2 Peter 3:15c — Wisdom From God

… with the wisdom that God gave him.

Summary: Understanding wisdom is as important as understanding the many meanings of “love.” 

It would be very easy to look at verses fifteen and sixteen together into one meditation and move on to the last paragraph in Peter’s letter. Yet, there is a link here between Peter and Paul that is both unique and important.

In “2 Peter 3:15b — The Bridge” we looked at the significance of the transition from the Old Testament to the New. Then we looked at the bridge between Peter, a close disciple of Jesus, and Paul, who had never met Jesus in the flesh.

In today’s passage, we have the opportunity to take a closer look at Paul and the “wisdom that God gave him.”

My Webster’s College Dictionary (circa 1991) defines being wise as “having the power of discerning and judging properly as to what is true or right.” The sense of the Greek “sophia” is less clear to me. The impression I get is that wisdom is having enough smarts to defer to God’s supreme intelligence.

Early in his career, Paul was anything but that smart. He put his entire reliance in his sense of personal indignation that anyone should question the Old Covenant. Only when he is confronted by Jesus himself (Acts 9: 1-19) does he finally gain “wisdom.”

Before Paul “got wisdom,” he had been given knowledge. As he explains in Acts 22: 3, “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.” In Acts 5: 34, we learn Gamaliel is a “teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people.”

We learn two things about Paul in these passages. First, Paul was trained by the best teacher Israel had to offer. Second, Paul was not shy. He was “zealous for God” in a way that drove him to get in people’s faces (Acts 22: 4).

God saw that Paul (formerly Saul) had knowledge and courage. What he lacked was understanding and a relationship with his Creator. That was easily fixed…

“About noon as I (Paul) came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, ‘Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?’
“‘Who are you, Lord?’ I asked.
“ ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied.” (Acts 22: 6-8)

Oops.

Getting wisdom requires that be willing to let go of our misconceptions. Letting go of our misconceptions means admitting that we were wrong. We turn from what is wrong to God’s Truth. This is known as repentance.

Once Jesus had Paul’s attention, everything changed. Paul saw all that he thought he knew about being a Jew in a new light. Once he had met the Living Lord, he wanted nothing from anybody else. Suddenly, his “zeal for God” had a new focus. Paul had wisdom.

Application: You can have wisdom, too. All you need to do is defer to God’s supreme intelligence. 

Food for Thought: How do we tell the difference between worldly wisdom and godly wisdom?