Luke 7:35

CHILDREN OF WISDOM

‘But wisdom is justified of all her children.’

Luke 7:35

Our Lord is discussing the criticisms which the Jews of His day made upon Himself and upon John the Baptist. Whatever they might be, whatever they might do, it seemed that neither our Lord nor the Baptist would be free from censure. And our Lord accounts for this by describing the Jews of that generation as entirely wanting in seriousness. He compares them to children playing in the public thoroughfare. And in the eyes of these Jews the Baptist and the Divine speaker Himself were like ill-natured playfellows who did not enter into their games, or who, at any rate, would not take the parts assigned to them. And the Jews condemned them for contradictory reasons—John for not being what our Lord was; our Lord for not resembling John. It could not be otherwise. That generation of Jews would know no better, but the true children of the Divine wisdom would know that both John and our Lord were right in adhering to their different modes of life. Wisdom, He says, is justified, is done justice to as being wisdom, by all her children.

It will be useful, perhaps, if we consider this saying of our Divine Lord somewhat more in detail.

I. We trace the truth and the applicability of the principle of this saying, first of all, in the different fields of purely human interest and study.—Each subject that engages the attention of man has a wisdom, that is to say, governing principles and methods, modes of thought and inquiry, in short, a philosophy peculiarly its own. Those who have mastered this wisdom, even in part, are prepared for results which are startling or absurd in the eyes of others who are strangers to it. In this sense each kind of human wisdom is justified by its children, and by its children only.

II. And next we see the truth of the principle in the region of human character.—In good men there are constantly features of character which those about them cannot account for. They are reserved or they are impetuous; they are high-spirited or they are depressed; they deviate in many ways from conventional standards; they baulk expectations; and they are pronounced morbid, eccentric, inconsistent, as the case may be. They act when we expect them to hold their hands; they are quiet when all seems to call for action. We perhaps say that they are unintelligible, and so it may be that they are to us, only because we are not in the secret of their characters. For each character, like each pursuit, like each art, like each science, has a wisdom of its own, its own governing principles, its own ruling instincts, its own constant tendencies. Only when we enter into this can we hope to understand it, only when we place ourselves at the point of view of the speaker or the agent who perplexes us, only then do we see consistency in motive where else so much seems to be so unaccountable and so strange. Here, too, Wisdom is justified of her children, while the rest of the world finds fault with her. That which enables us to do justice to character is sympathy with it.

III. And once more our Lord’s words hold good of the Christian creed.—Here, too, it is clear, upon reflection, that Wisdom is justified of her children. Let us remark that the word wisdom, in our Lord’s mouth, had especial significance. As He pronounced it His more instructed hearers would have recognised an ancient, and I may say a consecrated, word. In the book of Proverbs the Wisdom of God is no mere quality or attribute, corresponding in God to what would be wisdom in man. It is more than an attribute: it is almost what we should call in modern language a person. Read the great appeal of Wisdom in the first chapter of Proverbs; read the sublime passage in the eighth chapter, in which Christianity has always recognised the pre-existence of the Eternal Son. This Wisdom of God, dwelling with Him from all eternity, being Himself, and yet having a personal subsistence of its own, was, we may be sure, in the thought of our Lord when He used the word. It was the Wisdom of God, as He elsewhere says, who sent to His people the prophets, the wise men, the scribes; nay, it was this Wisdom which was incarnate in Jesus Himself. No longer something abstract and intangible, this Wisdom had taken flesh and blood; it had entered the world of sense; it had displayed itself in acts which struck upon the eye, and in words which fell upon the ear; this eternal Wisdom, born of the Virgin in the fullness of time, crucified, buried, risen, ascended, is at once the teacher, and in the main the substance of the Christian creed; and of this, too, it is true that Wisdom is justified of her children. When men nowadays reject Christianity, they reject it, as a rule, bit by bit. They first find one truth incredible, then another; until at last, so far as their minds are concerned, the whole edifice of faith is crumbled away.

IV. There are two practical lessons to be borne in mind.

(a) One is that nothing is so fatal to the recognition of moral and religious truth as a scornful temper. Scornfulness blinds the eye of the soul with fatal completeness. Its telling epigrams, ‘He hath a devil,’ ‘Behold a gluttonous man,’ may command a momentary applause, but they are dearly paid for.

(b) Secondly Wisdom may and must be won by prayer. It is the first of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit which God the Father gives to them that ask Him. ‘Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding.… Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord and shalt find the knowledge of God.’

—Rev. Canon Liddon.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

PERVERSENESS AND SYMPATHY

I. We have here a contrast presented.—There is

(a) On the one side, the perverseness, the waywardness of man; his disposition to cavil at all God’s appointments, especially at those which concern religion, revelation, and the soul; his readiness to complain of each as inappropriate, inadequate, inconclusive, or unreasonable; his proneness to say to each, If it had been thus, and not thus, it would have been more satisfactory, more impressive, or more convincing; I should have felt it so, and God, if He had sought my good, would have thus arranged it.

(b) On the other side, there is the sympathy of wisdom with wisdom; the kindred and affinity which exists between the voice of God in His Word and the voice of God in the heart and conscience of His creatures; the certainty that what God speaks, and the way in which He speaks, the persons by whom and the circumstances amidst which He speaks, will commend itself to those who are wise indeed, wise in the humility of a true self-knowledge, wise in the genuine insight of an illumination from above.

The waywardness which is here expressly rebuked was exhibited in the manner in which the Jews of that time received the mission of the Baptist and the mission of the Saviour.

II. There are those who judge in much the same manner now of God and His revelations. If He says what we know, or think we know, already, it is superfluous; we do not want a revelation to teach us that. If He says one word beyond what nature or reason might have taught us, it is irrational; the word must be brought to the bar of a pre-existing faculty within, and whatever that faculty does not instantly ratify must be condemned as a fancy or an imposture. The real dislike is to revelation; the real repugnance is to the idea of being taught anything from above; the ground of the refusal of this and that as an item of truth or as a mode of demonstration is, in fact, an overweening estimate of the power and sufficiency of man, insomuch that, whether the heavenly music be gay or grave, it will alike in either case be unresponded to; whether the messenger be the Baptist, he will be said to have a devil, or the Saviour, He will be accused of companionship with the sinful.

III. Here, also, Wisdom is justified by her children.—They whose hearts are softened by a true self-knowledge and enlightened by a real communion with God, they who are wise in that wisdom, of which the condition is humility and the beginning the fear of the Lord, will see wisdom in that which to the caviller is folly, will recognise a Divine harmony where all is discord to the self-confident, and own an abundance of resource worthy of the All-wise and the All-merciful in that variety of evidence which affords to different minds, and perhaps to different ages of the world, their appropriate as well as conclusive reason for believing. The very things which others calumniate are to them indications of wisdom. Where they do not see this they yet trust. Not blindly, nor in the dark, for they know Him Whom they have believed, and judge of that which they discern not by that which they have already known. Thus they live, thus would they die. They cannot part with what they have till they have found something better.

Dean Vaughan.

Illustration

‘The original expression lies in a very beautiful order: “Wisdom is justified of her children—all of them.” It is laid down, then, that until you stand in a certain relation to God, you cannot “approve” Him in any of His ways—because you cannot understand Him in any of His attributes. And the experience of the whole world will confirm this truth. What a really unread page is the whole page of nature—what a riddle is Providence—what an inscrutable mystery is the method of Divine grace in saving a sinner—what an unreality is the inner life of a spiritual man to any one in whom there has not yet taken place a certain inward transformation—a teaching, purifying, assimilating process. Hence every heart, in its natural state, is always mistaking God; always misjudging Him in everything God says, and everything God does. And the misconstruction is always deepening, just in proportion as the subject rises. In the outer circle of God’s works, there is ignorance; and in the inner circle of His glorious Gospel, utter blindness and universal distortion. Just like the children in the market-place, in the music of God’s love, they see nothing but melancholy; and in the solemn denunciations of His wrath they find no fear.’