INTRODUCTION

WHY CHRISTIANS ARE FOOLS

If I knew it would require dropping out of school, I probably would have said no. While in graduate school (but not for graduate school), I vowed to read the entire Works of Jonathan Edwards in a year.1 Yes, the entire works! Stamped on the inside cover of the first volume was this inscription:

These volumes are the gift of John H. Gerstner to Douglas O'Donnell who has vowed to God that he will complete their reading within one year of receiving them. Soli Deo Gloria!

That was the deal: Dr. Gerstner gave me the books for free; I vowed to read them.

When the books came in the mail, I opened them with eager excitement. Free books! Free Edwards! Freedom of the Will! I was converted to Christ when I was nineteen and converted to reading shortly thereafter. My job helped form and feed this new obsession. I worked as an overnight security guard at ServiceMaster's corporate headquarters. Every three hours I did my rounds. This took about ten minutes each time. The rest of the time—other than eating leftover shrimp in the kitchen from some fancy corporate party, playing intercom games with the other security guards, strumming my guitar, and doing homework—I read. For four straight years for at least four hours a night, I read dead theologians. I read Augustine. I read Luther. I read Aquinas. I read Calvin. I read Chrysostom. I read Wesley. I read Boethius, for goodness sake. And, yes, I read America's most renowned theologian.

My fellow security guard, the son of an Iowa farmer, called me a "plower." He likened my reading habits to his father's work. "You plow through books slowly but surely, like a plow overturning the soil," he would say with some affection and subtle admiration. "Next thing I know, you're done with this huge book."

Plower or not, half a year into reading Edwards the plow got stuck. I realized that at the pace I was going—the only pace I could go with such complex and interesting material—my vow would be impossible to keep. Something had to give: the rounds? The shrimp? The intercom? The guitar? School?

School! I became a grad school dropout in order to remain a full-time security guard/Edwardsian reader. With a thin yellow highlighter wedged atop my left ear and a red pencil in my right hand, I read, marked, and learned. I underlined and asterisked every important sentence, and then, in the back of each volume, I scribbled my favorite quotes. I finished on December 20, 1994, which I know because I joyfully inscribed it on the front plate beneath Gerstner's Soli Deo Gloria.

Just the other day I pulled these volumes off my shelf, and I relived that year for a moment. Like rereading the Bible that I first read cover to cover and marked up with obnoxious colors and mutilating markings, these volumes revealed so much of my early Christian life. In those back pages, I saw how much I valued Edwards's majestic view of God, salvation, and the church:

God is the highest Good of the reasonable creature; and the enjoyment of Him is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.

The church is the completeness of Christ, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.

Surely, the more the sinner has an inward, an immediate, and sole, and explicit dependence upon Christ, the more Christ has the glory of his salvation from him.

The man Jesus Christ, who is the head of all creatures, is the most humble of all creatures.

I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul . . . is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material world.

To take on yourself to work out redemption is a greater thing than if you had taken it upon you to create a world.

The gospel of the blessed God does not go abroad begging for its evidence, so much as some think: it has its highest and most proper evidence in itself.

There is not so much difference before God, between children and grown persons, as we are ready to imagine; we are all poor, ignorant, foolish babes in His sight. Our adult age does not bring us so much near to God as we are apt to think.

That final quote I liked best. (It has five stars next to it.) And today I still like it in its depiction of how we relate to, explain, and apply the Wisdom Literature of the Bible. In all my study of the Christian faith over these last twenty years, and especially in my recent work on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, I find Edwards's thought here instructive. I have gained enormous insight about God, his Word, and his world, and yet I know that I know so little. I have plumbed the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God only to learn that I am still but a poor, ignorant, foolish babe in his sight. I have climbed the mountains of his unsearchable judgments and inscrutable ways only to find myself not as near to God as I am apt to think.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

The Wisdom Literature is helpful in humbling us before God. It is more helpful, I dare say, than any other part of the Bible. These three books put us in our place. We can dig deep into the recesses of human knowledge. We can mine diamonds from the caverns of human existence, experience, and observation. But we cannot find wisdom, that wisdom which is heavenly—"from above"—from the one who "is above all" (John 3:31). We have "earthly wisdom" (2 Cor. 1:12). But the Lord alone has heavenly wisdom. He alone is wise (Job 28:23–27; 37:1–42:6).

God's wisdom wearies us if we try to grasp it through humanly means (Prov. 30:1b). Knowledge of the Holy One cannot be found within (vv. 2–3). Knowledge of the Holy One cannot be obtained by climbing Jacob's ladder to peek our heads through the clouds (v. 4a). We cannot wrap our minds around the one who "wrapped up the waters in a garment" (v. 4c), who "gathered the wind in his fists" (v. 4b). We can only see flickers of light in the night sky. Streaks of lightning that dance in the storm. And such light—momentary light—comes only through open eyes and hands and hearts, and with faces to the ground.

"Where shall wisdom be found?" (Job 28:12b; cf. v. 20). That is the foundational question of the Wisdom Literature. And Wisdom Literature answers: "The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom" (Job 28:28). This wisdom from above comes only "to those who take refuge in him" (Prov. 30:5b).2 This wisdom only comes to those who echo John the Baptist's words about God incarnate: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).

So the Wisdom Literature teaches us that the door to the kingdom is open to those whose childlike faith understands how the wisdom of God comes only from the fear of God. But it also teaches us about the gospel, illustrating the wisdom of God in the sufferings of our Savior.

At least that's how Paul saw it. The knowledge of God's plan of salvation—the mystery of the gospel revealed (Eph. 1:7–10)—is found in Christ and his cross. Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom (Col. 2:2–3), brings "wisdom from above"—God's peaceable, gentle, merciful wisdom (James 3:17) down to earth. And such wisdom was demonstrated through Christ's growth in wisdom and his teaching of wisdom, but ultimately through his sacrificial death.3

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart." Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:18–24)

Christians are fools. That's Paul's argument to the Corinthians. That is, those who trust that God through the crucifixion made Christ "who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (v. 30), appear foolish to the unwise—to the overly-wise-in-their-own-eyes—world. Yet he is no fool who abandons human pride and power to find the "secret and hidden wisdom of God" (2:7) now revealed in "Christ and him crucified" (2:2). The seeming folly of a crucified God is God's wisdom perfected. That is where wisdom is ultimately found.

Christocentric Wisdom

In his commentary on Isaiah, the church father Jerome wrote, "To be ignorant of the Scripture is to be ignorant of Christ."4 Jerome was right. If we know nothing of the Word of God, we will know nothing of the Son of God. Put positively, the more we know the Bible, the better we will know the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Jerome's saying, however, can be reversed to make just as pointed a point: "To be ignorant of Christ is to be ignorant of Scripture." For isn't this the claim of Jesus himself? In John 5:39–40 Jesus rebuked the Pharisees with these words: "You search...