At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing:
Proverbs 25:2
But the honour of kings is to search out a matter.
The work of growing up into a godly maturity is actually a cosmic game of hide the button. The task of dominion actually consists of men finding out things that God has hidden.
God hides things, and we are to find them. Not only so, but it says that it is the glory of God to hide things. The word for glory there is kabod, which also has the connotation of weight. In English, the word associated with the kings is different, but in Hebrew it is also the same word kabod. It is a kingly glory to seek, just as it is a divine glory to hide. It look a number of centuries, for example, but God hid silicon in the sand, and eventually we found iPhones there.
God hides, and kings find. This means that the pursuit of dominion through a wise investigation of the world God made is actually to aspire to royalty.
So how are we to aspire to this wisdom? Do we go into a corner in order to try to think innovative thoughts? No. It is not a coincidence that this saying is found in the book of Proverbs. The Hebrew word mashal means to “speak a proverb.” But the Hebrew word mashal also means “to reign as king.” The wisdom literature is literature that trains us up into God’s idea of royal wisdom, and this is particularly the case with the book of Proverbs.
And this seems odd to us because the book of Proverbs often seems somewhat straightforward and pedestrian to us. “Don’t cosign a note. Rotate your tires. Change your oil every three thousand miles. Give the hoochy-mamas a wide berth.” We want royal wisdom to be more sophisticated than that. We want royal wisdom to be in alignment with us and our contemporary street smarts.
But the street smart generation that doesn’t want to dabble in such pedestrian wisdom, remember, is a generation that is deep sixed under an oceanic amount of red ink—trillions of buckets of red ink.
