Podcast: How to Be Like God without Trying to Be God (Jen Wilkin)

November 04, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

You Bear the Image of God. But What Does That Mean?

In today’s episode, Jen Wilkin uses her biblical wisdom to help us understand what the Bible teaches us about how we, as redeemed creatures made in the image of God, are called to reflect God’s character to a watching world.

In His Image

In His Image

Jen Wilkin

This book by the best-selling author of Women of the Word explores ten attributes of God that Christians are called to reflect, helping readers discover freedom and purpose in becoming all that God made them to be.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:17 - Confusion about Being Made in the Image of God

Matt Tully
Jen, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Jen Wilkin
Wow. I’m glad to be a repeat attendee. Thanks for having me back.

Matt Tully
Oh, yes. One of our favorites and one of the most requested interview guests that we have. Actually, these kinds of interviews, the kind of conversation we’re going to have today where we’re discussing a biblical theme or passage, there’s just something about these that are my favorites. We’re getting into the Bible, discussing what God has revealed to us in Scripture. And no one does that better than you do, Jen. And today we’re talking about one of maybe the most important, most foundational concepts in all of Scripture, namely our creation as humans in the image of God. And my guess is that most Christians have heard that phrase, know that we’re created in the image of God, and have maybe a vague sense of what that means. But I also think that there can be a lot of confusion about just what it means to be in the image of God. So first question: Do you think that’s true? Have you found that to be the case where the Christians might have varying understandings of that or maybe even just don’t really know what we’re talking about?

Jen Wilkin
Absolutely. I’ve probably mentioned this with you before when we’ve had conversations, but one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book and the one that preceded it, None Like Him, is because I’ve tried to encourage students of the Bible to read it first as a book about God—asking first, What does the Bible tell me is true about God?—before we get to the personal I am statements. In other words, look at the God-ward “I am” statements first so that you can then have a right understanding of yourself in light of that. Borrowing from John Calvin, of course, when he says the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand, and there is no true knowledge of self apart from the knowledge of God. And so I think when we hear that we’re made in the image of God, that sounds like a nice idea. It’s like, Oh yeah! I want that. But we haven’t spent a lot of time making meditation on God. And so to be made in his image, we have a shallow understanding of it because we have not given a lot of time to examining and extolling the things that are true about God. And then also it’s like, God does actually seem to be quite different from me in many ways. And that’s true. That’s what I address in None Like Him or the ways that he’s not like us. But then I think sometimes when we get to the part about how we are like him, we can actually turn it the opposite direction and say, Well, he’s just like me. And that is actually not the ideal way to frame up a discussion of image bearing. It’s how do I reflect what’s true about him in limited human form? He is unlimited. I’m limited. So whatever my created form, and I don’t just mean our physical forms, whatever that is communicating about him is doing so in a limited way. It’s expressing the unlimited God in some limited way.

Matt Tully
In so many conversations about the image of God—the imago Dei, as it’s often referred to—in man, we can so often start with God briefly, but the conversation quickly pivots to like, Okay, let’s talk about what that looks like in us. And one of the things I love about your book is that you don’t do that. You really say, All right, if we’re going to understand this, we’re going to look at these ten attributes of God that then we do reflect as we image him. But really it is, first and foremost, a book about God.

Jen Wilkin
Right. What we don’t want to do is say, God is loving. But my understanding of what it means to be loving is based on the way I am loving. We want to say, How does God show up in the Bible as loving, and then how does that inform the way I understand myself to be loving or called to be loving? That’s different. So what you’ll find a lot of times is people are familiar with their own ways of being, and they hear the words that are associated with something that’s true about God, and they’re like, Well, I know those words. I know merciful, I know gracious. And so then we end up not being able to have a transcendent view of grace because we have such an imminent one in the way that we experience it or we live it out. And so often our views on those attributes, or some of them you would just call virtues, have been downgraded so much simply because we only look at them from a human perspective.

Matt Tully
In the book, you point to Jesus’s words in Mark 12, where he’s talking about paying taxes to Caesar and he gets this coin handed to him. And so often we can think about how that passage is just about taxes, or how we honor the government. And there’s something to be said for that, but you really see that passage teaching us something about this concept of how we image God himself. So I wonder if you could explain what Jesus is doing there and how that helps us understand this concept broadly. But before you do that, tell us a little bit about your coin collection.

Jen Wilkin
When I was growing up, my brothers and I had a coin collection, and we just thought we were going to get rich off of this thing.

Matt Tully
You had some interesting coins in there.

Jen Wilkin
We did. We had a St. Gaudens, we had some things that people knew about and that were actually worth some degree of money, but then there were a lot of wheat pennies that we found lying in a drain somewhere. We kept it in this case that was like a shallow case that had had a foam base in it so you could lay the coins in there, and then you laid this glass top over it so that you could see the coins, and they were held steady in the case. And then we had a day where we were misbehaving badly, and our front door had a portal window on it. It’s like a little round window and the rest of the door was solid. And what we thought was funny was—since there were three of us, and this is why I always advocate for having even numbers of children so the teams can stay even, because you’d pick someone who was the odd man out and then you just did something terrible to them to just see what would happen—and we had locked one of my brothers outside. So my other brother and I were inside. And the boys were in middle school, early high school, so all of that adolescent rage is just bubbling in there. And so the brother who was outside was banging on the window, trying to get in, and he broke the window. My mom was not home.

Matt Tully
He didn’t hurt himself, did he?

Jen Wilkin
No, he did not. No, the time that he sat down on a glass vase he did, but that is another story for another day, and it does live in infamy as a story in our family. He did receive a nickname, which I will not mention here. So he breaks the window, and we know my mom’s going to be home in a few hours, and all of a sudden we’re on the same team. That’s what a crisis will do to you.

Matt Tully
You gather together.

Jen Wilkin
And we were like, Well, we can’t get this fixed before she gets home. There was a little curtain on the inside of the window, and so we went and got the coin collection cover and we taped it behind the curtain so that you couldn’t tell that the window was knocked out. And then we gathered up our money—not the money we had collected, but the other money in our piggy banks—and we got the glass guy to come out and replace the window so my mom wouldn’t know. And we didn’t tell her until years later. So don’t be like me.

Matt Tully
I was going to say, because as your takeaway in the book you write, “As a parent, now when I think of coin collecting, my first thought is never to leave my children at home unsupervised.” But then you said, “My second thought, as a Bible teacher, is of a story recorded for us in the Gospel of Mark.” So going back to that story of Jesus being handed this denarius, what does that reveal to us about the image of God?

Jen Wilkin
Well, there’s something that we know about coins, because we’ve all held them.

Matt Tully
We’ve all had our collections.

Jen Wilkin
We’ve all had our collections, whether it’s just that you’re hoarding money in a corner or you have coins of value that are old, but they share something in common. They have a person’s face stamped on them, and it’s the image of a person who either has been an authority over us or currently is. So the coin that Jesus is referencing would be a denarius, and it probably has the image of the Emperor Tiberius. He was the current emperor when Christ was in his earthly ministry. And then there’s a statement, an inscription, surrounding it that equates Tiberius with being a son of a god, essentially. So there’s a great deal of irony in the statement that Jesus is making when he says, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”—that familiar phrase that a lot of us know. But it’s what he doesn’t say that I think drives home the point: “Render unto God what is God’s,” because we actually bear an image as well. We’re stamped with an image, and it’s the image of God. And therefore, while certainly you can pay a tax to an earthly ruler, we understand that we serve a higher ruler. We serve the One who’s seated on the heavenly throne.

Matt Tully
So there’s this implicit connection there. Jesus is saying, You all know what this coin represents. You know that you owe this ruler some kind of tax. But he’s saying something much bigger is at play for those who are stamped with the actual Creator-God’s image.

Jen Wilkin
He’s basically saying, Why are you worried about paying a temple tax? There are much greater debts that we owe. And it’s interesting to me that Charles Wesley in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” he actually references this. I may mess it up, but he says, “Adam’s image now efface, stamp thine image in his place.” So efface meaning to remove, to wear down. And so it’s an idea that is certainly not new to me. It’s even been sung throughout the years in the church. We need the image of Christ restored in us. And I think that’s what can be hard about image bearing is we know, Okay, I was created in the image of God, but then a lot of bad things happened. There are the things that happened cosmically, and then there are things that have happened personally, and so what does it mean on this side of the garden? What does it mean in my continuing propensity to sin that I’m bearing the image of God?

Matt Tully
So what are the core facets of the image of God in us? Theologians and Bible scholars have maybe debated that a little bit over the centuries. But what would you point to as some of the key things that that idea of image bearing contains?

Jen Wilkin
I think people can say, Is it the way that I look? Is it my physiology? We know that God does not have a body. In the incarnation, Christ takes on a body, but we speak of God as Spirit. And so we can ask, Is it my hands? Is it my feet? Well, we know that God cares for us in the way that he instructs us by using anthropomorphism, by speaking to us about having hands and feet.

Matt Tully
He doesn’t actually have hands and feet.

Jen Wilkin
He doesn’t actually have them, but I think we can say our physiology matters. We’re designed this way for a particular reason. So it’s not telling us what God literally is like, but in a figurative sense, we can understand our bodies are teaching parables in the way that they are put together. We have feet that can take us to do good works. We have hands that can minister to those in need. And so in a physical sense, we are living out the spiritual import of what it means to be an image bearer in the way that Christ does in the incarnation. I think the best way to think about how this is true or not true is to say, How did Christ, the perfect image bearer, show us what is true about God? And he did it by leading a virtuous life. He didn’t sin. He chose the will of the Father over his own will. And so when we think about bearing the image of God, we can think about a life of submitted obedience to him that is Spirit driven, not that is just getting it out. It’s that grace-driven effort term that’s been so helpful to so many of us.

Matt Tully
I know theologians will also point to this idea of representation as being a crucial part of our image bearing. Even just in a creational sense, and I want to get to the redemptive image bearing that we as Christians in particular can inhabit, but even just in a creational sense, God made us as those who would represent him to creation. Can you speak a little bit more about that?

Jen Wilkin
I think that we can miss the significance of what happens in Genesis 1 and continuing into Genesis 2. We all know that on the sixth day of creation we finally get to the part we’re most interested in. It’s like, Oh, we finally get to hear the humans are created! But essentially, if you look at the lead up in the creation account as the creation of a garden temple, essentially. And if you’re familiar with ancient Near Eastern patterns of talking about temple inauguration ceremonies and all that kind of stuff, you know that the last thing that’s placed in the completed temple is the icons—the graven images, so to speak—of the god that is to be worshiped. And so I think often we don’t connect the second commandment of “you will not make any graven images” to Genesis 1, but we absolutely should. The reason we’re forbidden to carve images, whether that’s figuratively or literally, is because we are the image. We’re intended to be the physical representation of God on earth. It was to be all of humanity. We are all to say something true about God. And that’s why we have a whole-life,-pro life ethic, because even the most wretched sinner, in some way, still images God, no matter how obscured that is in them. Even the smallest clump of cells, even the person who is on their deathbed, even the person who suffered great physical deformity—you could go on and on. We all still have dignity because we are formed in the image of God. And it’s the job of the Christian in the process of sanctification to see that image increasingly restored in them. It’s never lost, but it does get obscured through sin and through suffering sometimes too.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that. We bear the image of God by virtue of our creation, just our humanity.

Jen Wilkin
You don’t get to opt out of that.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s there. But we also, as Christians, Scripture speaks of us in a unique way, bearing the image of God. I think of Romans 8, where Paul says that God “predestined us to be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus,” who then Paul elsewhere in Colossians talks about how Jesus is “the image of the invisible God.” So I wonder if this can start to feel a little bit complicated and confusing. There are a lot of images happening here. Jesus is an image of God, we’re images of God, and we’re also becoming more image bearing. Explain all that for us. How do we think about these different images?

Jen Wilkin
I think you can try to overthink it. You don’t have to solve the riddle in order to start obeying. I guess that would be one way that I would say it. You don’t have to fully understand what it means to bear the image of God to say, I can see an act of faithfulness I can perform right now that will make me look more like Christ. But I think the simplest way to sort of get at what is being articulated is to ask, What were we made for? And that was lost. I think so often we focus on, to borrow from Andy Crouch, we go from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20, and that’s about it. But really, when you start talking about image bearing, the places that you can look to understand what it should be are what it was like before the fall and what it will be like in the new Jerusalem. So what should it have been like? Before Adam and Eve listened to the serpent, what should it have been like? It should have been perfect communion with God. My friend Kyle Worley has helped me a great deal with some of the categories for this. Actually, since I wrote this book, he is so good at talking about union with Christ, and I think it’s directly related to this question of image bearing because as a believer, we have union with Christ, and that can’t be taken from us. But what image bearing is often talking about is communion with Christ. Our communion with Christ gets impeded by the presence of sin. We’re not in a completely harmonious relationship with our Creator because we persist in sin even as believers. Or if you’re not a believer yet, obviously there’s a communion with Christ issue there as well. So as a new creation in Christ, one way to think about it is just that we are being restored to the image that was obscured in us that was meant to be the way that we lived all of life, and it’s the way that we will live all of eternity. We will, fully and finally, be able to bear the image of God as we were meant to all along in the New Jerusalem. So for now, it takes effort. It takes a great deal of effort, but it’s the best effort we can apply.

Matt Tully
As we resemble Jesus more and more, that really is taking us back to what we were always intended to look like and be like in the garden.

Jen Wilkin
I think that often we relate it to people say all the time, I just want to look more like Jesus. It’s entered into our Christian vernacular.

Matt Tully
Yeah. It’s a phrase.

Jen Wilkin
But it’s not really defined. What do you mean? And often what they mean is, I want to do Jesus-y things. And that’s not image bearing. Image bearing is not just doing Jesus-y things; it’s about being someone. I talk about this in the book, and there’s a lot of conversation in the church about what is the will of God for my life. And I think we have overly mystified it. I think that we have made it about outcomes instead of about inward change. And just tracking through the Bible, how many times is there a call to be holy as he is holy that carries into the New Testament and finds its clearest articulation, I would argue, in 1 Thessalonians 5, where Paul just straight up says, “This is the will of God for your life: your sanctification.” And if we thought about seeking God’s will in terms of growing in holiness instead of about which job we were going to take or where we were going to spend our time, which car am I going to buy, who am I going to marry? I think we’ve really cheapened the idea of the will of God when we do that. It’s not that God is disinterested in the decisions that we make, but he’s always more concerned with the decision-maker than he is with the decision itself. Those decisions should be the overflow of a person who’s different on the inside. I think the way I say it in the book is what good does it do us to have the right spouse, right car, right job, if we’re still the wrong person, if you’re still selfish? Good luck in a marriage to your dream spouse if you’re still self-centered. Good luck in that job that is going to require a lot of you. And so when we speak about bearing the image of God, our first impulse should be to ask, How am I being transformed inwardly to be a greater reflection of the character of Christ so that the actions that result from that are an overflow?

20:06 - Sinful Ways We Try to Imitate God

Matt Tully
I want to talk through just a few of those characteristics in just a minute, but I think it’d be important to hit one thing before we go there. Scripture calls us to pursue Christ-likeness, to image God in lots of different ways. And yet there are some attributes of God that we should not seek to imitate, that we should not try to image in ourselves. And those are some of the things that you hit on in your other book, None Like Him, which is sort of a companion to this book. Just briefly speak about those incommunicable attributes and why it is that actually it would be wrong for us to try to imitate God in those ways.

Jen Wilkin
I think the easiest way to sort of get at the incommunicable attributes as something that are only for God is to go back to Genesis 3. When the serpent comes to Eve and he begins to place doubt in her line of thinking, he says a very interesting thing to her. He says, “Did God really say that you shouldn’t eat of this tree?” And she says, “Oh, yeah, we can’t eat of it. We can’t even touch it.” You get a little hint of hypervigilance there.

Matt Tully
She’s setting up walls.

Jen Wilkin
She’s like the two-year-old in the room who has been told not to touch one thing but she can touch everything else, so she’s just fixated on that one thing. I think there’s a little of that there. But then he says, “You will not surely die, for God knows that in the day that you eat of it, you will become”—and this is the weird part—“like him.” That’s what the serpent says to her. “You will become like him.”

Matt Tully
And he’s saying it to image bearers.

Jen Wilkin
That’s what I’m saying! That’s super weird because in Genesis 1:26–27, we found out that she already is like him, which means that whatever the serpent is offering is a way to be like God that she is not made for. And I think that helps us to understand the distinction between what can be true about God and ought not to be true about us. We’re in Genesis 3 so this is the wrong metaphor, but the most low-hanging fruit in this conversation is omniscience. We’re not built for omniscience. Omniscience crushes us. We think, If I just had all the facts, I would make better decisions—which actually relates to the conversation on the will of God a little bit. And so we think, I’m just going to keep gathering facts on this decision I need to make, and I will arrive at a better conclusion. But what we find from a psychological standpoint is that too many facts actually lock us up. They crush us. We’re not able to make any decision at all because we’re not built to carry the weight of a billion facts. And yet where do we have access to those? On our little omniscience tools that we hold in our palms. The reason people are so addicted to their phones is because they mimic omniscience. And then you begin to realize a lot of the things that I will spend a lot of my time chasing after are those kinds of things. Omnipresence: I do want to be in more than one place at one time. I actually think that for the world to function in the way that it should, I should be able to be in more than one place at more than one time. We have a way to mimic omnipresence when we talk about multi-tasking. FaceTime is another good example. My daughter has lived in Korea for the last two years, so FaceTime is an absolute gift. But now that she is stateside again, actually living with me right now, how weird would it be for me to get on FaceTime with her when we’re in the same house? That’d be bizarre, right? Because what do we know? There’s something better than the app FaceTime, and that’s actual face time. But what FaceTime does is it makes us feel like we can be in more than one place at one time. And so it’s not that technology is wrong. The question is, Why am I so drawn to technology? And that’s not, of course, the only example that you could give. There are lots of others. Omnipotence. Any parent of young children knows what it feels like to want to have complete control over another human being. Or sovereignty. I will tell you what sports you will play and what you will study in college. I mean the list goes on and on.

Matt Tully
All those limitations, that’s one of the big themes of that other book is just coming to terms with the fact that we are finite, limited creatures, and that actually is precisely where God wants us.

Jen Wilkin
It’s by design. I think that we tend to think of limits as a product of the fall, and that’s absolutely not true. A body is a set of limits. It means that I can’t be in more than one place at one time. That’s why we talk so much about God as Spirit. Only God can be everywhere all at once. Think about what social media does. It mimics and makes you think that you can maintain an unlimited number of non-face-to-face relationships as a limited human who is locationally challenged, so to speak. We can only be in one place at one time. Well, there’s only one being who’s able to sustain an unlimited number of relationships, and that’s one who is Spirit. That’s God. And so just a lot of the lies that we’re most drawn to are rooted in a particular kind of idolatry, and that is the kind that Satan articulates. When he says, “I will ascend to the heavens, I will take the place of the Most High.”

Matt Tully
So those are all the incommunicable attributes of God.

Jen Wilkin
The omnis, anything related to infinitude.

25:18 - Righteous Ways to Imitate God

Matt Tully
And those are the roots of the idols that we often pursue. But then there are all these communicable attributes. These are things that we could pursue to our heart’s content, and that would only make us more Christlike if we’re pursuing them in the right way.

Jen Wilkin
You’re never going to be too loving.

Matt Tully
Too loving, too just. So let’s talk about a few of those things. I wanted to start with the topic of goodness. I think goodness is one of those that, to me, feels a little bit vague. It feels a little bit like, yeah, God is good, and we’re called to be good. But you actually say that God’s goodness is a light that radiates through all of his other attributes. What do you mean by that?

Jen Wilkin
Well, we need it. We need it to be a bedrock understanding for us because, in particular, when you think about the incommunicable attributes, I don’t want an omnipotent God who isn’t also infinitely good. I don’t want a sovereign God who is also not infinitely good. His incommunicable attributes become terrifying when they’re removed from the context of his infinite goodness. And so it is good that we talk about God being good, but sometimes I think we do it in a shallow way. We’ve heard, “God is good all the time, all the time God is good,” and I’m all for repeating that at every moment, but to make meditation on his goodness is different than to simply acknowledge it in a passing moment. When we begin to understand that not only is his goodness a light radiating into his incommunicable attributes but a light radiating through everything around us, that we experience his goodness without even paying attention to it, then it changes the way that we relate to his creation. It changes the way that we relate to other image bearers, and it certainly changes the way that we relate to him.

Matt Tully
That’s another thing that I love about this book is that you spend most of the time in each of these chapters, where you cover these ten different attributes, most of the time is reflecting on where we see this in Scripture, how we should understand how God is this thing, and then almost in a secondary way, but it’s very natural and helpful, you then turn to look at, What does this look like for us? How do we embrace this virtue in our own lives? But really, that just flows so naturally from first considering where we see this in Scripture. Another attribute that you highlight is patience.

Jen Wilkin
I didn’t want to write that chapter.

Matt Tully
I didn’t want to read that chapter.

Jen Wilkin
Oh, here, let me teach you all how to be patient, because I’m so great at it.

Matt Tully
Where do we see God’s patience in Scripture?

Jen Wilkin
Obviously, you see it with Israel all the time in the Old Testament. We tend to focus in on the days where God kicks them back into line and be like, Why is he so mean? We don’t pay attention to just the chapter after chapter where they were acting a fool and he just let it play out. And so I think we can be the same way in our own lives. We forget that God has been incredibly patient with us as we are still combating sin. If you want to draw a spiritual parallel to the Old Testament stories that we see—whereas Israel waged war against flesh and blood, we’re waging war against spiritual matters. We are trying to put to death sin in our own hearts. We are waging a holy war, in a very real sense, against sin in our hearts. And as terrible as Israel was at carrying out those commands, we also are terrible at it, and the Lord perseveres with us. He does not remove his salvation from us. Again, we have union with Christ. We may lose communion with Christ, but we have union with Christ no matter what. That itself is a supreme act of patience. As a person who has to exercise patience toward other people, I want to remove my affection from people when they are causing me stress. I don’t want to wait it out. I don’t want to play a long game. God is exceptional at the long game, and we need him to be. And until we have measured our own degree of patience against the patience of God, we will probably give ourselves more credit for being long suffering with others than we should. I think the times where we have to really confront the degree to which we’re steadfast or patient is when we’re in trial. With another person you might have some measure of control over what boundaries you need to put up with them or what you can hope will happen based on past experience. When it comes to a trial, we completely lack all control over when a trial is going to stop. They press us to to face down the fact that when things get hard, our response is, This is harder than I thought, and it’s taking longer than I expected. And God never says that. He never says, This is harder than I thought, and it’s taking longer than I expected. He obviously has an eternal perspective that we don’t have. But if he can be patient with all things in view, then even if I don’t have all things in view, I can be patient, trusting that his view is accurate and good.

Matt Tully
Patience in trials is one of those that, I think you’re right, it can really bring this issue to the fore. As I thought about patience, or impatience as a vice, I think most of us would know that we struggle with that in some way or another, but it does often strike me as one that’s maybe easier to excuse. It’s maybe in a category of respectable sins that we can say, Yeah, I struggle with impatience. We share that with our small group, but really, when we don’t exhibit patience as the Lord does with us, we really do call into question his goodness, and we reveal our own lack of faith in a big way.

Jen Wilkin
I want to make war on impatience. I don’t want to just tolerate it or struggle with it. I want to make war on it. Because if you think about the whole nature of the Christian faith is delayed gratification. We are participants in a religion that makes delayed gratification a pillar. We await a returning Savior. And we’re either going to do that well, or we’re not going to do it well. And yet we inhabit a culture that is all about instant gratification. And we can’t lie to ourselves and say that that hasn’t impacted us spiritually. You’ve probably all had the experience where you think a vague thought about buying something, and then it’s on your doorstep half a day later.

Matt Tully
How did that happen?

Jen Wilkin
Or your phone starts showing you ads and you’re like, What is that? It’s Satan. It’s Satan in your phone. So we can have what we want when we want it. Everyone is telling us not just that we can but that we should. And I think that’s the bigger thing to keep an eye on, particularly for parents who are raising children in this environment. Waiting is seen as an enemy to eliminate instead of as a friend to embrace or a virtue to cultivate. And so instead of medicating wait times with distractions, if we will sit in those wait times. Just in the normal course of a day. I’m not even talking about a big trial. Jesus says those who are faithful in small things will be entrusted with big things. So in the small opportunities I have to practice patience, I want to do so so that I can build some muscle memory for the day in which I’m really going to be tested.

Matt Tully
Maybe a final attribute to discuss is wisdom. That’s another one that, again, can feel so familiar. We know God is wise, and we talk about God’s wisdom all the time. What does that actually mean that God is wise?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I think we confuse wisdom with knowledge a lot in Christian circles. I think about patterns of prayer. There’s the prayer request, I just need wisdom in this particular decision that I’m making. I need to know if God wants me to do X or Y. That’s actually not a prayer for wisdom; that’s a prayer for knowledge. Does he want me to do X or Y? It’s a particular kind of knowledge. It’s knowledge of the future. So that there should be a big red flag to us to begin with, because the knowledge of the future belongs to the secret counsel of God.

Matt Tully
That starts to veer into that incommunicable omniscience.

Jen Wilkin
It does. And not only that, it’s just always a good reminder that the children of God walk by faith and not by sight. And so when we pray those kinds of prayers, what we’re often saying is, I actually would rather walk by sight. Now, we’re not alone in that. You can see lots of people in the Bible who pray those kinds of prayers. And it’s not that God never helps us in that way. I would not want to say that. I would not take that out of his toolkit of ways to help his children. But is that normative? Is that what we should expect to happen all the time? A prayer for wisdom—the reason that James says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask and God will give it.” The reason he gives you an ironclad yes is because wisdom is taking what facts we have, and using them in the best way possible. It’s not gathering every single fact. It’s saying, Well, I know these things, and I’m going to use these things the best way that I can. And I’m going to trust the outcome to the Lord. We don’t trust in outcomes; we trust in the God of all outcomes. So wisdom is having insight. It is making good decisions based on the information that you have, but knowing that you don’t have all the information as a limited human. The wisdom of God is perfect because he holds all knowledge. And so he does have every single fact, which is why we can’t convince him differently to do something that we want him to do, because he’s not lacking information. You might change your mind on something if I presented you with facts that you hadn’t known before. But God is never in that situation. So the wisdom of God is perfect wisdom. Our wisdom is not perfect wisdom, but God wants us to grow in wisdom. The entire book of Proverbs is about wedding ourselves to wisdom. Don’t hang around with folly, marry wisdom. And then when we get to Revelation, you think about the book of Proverbs and it has lady folly characterized as a prostitute. Lady wisdom is characterized as a bride. And what do we find at the end of Revelation? Well, we find the city of Babylon, the city of man, personified as a prostitute. It’s the city of folly. And then the new Jerusalem descends as a bride. It’s the city of wisdom. So when we look toward that final place of our habitation, we know that eventually we will have perfect wisdom. And until then, God is pleased to give it to us if we ask. And then I have to go back. If I have a life verse, this is it. Psalm 111:10 tells us that the beginning of wisdom—once you realize you need it, you got to know where to start. “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”

Matt Tully
I wanted to ask you about that because Proverbs 9:10 says that as well. That’s a passage that I’m sure we’ve all heard, but it’s a little confusing. What does that mean?

Jen Wilkin
Well, often when I will quote that verse, women will say to me, “No, no, no. Jen, perfect love casts out fear.” They take you to the New Testament and pit it against you. And they don’t mean to, but it’s just that one verse is very comforting and one verse is very challenging.

Matt Tully
That’s a whole other interview we could do about the scary verses of the Bible.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, scare verses of the Bible. So their reflex reaction is, I’m not supposed to have any fear. And yet one of the most leveraged verses in female spaces is, “Charm is deceitful and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” Now, I would argue that’s not just a verse for women, but that’s a chat for another day. But suffice it to say that the fear of the Lord is regarded throughout the Scriptures as a virtue. A “God-fearing woman” would be a phrase you might hear in previous generations. It’s not something that we often assign to women today as a virtue. And of course it means right reverence and awe, borrowing from the book of Hebrews. It means that while we know that we have union with Christ, we take seriously our communion, in that we do not presume to continue in sin because our God is a consuming fire.

Matt Tully
And why is that the foundation, the beginning of wisdom?

Jen Wilkin
Because it rightly orients us to the one who we will be asking to provide our daily bread. And by daily bread I mean, in a metaphorical sense, all that is needful to do the will of God. And we don’t rightly ask until we rightly understand our lack. The Beatitudes say, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” And we begin to sense our hunger and our thirst when we see a God high and lifted up. We’re then rightly oriented to ask in the way that we ought to. I think too often we feel full already when we come to the Lord, and we ask for things that are nice to have, but we don’t ask for things that are essential to our ability to fulfill our calling to bear his image.

Matt Tully
Jen, thanks for talking with us today about these communicable attributes of God that we as Christians are called to pursue as we’re united to Christ. And as we said, we’ve had another conversation already about the incommunicable attributes, related to your book None Like Him, and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Thanks for being here.

Jen Wilkin
Thanks for the good conversation.

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