Wonderful Things

1 Corinthians 2:6-7 -  “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”

On the afternoon of November 26, 1922, in the Valley of the Kings, Howard Carter chipped a small hole in a sealed doorway, held up a candle, and leaned in. Behind him, Lord Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything. For a long moment Carter said nothing; the hot air made the flame flicker, and his eyes adjusted slowly to the dark. Then came the answer that would travel around the world: “Yes, wonderful things.”

Gold everywhere. Thrones and chariots and the glint of a boy king’s treasure, untouched for more than 3,000 years. But none of it was new. It had been lying there in the dark the whole time, complete, waiting. Carter didn’t create the treasure by finding it. He simply became the first set of eyes in thirty centuries to see what had always been there.

Paul is working with something like that in verse 7, where he says we impart “a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” The word translated secret is mystērion. In our language a mystery is a problem we haven’t cracked yet, a case still open on the detective’s desk. That isn’t what the word means for Paul. For Paul a mystērion is a truth God deliberately kept sealed for long ages, then unveiled at the moment He appointed. The wisdom was always there. It was waiting behind the stone, finished, while the centuries filed past.

Before he opens the chamber, Paul clears the table. The wisdom he’s about to show us, he says, is “not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.” Every age has its certainties, the things every reasonable person simply knows, and every age watches the next one quietly bury them. The wisdom of the moment always carries an expiration date stamped somewhere on it. What Paul is about to unveil was decreed before there were any ages to expire in. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t date. It was old before the mountains were born and it will be fresh when the last empire is a footnote.

And notice whose name is on the seal. “For our glory.” Before there was a Valley of the Kings, before there was a you, the wisdom of God in the crucified Christ was already prepared and set aside for the people who would one day love Him. Paul tells the Ephesians the same thing: God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4). To the Colossians he calls it “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” (Col 1:26). What was hidden for ages has now been revealed; what was sealed has been opened. And the treasure inside was never a thing. It was a Person.

We tend to think of wisdom as something we accumulate, a chamber we fill over a lifetime of effort and reading and getting burned. So we approach God the same way, quietly assuming the deep things are earned by the diligent and rationed out to the rest. But this treasure tells a different story. It was decreed before any of us drew a breath, and it opens to us by grace alone. Carter spent years digging in that valley, and his patience was real. The wisdom of God asks something stranger of us than patience. It asks us to receive what was already finished before we arrived, to stop excavating and start beholding.

Maybe that is the quiet ache underneath so much of our striving: the suspicion that we’re still digging, still proving, still hoping to earn our way into a chamber that might turn out to be empty when we finally break through. Hear verse 7 one more time. The chamber is not empty. It is full of wonderful things, decreed before the ages, with your name on the seal. The only question left is whether we’ll lean in with the candle and look.

Today: Sit with the next sentence, and resist the urge to answer it quickly: before the ages, before I existed, God decreed this wisdom for my glory. What changes in how I come to Him this morning if the treasure is already mine, already finished, and I am only now leaning in to see what has been there the whole time?

Prayer: “Father, before there was a world, before there was a me, You decreed the wisdom of the cross and sealed it with my name. I stand amazed that the deepest treasure in the universe was prepared for me and not by me. Thank You for rolling back the stone in Christ and letting me see wonderful things. Open my eyes wider still today, until the light of Your grace fills the whole dark room. Amen.”

-PK