Reflection: The God Who Knows Better (March 11, 2012)

The 3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Cor. 1:18-31; John 2:13-25

"The tragedy of life is that we grow too soon old and too late wise." Benjamin Franklin's adaptation of a Dutch proverb is still true. It seems that it takes most of our lives to reach the point at which we truly know better. Unfortunately, at that stage in life it's too late for us to benefit from our acquired wisdom. Compounding the dilemma, those who could benefit from what we have learned dismiss us as being old and irrelevant. The young are on the same path that the old have journeyed. They think that they know better, but they don't and they can't.

Our earthly experiences with knowing better highlight an even greater discrepancy between thinking we know better and actually knowing better: how we view things versus how God views them. Because our perspective of our experiences, desires, priorities, morals, and values is shaped by the world in which we live, we have developed ideas about what is better for us that are inconsistent with God's Word. When those inconsistencies grow into open conflict between God's wisdom and worldly wisdom, we are prone to think that we know better than God. After all, His Word is very old and it seems to be seriously out of step with the realities of our world. Thinking that we know better, we embrace worldly wisdom to make sense of the origin, purpose, and potential of our lives. In time we discover that the answers of biology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy are weak and foolish compared to God's Word and will. Apparently, the tragedy of our spiritual lives is that we grow too soon old and too late wise.

The good news for us is that it is not too late for us to be spiritually wise. God has chosen "the foolish things of the world" and "the lowly things of this world" and "the things that are not" — He has chosen us — to become wise in Christ. He makes use of all the foolishness of the lives that we lived when we thought that we knew better to demonstrate His wisdom and His power. How He chooses to do this in our lives challenges our trust that He does know better, because the power and wisdom of God is shown in the Cross. In the midst of our struggles with the crosses in our lives we may be tempted to go back to the "wisdom" of the world, but we know that because Christ crucified for us is ultimate display of God's wisdom and power that our God knows better. In Christ, so do we.

Audio file of the sermon based on this reflection