“I will bless the Lord who counsels me—even at night when my thoughts trouble me. I always let the Lord guide me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices; my body also rests securely. For you will not abandon me to Sheol; you will not allow your faithful one to see decay. You reveal the path of life to me; in your presence is abundant joy; at your right hand are eternal pleasures.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever thought you knew how to do something, only to have someone come along and give you counsel on it? Worse yet, was their counsel right and wise and revealed that you didn’t know as much about doing whatever it was as you thought? And if that seems like an oddly specific situation, all I’ll say is this: more times than I can count. This is bad enough when it’s doing a task that isn’t ultimately all that significant. It’s many times worse to find out you don’t know as much as you thought when it comes to doing life itself. Yet this lies at the heart of the Gospel. God knows how to do life better than we do. The Advent season is a reminder of when God revealed definitively that He knows how to do life better than we do. If we will take His counsel, His presence is the reward. Let’s talk about it.

We recognize that things aren’t like they should be. Everyone knows that. Okay, maybe not everyone. There are a handful of folks across the world who have bought into the utterly despairing position of secularism that things simply are, that there are no oughts, but in their most honest moments even these folks acknowledge that people don’t do the right thing on more occasions than not.

I had a long-running series of conversations in my comments section with a gentleman who was utterly convinced that the only real “sin” in the world (he would not have used that word, and would, in fact, have considered that word part of the problem) was religious people telling others that they were sinning. He directly and specifically accused me of child abuse numerous times before I finally acknowledged that our conversations were not going to go anywhere, and banned him permanently from commenting. His explanation for the reason the world wasn’t like it should be was religion, but he nonetheless agreed with religious people that the world isn’t like it should be.

Over the course of human history we have proposed all sorts of different reasons and explanations for why this is the case. Some of them have been pretty straightforward. Others have been pretty far-fetched. Either way, we have long grappled with how to explain something we know is the case without understanding exactly how or why it is the case.

Some of these explanations have largely absolved humanity from any meaningful guilt in the problem. The Greeks blamed the gods themselves. Upset that Prometheus had given us fire, the Greek gods played a mean trick by creating an exceedingly beautiful woman to attract a man into marriage, then gave her a jar as a wedding gift that she was told to never open. The gods also created her to be very curious. Eventually she opened the jar just like they planned, and when she did, she released all the various evils into the world.

That’s one of the more creative explanations for why the world isn’t the way it should be. While others aren’t perhaps quite so colorful, they often do share in common the belief that the problem isn’t us. It’s not our fault. We are basically good. We are basically innocent. The problem is out there.

Other explanations, however, have placed the blame squarely on humanity. Judaism was the first ancient religion to do this. We didn’t come to the decision to do other than we should have done entirely on our own, but the decision was ours nonetheless. We were responsible for it, and God held us responsible for it. The solution Judaism offered the world was the Law. If people would place their faith in God and keep the law that God Himself had given, things would go well for them.

And, the Law proved itself to be a pretty good solution to the problem…when it was kept. The moral framework offered by the Law of Moses was a vast and dramatic improvement over what anybody else was practicing at the time. It was much, much better than what any other religion offered at the time (and there weren’t any non-religious options available…not that those have proven to be any more developed or enlightened when they have been pursued at the culture-wide level today).

The only problem was that it was hard to keep. In fact, it proved to be impossible for us to keep. Oh, we tried. We tried hard at various times. And sometimes we got into a pretty good groove of keeping it. These times usually came in conjunction with the rise of godly leaders who by their example and position set the tone for a whole culture. Most leaders, like most people, however, didn’t manage to do it if they even tried. So, most of the time we didn’t do very well. Accordingly, the cultural results we experienced weren’t very good.

For all of this, the Law of Moses, given by God, did one thing that was really important. It revealed rather definitively that the problem with the world was not something “out there,” but rather, “in here.” The problem is us. The problem is that we are sinners. We are the source of the brokenness we rage against. In our own wisdom, we thought we could solve the problem by various external constraints on our behavior. But not only did we incorrectly identify the source of the problem, none of our solutions worked. Our wisdom, as it turns out, wasn’t all that wise.

God, on the other hand, saw the problem. He understood the problem. He loved us in spite of being the cause of the problem. And He had a solution for fixing the problem. In order to receive this solution, though, we were going to have to trust in His wisdom rather than ours. And His wisdom was going to be sufficiently different from our own, that this was going to be a challenge. His wisdom involved a baby born to a poor couple living under scandalous circumstances, and who were being hunted down by the most powerful man in the region.

That’s doesn’t exactly scream that it is the solution to what is wrong with the world. But for those who have been willing to trust in it—to trust in Him—they have found over and over again that putting trust in this little baby who grew to be a man who would lay down His life to pay the price for our sins, opening the door to eternal life and the relationship with God we were made to enjoy, sending us His Spirit to make us over in the image of His righteousness over time, they have found again and again that this was exactly what we needed all along. God’s wisdom is the wisest there is.

With all of this in mind, we can declare with David, “I will bless the Lord who counsels me—even at night when my thoughts trouble me.” God gives us wisdom even in our quiet moments when we are trying to work things out all by ourselves. And when we trust in His wisdom, life will be the result. “I always let the Lord guide me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices; my body also rests securely. For you will not abandon me to Sheol; you will not allow your faithful one to see decay. You reveal the path of life to me; in your presence is abundant joy; at your right hand are eternal pleasures.”

May you know that abundant joy and those eternal pleasures as you put your hope in the baby who brought to the world the absurd wisdom of God as you move through this season and beyond.