Day 1 The Extraordinary Wisdom Of God’s Salvation Plan
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgements,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
Romans 11:33
For eleven chapters Paul has given his account of the gospel. Step by step he has shown how God has revealed His way of putting sinners right with Himself, how Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification, how we are united with Christ in His death and resurrection, how the Christian life is lived not under the law but in the Spirit, and how God plans to incorporate the fullness of Israel and of the Gentiles into His new community. But before going on to explain the practical implications of the gospel, Paul falls down before God and worships. He is overcome by God’s grandeur.
The passage (11:33-36) falls into three strophes: 11:33 containing three exclamations about God’s wise plan; 11:34,25 featuring three rhetorical questions that emphasise human inability to understand God’s ways; and 11:36 containing a declaration about the ultimacy of God that calls forth a final doxology. This arrangement of the material, the short, roughly parallel lines and some unusual vocabulary suggest this is a hymn. Paul probably composed it himself, borrowing extensively from Old Testament wisdom traditions, apocalyptic and Hellenistic Jewish teachings.
The opening is an exclamation: ‘Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgements and his paths beyond tracing out!’ (11:33). The beginning ‘O’ is an emotional expression of awe, stimulated by Paul’s thinking of the ‘depths’ of three divine qualities, each communicable attributes of God (aspects of God’s character that have partial parallels in human beings and that involve God’s interaction with His created world) – wisdom, knowledge and judgement.
This opening sentence can be understood in one of two ways. Paul might be stating one truth, relating to the wisdom and knowledge of God together. If this is right ‘riches’ tells us more about ‘the wisdom and knowledge of God.’ The NIV has taken Paul’s wording this way where ‘riches’ describes God’s wisdom and knowledge: ‘the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!’ (11:33). Another understanding is that Paul is celebrating two things: on the one hand God’s riches, and on the other, God’s wisdom and knowledge (RSV: ‘the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God’).
God’s wisdom is an extremely rich biblical theme. Paul is no doubt thinking of God’s wisdom expressed in His plan for the salvation of humanity. ‘Knowledge of God’ clearly means God’s knowledge of us and not our knowledge of God.
The second and third lines are both introduced by the exclamatory ‘How.’
‘How unsearchable his judgements,
and his paths beyond tracing out!’
These two exclamations have the same syntactical structure and although we miss this in our English versions, both begin with individual Greek words (the first for ‘unsearchable’ and the second for ‘beyond tracing out’) which are very similar sounding. ‘Judgements’ here are not God’s judicial decisions but His “executive” decisions for the direction of salvation history (Psalm 19:9; 36:6; 119:175). These ‘judgements’ are unfathomable, unsearchable. His ‘ways,’ (essentially the same meaning as ‘judgements’), are ‘beyond tracing out.’ So these second and third lines extol God’s providential control of salvation history as something beyond human understanding.
Paul is not expressing a sense of frustration here. What he is saying is that confronted with the mysteries of election and the future of Israel, the truth of these matters can be known finally only by God Himself. Paul’s praise is not motivated so much by the hiddenness of God’s ways but by the admittedly partial revelation of those ways to us.