Wisdom of God

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

— Romans 11:33

The wisdom of God is his perfection of applying his infinite knowledge to choose the best ends and means, for his own glory. Where God’s omniscience is the extent of what he knows, wisdom directs and uses that knowledge toward its purpose.¹ Scripture calls him “the only wise God” (Rom. 16:27; 1 Tim. 1:17), the one whose understanding “founded the earth” (Prov. 3:19), and whose wisdom is displayed above all in Christ, “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), made known through the church as “the manifold wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:10).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names wisdom among the perfections of God’s one undivided essence, listing it alongside his other communicable and incommunicable attributes: he is “every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory.”² The confession devotes no separate chapter to wisdom as its own topic; its fuller confessional weight instead falls in the following chapter, on God’s decree, where wisdom is what qualifies how God brings his eternal purposes to pass:

God hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby is God neither the author of sin nor hath fellowship with any therein.³

The decree is not simply an exercise of God’s power or will in the abstract; the confession specifies that it is a wise counsel, one that ordains all things without God becoming the author of the sin it ordains, a distinction the doctrine of God’s decree and its own confessional chapter carry further.

Biblical Basis

Wisdom is displayed in creation. “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens” (Prov. 3:19). The psalmist draws the same connection: “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Ps. 104:24).

Wisdom is displayed in providence and the decree. Paul’s doxology over God’s dealings with Israel and the nations, the very text this article opens with, praises “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God,” concluding that “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:33, 36).

Wisdom is displayed supremely in Christ and the plan of salvation. Paul names Christ himself “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), the one “whom God made our wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:30), even though the cross appeared as folly to the world (1 Cor. 1:18). Through the church, Paul writes, God’s purpose was “that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic orthodoxy treated wisdom as a distinct perfection from knowledge, built around an exposition of Romans 11. Petrus van Mastricht devoted a full chapter of his Theoretical-Practical Theology to “The Intellect, Knowledge, and Wisdom of God,” structured as a close exegesis of Romans 11:33-34. He defined this essential wisdom as “a certain peculiar power and perfection of the divine intellect and knowledge by which God knows what methods to use in the unfolding of his counsels and works to exalt his glory as greatly as possible.”⁴ Mastricht then catalogued the spheres in which that wisdom is chiefly exercised: God’s eternal counsels and predestination, the works of creation and providence, the formation of man, the ordering of creatures so different from one another, the work of redemption through the Son and the Spirit, the mysteries of the Christian faith, the defense of the church against her enemies, and God’s governance of individual believers.⁴

English Puritan devotional theology gave the doctrine its longest treatment. Stephen Charnock’s Discourse IX: On the Wisdom of God, an exposition of Romans 16:27 (“To God only wise be glory”), works through wisdom’s manifestation across creation, providence, and redemption at far greater length than any Reformed systematic treats it, including a sustained account of how wisdom governs God’s relation to sin and evil in the world, taken up below.⁵

Particular Baptist systematics carried the same structure forward. John Gill’s A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, published in the tradition that produced the 1689 LBCF itself, devotes a chapter to the wisdom of God, proving it a divine perfection, distinguishing it from mere knowledge, and tracing its manifestation through creation, providence, and redemption in turn.¹

Modern Reformed dogmatics situated the doctrine within the Bible’s own wisdom tradition. Herman Bavinck distinguished the Old Testament’s practical, fear-of-the-LORD-rooted idea of wisdom from the more discursive, theoretical model of Greek philosophy, then traced how the New Testament identifies this Wisdom with the Word himself before it is climactically revealed “in the foolishness of the cross… in Christ… in the church… in all of God’s providential guidance of Israel and the gentiles.”⁶

Objections and Responses

If God is perfectly wise, why does he permit sin and evil in the world at all? Charnock answers that God’s wisdom is not shown by preventing sin’s entrance but by bounding it and turning it to a greater good than would otherwise have existed:

The ordination of sin to good is an act of his wisdom, whereby he doth dispose the evil, overrules the malice, and orders the events of it to his own purposes… he wills it not as sin, but as his wisdom can order it to some greater good than was before in the world, and make it contribute to the beauty of the order he intends.⁷

He points to the cross as the supreme case: Satan’s own scheme to destroy Christ became, by God’s wisdom, the very means of Satan’s defeat and the world’s redemption, so that “the wisdom of God” was seen “in restoring us by methods seemingly repugnant to the end he aimed at.”⁸

Doesn’t calling God “wise” imply he deliberates and reasons the way creatures do, weighing options before arriving at a conclusion? Such deliberation would compromise God’s simplicity, the truth that God is not composed of parts he might lack or gain. Gill answers that God’s wisdom is not a possession added to his essence but is identical with it: “as he is love itself, and goodness itself, so he is wisdom itself; his wisdom cannot be separated from his essence; this would be contrary to his simplicity.”¹ What Scripture calls God’s wisdom is not a process of reasoning toward an answer but his eternal, simple knowledge of the best possible ends and means, described to creatures in terms drawn from their own experience of deliberation.

Related Doctrines

References

John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 10, “Of the Wisdom of God”: “the Wisdom of God… belongs to him as an intelligent Spirit; and is a more comprehensive attribute than that of knowledge; for it not only supposes that, but directs and uses it, in the best manner, and to the best ends and purposes.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 13, “The Intellect, Knowledge, and Wisdom of God,” 302-3. ↩ ↩²
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse IX: On the Wisdom of God,” 498. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God”: “God’s wisdom is especially revealed in the foolishness of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18), in Christ (1 Cor. 1:24), in the church (Eph. 3:10), in all of God’s providential guidance of Israel and the gentiles (Rom. 11:33).” ↩
Charnock, “Discourse IX,” 1:532-33. ↩
Charnock, “Discourse IX,” 1:568-69. ↩