Oh, the Depth: The Wisdom of God

Every man who has fished these waters knows the feeling. You are drifting the sound on a falling tide, watching the depth finder tick along. Eight feet. Ten. Twelve. Then the bottom drops out from under you and the number jumps. The channel. You cannot see it. You cannot touch it. There comes a point so deep the anchor line will not reach it. All you know is that the water beneath your boat just got deeper than anything you brought with you.

That is where the apostle Paul is standing at the end of Romans 11. For three chapters he has been working through the hardest questions a man can ask about God. Why did Israel reject her Messiah? Has God cast off His people? How can God harden some and show mercy to others and still be just? Paul answers those questions with more care than any theologian who ever lived. Then he reaches the end of chapter 11, looks down into the plan of God, and the bottom drops out. He stops arguing and starts singing.

We have spent months in this series looking at who God is. We have seen that God is Spirit. We have stood under His Sovereignty and marveled at His Omnipresence, His Omniscience, His Longsuffering, His Immutability, His Eternity, His Omnipotence, His Holiness, and His Goodness. Ten sermons, and every one of them ended in the same place: a God so big and wonderful He is worthy of worship no matter what. This time we come to the attribute that ties them all together. The Wisdom of God.

The big idea is this: the wisdom of God is too deep to search, too high to counsel, and too rich to repay, so the only fitting response is worship. Three truths carry us there, following the movement of the text.

The Depth of God’s Wisdom

Notice how verse 33 begins: with an exclamation. “Oh.” Paul has been reasoning for eleven chapters, and reason has carried him as far as reason can go. What comes out of him now is a cry.

This is the doxology that crowns Romans 9 through 11. As long as those three chapters sit in your Bible, they are a death blow to Arminianism and a death blow to replacement theology. Remember what Paul has just walked through: God’s electing purpose in choosing Jacob over Esau, vessels of mercy and vessels of wrath, the partial hardening of Israel, the grafting in of the Gentiles, and the promise that all Israel will be saved, because the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. God has not replaced Israel and He has not abandoned her. He has woven Jewish unbelief and Gentile mercy and Israel’s future restoration into one plan, and no man alive would have drawn it up that way. That is the plan Paul is looking down into when he says “Oh, the depth.”

He piles up three words: riches, wisdom, knowledge. God’s riches are the vast resources of His grace, the mercy He shuts up sinners under disobedience in order to show. His knowledge is His perfect grasp of every fact, every heart, every outcome. We covered that when we studied the Omniscience of God. His wisdom is something more. Wisdom is knowledge aimed at an end. It is God ordering all things, every hardening and every softening, every fall and every rescue, toward the exact goal He intends. Knowledge sees everything. Wisdom does something perfect with it.

Then come two verdicts on that wisdom: His judgments are unsearchable, and His ways are unfathomable. Both words come from the water. Unsearchable means you cannot trace it out to the end. Unfathomable means your line will never touch bottom. A fathom is a measure of depth. Paul is telling you that you can let out line all day, all your life, and the wisdom of God keeps going down past where your spool runs out. Maybe you have never dropped an anchor that ran to the end of its line and never snagged bottom. But you have cast a line into open water and had something grab hold and run with it, and run, and run, until the line gave out. You will never have enough line to stretch across the ocean. You will never have enough anchor to reach its bottom. We know more about space than we know about our own oceans.

Be careful here. Unsearchable does not mean unknowable. God has revealed His ways in this Book, and Paul just spent three chapters explaining them. You can know the wisdom of God truly. You just cannot know it exhaustively. There is a difference between wading in the ocean and draining it. So wade into God’s Word. Get into it. If that does not excite you, search your own heart and ask why you do not want to know God more.

Where does this land on you? It lands right where God’s providence has confused you. The diagnosis you did not expect, the door that closed after you prayed it open, the trial your family walked through and still cannot explain. You have asked why, and heaven has not handed you a full accounting. Verse 33 tells you the reason. God has a plan. It just runs deeper than your sounding line. When you cannot trace His hand, this verse gives you something better to do than demand an explanation. It gives you a depth to worship over. This is why Job could still worship after he lost it all. This is why the martyrs could worship with the flames coming up over their bodies, why saints met in caves and moved from place to place while blood was spilled across Europe, and worshiped anyway. Study church history. It used to cost something to serve God. Name the thing you have been demanding God explain, the one you keep turning over at two in the morning, and every time it rises up, do not hand God your questions first. Hand Him verse 33. Pray it back to Him out loud: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.” Turn the demand into a doxology.

The Independence of God’s Wisdom

So God’s wisdom is deeper than we can search. But someone will ask, could we not at least help Him with it? Could God use a little advice? Verses 34 and 35 answer that question, and the answer humbles us further.

Paul asks three questions, and he pulls them straight out of the Old Testament. That matters. When the apostle wants to exalt the wisdom of God, he does not invent new language. He reaches for what God already said about Himself. The first two questions echo the prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah asked that question of a nation headed into exile, a people about to watch everything visible fall apart, and God’s answer to their fear was His own incomparable wisdom. Nobody informed Him. Nobody briefed Him. Paul takes up the same question. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Answer: no one. Who became His counselor? Answer: no one ever has, because God has never faced a situation He did not fully understand. Whatever is going on in your life, and whatever is going on in the life of the church, there is no emergency situation room in the throne room of heaven.

Think about what a counselor is. A counselor supplies what the decision maker lacks. A king keeps counselors because a king has blind spots. God keeps no counselors because God has no blind spots. He never called a meeting before He laid the foundations of the earth. He has never once said, “I had not considered that.” Every plan God has ever made was formed in the solitude of His own perfect mind before a single creature existed to offer an opinion. I think that is why God made man so late in the creation week. The earth, the grass, the animals, all of it was very good before man ever drew breath, so that we would understand that God does not need man. It did not take man very long to mess it all up, either.

The third question, verse 35, reaches back to God’s speech at the end of Job.

That question flattened Job, and it should flatten us. Who has first given to Him that it might be repaid? If any man had ever put God in his debt, God would owe him. Wages, Paul would say. But no man has. Every breath you drew this morning was borrowed. Every dollar you have ever given to the church was His before you gave it. You cannot make the first move with God. He always moves first, because everything already belongs to Him.

Put the two truths together. God needs no counsel, and God carries no debt. His wisdom is independent. He does not consult, and He does not owe.

Here is where this cuts. Every time you second-guess the providence of God, you are applying for the position of counselor. When you say “if I were God, I would have done it differently,” you are submitting your resume for a job that has never been open. If you serve God expecting Him to owe you a smoother life for it, you have verse 35 backwards.

Examine your prayers this week. How many of them are worship, and how many of them are advice? There is a way to pray that pours out your heart and trusts His wisdom, and there is a way to pray that hands God your plan and asks Him to sign it. One of those is faith. The other is counsel.

The Purpose of God’s Wisdom

So His wisdom is too deep to search and too high to counsel. That could leave us cold, a God remote and unreachable. Verse 36 will not let us stop there. It tells us where all that wisdom is going, and it ends in glory. Three prepositions, and they carry the whole universe.

From Him. God is the source of all things. Not one atom exists that He did not call into being. We confessed this when we studied Genesis 1 and John 1. In the beginning, God. Creation did not emerge and God did not find raw materials lying around. The Big Bang and millions of years are fiction, a fairy tale. The Bible is true from the very beginning. All things are from Him.

Through Him. God is the means of all things. He did not wind up the world and walk away. Every moment of history moves through His sustaining hand. Every falling tide falls through Him. The breath in your lungs right now passes through Him. Providence is not God watching. Providence is God working.

To Him. God is the goal of all things. This is where the wisdom of God has been driving all along. Creation, providence, election, redemption, the hardening of Israel, the calling of the Gentiles, the salvation of every sinner who believes. All of it runs to one destination: the glory of God. His wisdom is depth with a direction.

So Paul lands where every study of God’s attributes must land: “To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” Paul did not tack that on as a polite sign-off. The doxology is the point of the passage and the point of the universe. A God this wise, this independent, this complete, deserves glory that never runs out. Notice, Paul does not say the glory will be His someday. Glory belongs to Him now and forever, whether men give it or not. Our worship simply agrees with what is already true of Him.

This verse reorders your life. If all things are to Him, then your marriage is to Him. Your work is to Him. Your homeschool table, your paycheck, your fishing trips, all of life. Not just your Sunday but your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and even Saturday too. You were not saved so that God could improve your story. You were saved so that your story could be swallowed up into His. Ask yourself plainly: is there a room in your life you have marked off as yours, where “to Him” does not apply? The text knows no such room. All things.

Paul began these three chapters with sorrow, grieving over his kinsmen according to the flesh. He ends them singing. What changed? Not his circumstances. Israel was still hardened when he wrote verse 36. What changed was where he was looking. He stopped staring at the problem and looked down into the wisdom of the God who holds it.

That is what this whole series has been doing to us, sermon by sermon. Every attribute we have studied has made God bigger and made our troubles smaller by comparison. His wisdom gathers them all up. The sovereign God wields His power with perfect wisdom. The omniscient God turns His knowledge to wise ends. The good God does us good in ways too deep to trace. You will never have a God you can fully explain. What you have is better: a God you can fully trust.

The Gospel

Hear where the wisdom of God shines brightest. Creation displays it gloriously, but the cross displays it most.

The deepest of all God’s unsearchable judgments is this: that the holy God would justify guilty sinners and remain just while doing it. No counselor proposed that plan. No man would have dared. God took the worst act in human history, the murder of His own Son, and made it the salvation of His people. The wisdom of the world looks at a crucified Savior and calls it foolishness. God looks at it and calls it His wisdom, because in Christ, mercy and justice met without either one bending.

If you are without Christ, verse 33 should trouble you. His judgments are unsearchable, and one of those judgments is coming for you. You cannot counsel your way out of it, verse 34. You cannot pay your way out of it, verse 35, because you have nothing to give that He does not already own. Your works cannot put God in your debt. There is one refuge from the judgments of God, and it is the Son of God, crucified for sinners and raised from the dead. Come to Him. Repent and believe, and the depth that terrifies you becomes the depth that saves you.

Believer, take the comfort. The same unsearchable wisdom that planned your salvation before the foundation of the world is the wisdom governing your hardest providence right now. The God who was wise enough to save you at the cross is wise enough to be trusted with the thing you cannot explain. From Him your salvation came. Through Him it is being kept. To Him it will bring glory forever.