February is Black History Month, and we are planning to focus our celebration on the role that black preaching has had in Church history and American history. So please plan to join us on the evening of February 25 for our annual African American History event, Top It Off, from 5-7:30 PM. Childcare will be provided. Sign up below and bring a topping for baked potatoes. This will be a time of singing and celebrating what God has done in and through Africans and African Americans in American History and more importantly, Church history. There is wisdom in celebrating Black History.
Proverbs is a book that teaches us what wisdom is and how to act wisely. (The Scripture’s assumption is that we are not naturally wise!) Proverbs chapter 8:22-31 personifies wisdom and shows how wisdom has behaved from before the foundation of the earth. Wisdom speaks thus,
“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths, I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.”
What a beautiful picture of God’s wisdom at work in creating all that is and creating it all to exist together and work together in unity and diversity. God’s wisdom brought order out of chaos and made the disparate pieces relate to each other rightly. And the result of wisdom’s work is “rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.” What we can conclude then is that wisdom rejoices in creation and man the creature. The rejoicing is described as “delighting”. The wisdom of God is at work when the creation and the creature are in harmony, relating rightly to one another. If that is true, we are wise in pursuing reconciliation between the ethnicities. And rejoicing in the work of God in the history of Africans and African Americans is, in part, what acting wisely looks like. Also, we can conclude that everything and everyone rightly relating to each other must be part of the joy that is set before Jesus, who is both God’s agent in creation and the wisdom of God. This joy is why he endured the cross. (Hebrews 12:2) Therefore, let us, in wisdom, rejoice with Jesus’ joy!