (1 Tm. 1:17), and therefore is like Him from everlasting to everlasting (Ps. 90)… Possessed, most accurately, represents the original.” The Hebrew word properly means to acquire, and so to possess, and therefore, lends itself readily to the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son, even as Col. 1:15 declares the absolute Pre-existence of the Son.
Thought: “No man ever thought too much of Jesus Christ” (J.C. Ryle)
Prayer: “O make me understand it; help me to take it in.”