What is the Wisdom of God?
A friend of mine, in explaining some of his hesitations with Christianity, recently asked me a great question. Why had God chosen to make himself manifest as the man Jesus on Earth 2000 years ago and not today? Wouldn’t it make more sense to come into a time where the world is not only interconnected, but proof would be readily available? A miracle could be digitally recorded as physical evidence. The heretics who would deny God could be shown as materially incorrect. This was a great question that I could not fully respond to at the time, and I could only defer to an answer that didn’t satisfy someone who did not accept the Christian worldview already. That answer was this, “I don’t know why then was chosen, but it has to do with the faith of man and the wisdom of God.” Unappealing as that answer may be to a non-Christian, it also is not a complete picture for the believer as well. Our human faculties and reason are tools that can be used to get closer to answering these questions, though there is no concrete answer that man can insert in place of the wisdom of God. With this in mind, and after several months of pondering, listening, and reading, I will attempt to provide a better answer to this: “Why would the wisdom of God place the coming of Jesus in the year 0 as opposed to today?”
We start on the battlefield of Troy. The rage of Achilles has decimated the sons of Priam at the gates of the great city. The Trojan king, in his grief, begs Achilles for his son’s body and a proper funeral. Achilles, the greatest warrior of all, relents and allows for the funeral rites of Hector. The poem ends with King Priam and Achilles weeping on the battlefield in a shared moment of grief at the cost of their war. The epic doesn’t end in the triumph of the Greeks, or even the destruction of the East. Only grief is left. The gods had decided that Troy would fall. Man is doomed to follow his cruel fate, to his death, as the gods play with them like toys. When Achilles is seen later in the Underworld on Odysseus’s journey home, he tells him that he would trade all of his glory for one more second of life, even as a slave.
The old world comes to a head at this moment on the Anatolian plain. Their gods were at best were powerful, though not all-powerful, and mischievous, conniving, jealous lords that were constantly competing against each other for the favor of men and to interfere in the lives they had. The powers of small gods that mirror the complexities of humans. Even Zeus, their king, was not omnipotent. With these gods, man can strive as hard as he can for it to truly be for nought. Such is Achilles, even the greatest among you is doomed to this same fate as he is cast down into the underworld. All the strife in this life is truly worth nothing and meaning ends upon death. At the end of a great battle, there is only despair because death and destruction rule this world and possess no mercy or grace even for the victor.
Man emerged from a cave even before these battles in ancient Greece and started to worship the gods. The sun, the moon, and all the other natural things were clear and common gods. The premise was that these gods were only reflections of man's heart. These gods were fickle and cruel. Eventually, we corrected them into a pantheon of greatness to balance their tempers and create a system that made sense as it makes sense to man. As we develop kings and kingdoms and empires, so these gods held dominion over some natural science or region. As man did, the god could reflect into a greater light.
However, at the end of this. All that is still left is the heart of man, albeit reflected into a larger-than-life god, a superhero at best. A god that is only a man at its core. The Iliad is the place to reveal the ultimate endpoint of this ideology. The most advanced civilization in the ancient world. Poetic and intellectual as they were realized that the end of the great battle was not in triumph, but in grief because of what still came beyond, sacrifices and successes that blew away like dust in the wind. The pagan worldview reaches its apex here, as all these religions of old eventually will.
By contrast, the Jews are the chosen people whom the true, monotheistic God, Yahweh, is introduced. He teaches them that they are a people separate from the rest because of their devotion to him and him alone. He is more powerful than any pretender to his true throne. As humanity is steeped in this idea through the Jews, God teaches them increasingly over time. He is patient and He is fierce. He wields true power with true consequence. He does not always act in ways that humans can understand immediately or ever, as His ways are truly above ours. His motivations are not the simple desires that the rain gods or the sun gods have. He doesn’t demand blood; He requires faith. This is shown early on with the patriarchs in Abraham. He shows mercy, not to gain favor with us, as we can give him nothing, but only out of his love for us. The moment on the plain in Troy, as the gods laugh at the destruction of all, is contrasted by the moment of manifestation of God, who is so far above our ways that He sends Himself down to us. Fully God, and fully man.
He comes at the exact right time in the course of human history that our minds might be ready to receive Him in His providence. Of course, he is denied by the world, but the spark is kept alive. He gives us that light to carry on into life. He gave us enough time to see the weakness of Zeus and the folly of the bloodthirsty demons. He comes after we have been steeped in his teaching for centuries. Centuries marked y failure to keep his word, but centuries of at least a kernel of faith, nonetheless. A testament to his mercy. He comes to us in wisdom and asks us to follow that which we cannot fully understand. The price of destruction and death is understood, and He comes to defeat it and show us that he makes all things new. The true God comes to life to conquer death. The fake gods inflict death to conquer life.
Still, the question remains why He would choose to come then, even if it made sense thematically, if there was no one to definitively record the truth. No real-time photos, and no interviews. There is an inescapability that God requires of the believer: faith. There is no answer that can truly satisfy and give the scientific mind a foolproof answer; that is the nature of the belief that is required from God. He has equipped us with everything and requires us to choose him, and He does not make us do so, though he yearns for that. We have the entire corpus of human knowledge at our fingertips, and it seems it is perhaps harder to make this choice than it would have been 2000 years ago. By design, knowledge is not the deciding factor for accepting God. He does not seek a conversion only of your mind, but also of your soul. A whole disposition that is not so easily swayed as the mind is by facts and figures. Faith and love of this God is his goal, not simply the acknowledgement or belief in Him. The concept is perplexing, but can make more sense when applied to the individual life.
The first time that you met your future wife, did you love her? The first time that you met the person who would become your best friend, did you know? The first time you tried out a job, would it become your vocation and passion? The answer is most likely no to all of these fields. The truth in these scenarios, for most, is revealed over time. We might be stuck in a job that is terrible for years, only to have a great opportunity present itself only after and because of the hard work we toiled in. Why was it not revealed to us to go immediately on this other path? Why did we have to work for years in what felt like a fruitless and draining endeavor to get to this better place? Perhaps, we weren’t ready. Perhaps if we had had this opportunity earlier, we would not have succeeded, or not appreciated it. Things have a tendency to come when we need them. Why didn’t you marry your wife, or even want to, after your first date? The depth of the relationship was not yet there; you must have suffered and grown together to the point where you knew with all certainty that this woman was your wife, and you could be ready to take on the world for her. How much in this life do we suffer as we hope against hope to make it through situations? However, often by the time we reach the end of a journey, we see the machinations of a wisdom larger than our own that shows us that our suffering was redeemed, and perhaps things happened in the time they were supposed to. This is the best analog, better than any historical or thematic exploration, that can be applied to this question of God’s wisdom in Jesus' coming 2000 years ago, as opposed to the present day. God’s wisdom is above ours and can only be seen forward in blips and when reading backwards across history. Our experiences in our lives and the movements of our soul lend greater insight to this fact than dogma and possess a key to unlocking that relationship with the One who possesses all wisdom.