Before You Smack The Earth
There is nothing chic about fighting gravity. You can dress it up in academic robes, paint it in revolutionary colors, and chant it in the streets, but if you step off the roof you will still obey the ground. Reality does not negotiate. And that is precisely why our age’s crusade to reinvent the moral order—marriage, sex, gender, truth, justice—is not merely “breaking a few old rules.” It is an assault on the very structure of the world. Scripture calls that structure Wisdom.
Proverbs 8 lets us overhear Wisdom speaking from the threshold of time: “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old… From everlasting I was established” (Prov 8:22–23, NASB1995). Before there were mountains to climb or seas to cross, before a single grain of dust existed to be numbered, Wisdom was already at the Father’s side, “rejoicing always before Him” (Prov 8:30). Wisdom is not a fashion trend that arrives with the latest think-piece; Wisdom is older than light. To contradict Wisdom is not to innovate. It is to lie about the world. And when you lie about the world, sooner or later you smack the earth.
Scripture presses this further. At creation, God did not improvise. He legislated reality. “When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep… When He set for the sea its boundary, so that the water would not transgress His command” (Prov 8:27–29). The verb behind “inscribed” (ḥāqaq) is the language of royal decree. Skies are held firm by statute. Shores stand because a scepter has drawn their line. The cosmos is not a democratic experiment; it is a Kingdom under law. To sin, therefore, is not simply to be naughty; it is to wage an anti-creational revolt—an attempt to pry up the floorboards of God’s house and redraw the circle He carved into the deep. And every such revolt ends the same way: man insists he can fly, then discovers what the pavement feels like. Before you smack the earth, remember: Wisdom was here first.
This is why cultural “redefinitions” implode. You can rename darkness “light,” but you cannot make it shine. “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isa 5:20). Our age sues God for custody of His words—marriage, man, woman, justice, mercy—and then rear-ends reality at speed. The results are not brave new worlds but shattered souls, fatherless homes, sterilized futures, and courts straining to manage the chaos we insisted would liberate us. “Professing to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22). This is the danger of redefining wisdom: you don’t rewrite the cosmos, you only ruin yourself.
The New Testament unveils the deepest reason redefinitions fail: Wisdom is personal. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things came into being through Him” (John 1:1–3). “By Him all things were created… and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). The order you collide with when you defy reality is not an impersonal force; it is the lordship of Jesus Christ. He “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb 1:3). He holds the synapse that fires when you deny Him, the breath you spend to contradict Him, the court that rules against His design. There is no neutral square inch in a world upheld by the Wisdom of God. Every attempt to “liberate” ourselves from His order is just another sprint toward the cliff’s edge.
This explains the spiritual psychology of our moment. When a people will not have Christ, they will not suffer His definitions. They will smelt a golden calf out of new acronyms and call the glitter “progress.” They will take the chisel to the image of God and call the shards “authenticity.” But chisels do not change marble into silk, and rebellion does not convert lies into life. The sea may rage, yet it cannot overrun the decree, “Thus far you shall come, but no farther” (Job 38:11). Before you smack the earth, remember the decree still stands.
What then shall the church do? First, we must recover our fear of God, which is the beginning of knowledge (Prov 1:7). Fear of God is not a mood; it is epistemology under sovereignty. It means we learn reality from the One who made and maintains it. Second, we must refuse counterfeit wisdom, however sophisticated its diction. If a claim contradicts the speech of Christ in Scripture, it is not wisdom. It is cosmetic foolishness. Third, we must display the beauty of obedience. Nothing exposes the lie like the loveliness of the truth lived out: husbands loving wives; wives building homes in glad strength; fathers present; mothers honored; children catechized; merchants honest; rulers just; churches ordered by the Word; saints joyful and pure. This is not nostalgia; it is normalcy under Christ.
Finally, we must preach the scandal and mercy of the cross. The same Lord who inscribed order on the deep bled for rebels who tried to erase His lines. “The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing… but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). At Calvary, Wisdom suffered for our un-wisdom, righteousness for our unrighteousness, so that fools might be forgiven and refitted to the grain of creation. He does not save us to leave us disorderly; He saves us unto Wisdom.
So hear the warning and repent. Come to Christ, the Wisdom of God. Receive His Word not as one opinion among many but as the royal decree that makes worlds stand. Build your life, your family, your church, your vocation on what cannot be shaken. Let the fashions rot; let the fads expire. Wisdom was singing before the stars learned how, and Wisdom will be singing when every last counterfeit collapses into dust. Join the song before you smack the earth.
