Hidden Treasure

Posted on March 3, 2017 by

“In Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

Everyone knows that when God told Solomon He would give him whatever he asked (II Chron. 1:7), Israel’s king asked for “wisdom and knowledge” (II Chron. 1:10). However, in the parallel passage in I Kings 3, this account says that Solomon asked God for “an understanding heart to judge Thy people” (I Kings 3:9). Far from a contradiction, the variance in these parallel accounts is God’s way of giving us a fuller understanding of that for which Solomon asked, and a definition of wisdom and knowledge. Anyone possessing these two virtues would by definition have an understanding heart to judge or rule God’s people. When Solomon was given this, he became a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, “in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” i.e., an understanding heart rich in its ability to judge God’s people.

But those who acknowledge the Mystery that Paul mentions in the previous verse (Col. 2:2) know that God has an earthly people (Israel) and a heavenly people (the Body of Christ). It was “the glory of God” that He was able to “conceal” the Mystery for 4,000 years (Prov. 25:2) in the “unsearchable” heart of the King of kings, “the heaven for height, and the earth for depth” (Prov. 25:3). Thus Paul speaks of “the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God,” and declares “how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out” (Rom. 11:33) when he says he wants us to understand the mystery of Israel’s blindness (Rom. 11:25), and how God’s plan to rule His earthly people would undergo a postponement that has now lasted 2,000 years. But when he speaks of the Mystery in Ephesians 3, he prays that we might understand the “depth and height” of it (Eph. 3:18). That is, he is praying that we might also understand that God has a plan to rule His heavenly people, the Body of Christ (Eph. 3:1-17), in “the heaven for height.”

Thus in God’s plan to rule His people Israel on earth we find some of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and in His plan to rule His heavenly people, the Body of Christ, in the heavens, we also find some of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, but unless we acknowledge both we do not understand “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” that are hid in the Lord Jesus Christ. source

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