Today's morning insight (and remember these are supposed to be discussion starters, so please feel free to comment, and even disagree - these are really just musings...)
So I've always accepted the idea that personified Wisdom in the Old Testament is a reference to the pre-incarnate Word of God, that is, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. Wisdom is referred to in several places as an agent of creation, and the Word is the agent of creation in John 1:3 (All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be).
I always knew it was somewhat ambiguous and not at all dogmatic, in fact, when I wrote my "Trinity Suite" for my Still Quiet Voice CD, the three songs were titled: The Wisdom, The Word, and The Wind. So there I made Wisdom to be a reference to God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity.
But now I'm rereading the book of Wisdom in the OT in my devotional time, and I've become convinced that personified Wisdom in the OT is primarily a reference to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. I'm only halfway through the book on this go-round, but check out Wisdom 1:5, 6-7, 7:7, 21-27, 8:17, and 9:9-11, 17. And it occurs to me that, given the doctrine of inseparable operation (not to mention the Church fathers' conviction that the Holy Spirit was the Spirit/Wind in Genesis 1:2), the Holy Spirit must also be an agent of creation. So the "wisdom as agent of creation" passages still fit in.
I've always believed that all three Persons of the Trinity are there in the OT (the whole first section of my book Trinity 101 is about this). Now I'm refining that thought to be a bit more specific. Personified Wisdom is the Holy Spirit; the Angel of the Lord (as in Gen 18) is the pre-incarnate Word/Christ; and that could mean that references to "God" (i.e., YHWH or El) are more specifically God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, not the "whole" Trinity. This last point is debatable (and I already know that so great a Bible scholar as Michael Barber disagrees with me, if you know who that is), but I am convinced that's the way to think of it.
So in my forthcoming book, Praying the Psalms (in which I've made new translations of excerpts of the Psalms) I actually went for it, and wherever the Hebrew text has YHWH - which requires a substitution - I decided to go with "Father." After all, Jesus himself gave us this designation for the First Person of the Trinity as the Christian substitution for the Divine Name.
Thoughts...?
I'm back, up and running, and ready to go - I should have a new JOURNEY episode within the next week or so - and because you are my loyal peeps, here is an exclusive, just-for-you, behind the scenes SNEAK PEEK into my new office:
This was for March 24th, recorded for the Ascension App
Thanks for your patience - here is our next installment of The Journey - it's session # 96, but I'm also calling it PART 1 of a "miniseries" on John chapter 6.
Whoever watches it first, please let me know if it looks good or if there are any problems with it - I get through the first two sections of the text on the feeding of the 5,000.
Enjoy!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
