Your Choice: Wisdom, or ...?

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:11] That last verse of what we just sung speaks to the theme today, Your grace in lowliness revealed. [00:00:20] Lord Jesus, we adore your grace in lowliness revealed. [00:00:27] That's the story of the incarnation of the well, the becoming flesh of the Word. The Son of God became what we are, humbled himself to become one of us. Taking the form of a servant, in the language of Philippians 2, takes the form of a servant. [00:00:47] The form of a servant because as the Son of God, he's equal with God, right? He's, well, not naturally a servant. He becomes a servant for our sake, for our salvation. [00:01:01] He becomes lowly. [00:01:04] To be born in a stable and to submit to human parents, that's the humility of our Lord Jesus Christ. [00:01:15] And in that humility, there is wisdom and there is power. [00:01:23] It's the same pattern for us as children of God. [00:01:28] Jesus said that we must become like a child, that we must have faith, like a child. [00:01:36] Involved in that is a kind of lowliness, a readiness to submit to God and to count our own. Understanding as well is not understanding. There are times when my children don't understand what I tell them to do or why. [00:01:57] And so there's something to coming to understand that I want them to understand eventually why I tell them to do what I tell them to do and such. But that doesn't come right away necessarily. And so the first thing, the first thing to learn, the primary thing, is respect and obedience to authority, to parents, to God. [00:02:23] It's the faith that doesn't question first. [00:02:28] Now, that's scary, right? If you have a tyrant, then it's like, well, you might want to start asking questions, that kind of thing. But, well, God's not a tyrant. And we know that because he gave his own Son for us. So we know that we can trust him even when we don't understand what's going on around us. [00:02:50] So faith like a child. We see that pattern in Solomon. [00:02:55] Solomon has this dream, and God offers him whatever he wants. And he can choose. Well, he sort of has two choices. He could choose to increase his power or to seek wisdom. And the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the fear of the Lord. So again, that submissive, I'm nothing, you know, Fill me with your wisdom, God, you tell me. [00:03:22] Yeah, it's kind of like saying, you tell me what I need, God, I don't need to choose any of these things. [00:03:30] Well, God's happy that he doesn't he doesn't choose these things. He doesn't choose long life or riches or the life of his enemies. [00:03:40] All three of those things would increase his power. [00:03:43] And power is useful. Solomon's got problems. [00:03:47] Number one, he's mortal. [00:03:50] That's a problem. He's going to die. So he could ask for long life. That would increase his power. [00:03:58] Riches. There's a lot that he could do with riches. [00:04:03] Doesn't ask for it. That would increase his power or the life of his enemies. Okay, Solomon's got enemies, people who want him dead. And he could ask that God kills his enemies or something like that, that would increase his power. [00:04:19] But he doesn't ask for it. Instead he asks for wisdom. [00:04:24] He puts wisdom above power. And that's what it's like to become children. If we're all supposed to become children in faith in relation to God, then it in a sense means becoming powerless. And depending on God, it means putting wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom above power. [00:04:50] Now, historically, looking at kind of a timeline of the last, let's say 500 years with the Enlightenment and industrialism, and you just kind of take it through to the present. [00:05:08] One way to map that story is like an exponential curve of increasing our power. [00:05:15] And the scientific method has been really good for this. [00:05:19] Rationalism, empiricism, like looking at the stuff of the world and trying to figure it out. We've been looking at the stuff at matter. We've been using telescopes, looking at, using microscopes to understand things in order to increase our power. [00:05:40] That's really useful because we've got problems just like Solomon did. We're mortal. [00:05:49] We need money, so to speak. We've got enemies. [00:05:54] So we've got all these, all kinds of developments, developments that make food easier to grow and to keep and to transport. [00:06:04] That's like riches. I mean, we are rich, very rich in that sense. [00:06:10] No king had refrigeration ever. [00:06:14] Well, they did. It was just really, really expensive. [00:06:19] And yeah, that was a silly comment. They actually did ice and things like that. But yeah, go with it. [00:06:30] So anyway, we are wealthy and we've increased our power by a lot. [00:06:36] And then of course, we're constantly developing new weapon systems and things like that. Like our journey from the sword to the pick. Your modern, let's say nuclear bomb. [00:06:55] That's quite. I mean, that's that exponential curve in power. So we've increased our power. [00:07:03] I think at the same time we've decreased our wisdom. [00:07:08] And you see that in how crazy things are getting in terms of what people will believe today and what truths they'll give up. [00:07:18] So what do we do? [00:07:21] The most powerful, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, he's got a solution. He's working toward AI and he's got his own AI company now, Xai. [00:07:34] And the way that he talks about it is like, well, there are companies making AI, but there's a problem. [00:07:42] Those aren't seeking the truth, they're captured by ideologies. And so Elon Musk is thinking that the way to, the way to move forward safely and to not have AI come back to bite us is to make AI he says maximally truth seeking. We need a maximally truth seeking AI and that will be our best bet. [00:08:10] The only problem is, well, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And AI is this maximizing power, like to the extreme, just building like bigger and bigger data centers and feeding it more and more information? We're building a monster. I mean, that's literally what it is, okay? It's a monster of zeros and ones. It's a monster computer. [00:08:38] It's building power. [00:08:41] In fact, the way that it's talked about is in terms of like, well, we need a whole lot more energy. [00:08:49] Tech companies are building nuclear power plants in order to power this. We are building our power. [00:09:01] But the answer is not simply to train AI to seek the truth, because you and I know that the truth comes well from the fear of the Lord, that the truth has come down to us in Jesus Christ, the light of the world, come to enlighten us. [00:09:22] Power. We've increased our power by, with the scientific method, by examining things and trying to figure things out from below. [00:09:32] And we can keep increasing our power. [00:09:35] Ultimately, that's not going to save us. [00:09:39] No amount of power is going to save us from, well, from death or from the judgment when Christ comes back. [00:09:52] Power helps us. In the short term. [00:09:55] Power could have helped Solomon in the short term. [00:09:58] He could have asked for power, asked for riches or for a long life, and then he would have died. [00:10:05] That would have been over. Or he could have become a tyrant. Instead, he asked for wisdom. [00:10:11] You and I here, we've got problems that more power could solve and we're not going to stop AI that's going to go on with or without us. But we do have a choice of where to place our hope, where to place our faith and our attention and on, on that exponential curve. Things are changing very rapidly today. [00:10:35] It's going to speed up and speed up. What are we going to see in the next decade or the next year. We're at the beginning of the year. What's 2025 going to bring? [00:10:46] We have no idea. [00:10:49] But what ought we to do? What ought our posture to be toward the present and toward the future should be one of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, who is all powerful. He says all power and authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me. [00:11:11] Jesus Christ has all power. And yet you see, as we sang in our hymn actually just now, he hides that power within an earth born form. He hides his all creating light to serve us all. He humbly cloaks the splendor of his might. [00:11:34] Jesus Christ is power. [00:11:37] He is wisdom. How do we get wisdom? [00:11:41] By looking to him in faith, by becoming a child in faith and saying, I don't understand what's going on around me. I don't understand myself. [00:11:54] And I could try and figure it out other ways, but it's not going to work. I need to look to my Creator who's come in the flesh so that we can receive from him, so that we can be enlightened by his all creating light. [00:12:11] That's what we need in 2025, just like Solomon needed in I don't know what year we would estimate BC Nothing has changed. [00:12:24] It looks like everything's changing. It looks like, oh, what do we do? [00:12:30] We're on the brink of whatever. [00:12:35] Just say again. It's not that there shouldn't be people out there developing new weapons systems, that kind of thing, okay? [00:12:43] That's an earthly reality and people need to be protected and that kind of thing. But again, where do we place our hope? You see Jesus there submitting to both fathers. And it's kind of funny because one of them is not his father really, his adopted father. [00:13:01] But there's an order there. He's looking to God, you could say in faith. Kind of weird because he's the Son of God. But he's looking to God in faith, in God as the pattern of our own human nature, as the one in whom our nature is restored. [00:13:20] It looks like weakness. It looks like weakness to the world to place our hope and our attention to find our joy in Jesus Christ. But we know in a hidden way, in faith that it is power. And when Jesus comes back, that power will be revealed, things will be made plain. [00:13:42] In Jesus name, Amen.