“O send forth wisdom, out of thy holy heavens,
Even from the throne of thy glory;
That being present she may labour with me,
That I may know what is pleasing in thy sight!”
And our Lord assumes the title of Wisdom, Luke xi, 49; Matt. xxiii, 34; and declares that “wisdom shall be justified of all her children,” Matt. xi, 19; Luke vii, 35.
WISDOM, Book of, an apocryphal book of Scripture, so called on account of the wise maxims contained in it. This book has been commonly ascribed to Solomon, either because the author imitated that king’s manner of writing, or because he sometimes speaks in his name. But it is certain Solomon was not the author of it; for it was not written in Hebrew, nor was it inserted in the Jewish canon, nor is the style like that of Solomon; and therefore St. Jerom observes justly that it smells strong of the Grecian eloquence; that it is composed with art and method, after the manner of the Greek philosophers, very different from that noble simplicity so full of life and energy to be found in the Hebrew books. It has been ascribed by many of the ancients to Philo.
WOLF, זאב, in Arabic, zeeb, Gen. xlix, 27; Isa. xi, 6; lxv, 25; Jer. v, 6; Ezek. xxii, 27; Zeph. iii, 3; Hab. i, 8; λύκος, Matt. vii, 15; x, 16; Luke x, 3; John x, 12; Acts xx, 29; Eccles. xiii, 17. M. Majus derives it from the Arabic word zaab or daaba, “to frighten;” and hence, perhaps, the German word dieb, “a thief.” The wolf is a fierce, strong, cunning, mischievous, and carnivorous quadruped; externally and internally so nearly resembling the dog, that they seem modelled alike, yet have a perfect antipathy to each other. The Scripture observes of the wolf, that it lives upon rapine; is violent, bloody, cruel, voracious, and greedy; goes abroad by night to seek its prey, and is a great enemy to flocks of sheep. Indeed, this animal is fierce without cause, kills without remorse, and by its indiscriminate slaughter seems to satisfy its malignity rather than its hunger. The wolf is weaker than the lion or the bear, and less courageous than the leopard; but he scarcely yields to them in cruelty and rapaciousness. His ravenous temper prompts him to destructive and sanguinary depredations; and these are perpetrated principally in the night. This circumstance is expressly mentioned in several passages of Scripture. “The great men have altogether broken the yoke and burst the bonds; wherefore, a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them,” Jer. v, 6. The rapacious and cruel conduct of the princes of Israel is compared by Ezekiel, xxii, 27, to the mischievous inroads of the same animal: “Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, to destroy lives, to get dishonest gain;” and Zephaniah, iii, 3, says, “Her princes within her are roaring lions, her judges are evening wolves: they gnaw not the bones till the morrow.” Instead of protecting the innocent and restraining the evil doer, or punishing him according to the demerit of his crimes, they delight in violence and oppression, in blood and rapine; and so insatiable is their cupidity, that, like the evening wolf, they destroy more than they are able to possess. The dispositions of the wolf to attack the weaker animals, especially those which are under the protection of man, is alluded to by our Saviour in the parable of the hireling shepherd: “The wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the flock,” Matt. vii, 15. And the Apostle Paul, in his address to the elders of Ephesus, gives the name of this insidious and cruel animal to the false teachers who disturbed the peace and perverted the faith of their people: “I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock,” Acts xx, 29.
WORD. Sometimes the Scripture ascribes to the word of God certain supernatural effects, and often represents it as animated and active: “He sent his word and healed them,” Psalm cvii, 20. It also signifies what is written in the sacred books of the Old and New Testament, Luke xi, 28; James i, 22; the divine law which teaches and commands good things, and forbids evil, Psalm cxix, 101; and is used to express every promise of God, Psalm cxix, 25, &c, and prophecy or vision, Isaiah, ii, 1. This term is likewise consecrated and appropriated to signify the only Son of the Father, the uncreated Wisdom, the second Person of the most holy Trinity, equal to and consubstantial with the Father. St. John the evangelist, more expressly than any other, has opened to us the mystery of the Word of God, when he tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made,” John i, 1–3. The Chaldee paraphrasts, the most ancient Jewish writers extant, generally make use of the word memra, which signifies “the Word,” in those places where Moses puts the name Jehovah. They say, for example, that it was the Memra, or the Word, which created the world, which appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai, which gave him the law, which spoke to him face to face, which brought Israel out of Egypt, which marched before the people, and which wrought all those miracles that are recorded in Exodus. It was the same Word that appeared to Abraham in the plain of Mamre, that was seen of Jacob at Bethel, to whom Jacob made his vow, and acknowledged as God, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, then shall the Lord be my God,” Gen. xxviii, 20, 21. The manner in which St. John commences his Gospel is strikingly different from the introductions to the histories of Christ by the other evangelists; and no less striking and peculiar is the title under which he announces him--“the Word.” It has therefore been a subject of much inquiry and discussion, from whence this evangelist drew the use of this appellation, and what reasons led him, as though intending to solicit particular attention, to place it at the very head of his Gospel. That it was for the purpose of establishing an express opinion, as to the personal character of him it is used to designate, is made more than probable from the predominant character of the whole Gospel, which is more copiously doctrinal, and contains a record more full of what Jesus “said” than the others. As to the source from which the term Logos was drawn by the Apostle, some have held it to be taken from the Jewish Scriptures; others, from the Chaldee paraphrases; others, from Philo and the Hellenizing Jews. The most natural conclusion certainly appears to be, that, as St. John was a plain, “unlearned” man, chiefly conversant in the Holy Scriptures, he derived this term from the sacred books of his own nation, in which the Hebrew phrase, Dabar Jehovah, “the Word of Jehovah,” frequently occurs in passages which must be understood to speak of a personal Word, and which phrase is rendered Λόγος Κυρίου [the word of the Lord] by the Septuagint interpreters. Certainly, there is not the least evidence in his writings, or in his traditional history, that he ever acquainted himself with Philo or with Plato; and none, therefore, that he borrowed the term from them, or used it in any sense approaching to or suggested by these refinements:--in the writings of St. Paul there are allusions to poets and philosophers; in those of St. John, none, except to the rising sects afterward known under the appellation of Gnostics. The Hebrew Scriptures contain frequent intimations of a distinction of Persons in the Godhead; one of these Divine Persons is called Jehovah; and, though manifestly represented as existing distinct from the Father, is yet arrayed with attributes of divinity, and was acknowledged by the ancient Jews to be, in the highest sense, “their God,” the God with whom, through all their history, they chiefly “had to do.” This Divine Person is proved to have been spoken of by the prophets as the future Christ; the evangelists and Apostles represent Jesus as that Divine Person of the prophets; and if, in the writings of the Old Testament, he is also called the Word, the application of this term to our Lord is naturally accounted for. It will then appear to be a theological, not a philosophic appellation, and one which, previously even to the time of the Apostle, had been stamped with the authority of inspiration.
Celebrated as this title of the Logos was in the Jewish theology, it is not, however, the appellation by which the Spirit of inspiration has chosen that our Saviour should be principally designated. It occurs but a very few times, and principally and emphatically in the introduction to St. John’s Gospel. A cogent reason can be given why this Apostle adopts it; and we are not without a probable reason why, in the New Testament, the title “Son of God” should have been preferred, which is a frequent title of the Logos in the writings also of Philo. Originating from the spiritual principle of connection, between the first and the second Being in the Godhead; marking this, by a spiritual idea of connection; and considering it to be as close and as necessary as the Word is to the energetic mind of God, which cannot bury its intellectual energies in silence, but must put them forth in speech; it is too spiritual in itself, to be addressed to the faith of the multitude. If with so full a reference to our bodily ideas, and so positive a filiation of the second Being to the first, we have seen the attempts of Arian criticism endeavouring to resolve the doctrine into the mere dust of a figure; how much more ready would it have been to do so, if we had only such a spiritual denomination as this for the second! This would certainly have been considered by it as too unsubstantial for distinct personality, and therefore too evanescent for equal divinity. One of the first teachers of this system was Cerinthus. We have not any particular account of all the branches of his system; and it is possible that we may ascribe to him some of those tenets by which later sects of Gnostics were discriminated. But we have authority for saying, that the general principle of the Gnostic scheme was openly taught by Cerinthus before the publication of the Gospel of St. John. The authority is that of Irenæus, a bishop who lived in the second century, who in his youth had heard Polycarp, the disciple of the Apostle John, and who retained the discourses of Polycarp in his memory till his death. There are yet extant of the works of Irenæus, five books which he wrote against heresies, one of the most authentic and valuable monuments of theological erudition. In one place of that work he says, that Cerinthus taught in Asia that the world was not made by the Supreme God, but by a certain power very separate and far removed from the Sovereign of the universe, and ignorant of his nature. In another place, he says that John the Apostle wished, by his Gospel, to extirpate the error which had been spread among men by Cerinthus; and Jerom, who lived in the fourth century, says that St. John wrote his Gospel, at the desire of the bishops of Asia, against Cerinthus and other heretics, and chiefly against the doctrines of the Ebionites, then springing up, who said that Christ did not exist before he was born of Mary.
“It appears,” says Dr. Hill, “to have been the tradition of the Christian church, that St. John, who lived to a great age, and who resided at Ephesus, in Proconsular Asia, was moved by the growth of the Gnostic heresies, and by the solicitations of the Christian teachers, to bear his testimony to the truth in writing, and particularly to recollect those discourses and actions of our Lord, which might furnish the clearest refutation of the persons who denied his preëxistence. This tradition is a key to a great part of his Gospel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke had given a detail of those actions of Jesus which are the evidences of his divine mission; of those events in his life upon earth which are most interesting to the human race; and of those moral discourses in which the wisdom, the grace, and the sanctity of the Teacher shine with united lustre. Their whole narration implies that Jesus was more than man. But as it is distinguished by a beautiful simplicity, which adds very much to their credit as historians, they have not, with the exception of a few incidental expressions, formally stated the conclusion that Jesus was more than man; but have left the Christian world to draw it for themselves from the facts narrated, or to receive it by the teaching and the writings of the Apostles. St. John, who was preserved by God to see this conclusion, which had been drawn by the great body of Christians, and had been established in the epistles, denied by different heretics, brings forward, in the form of a history of Jesus, a view of his exalted character, and draws our attention particularly to the truth of that which had been denied. When you come to analyze the Gospel of St. John, you will find that the first eighteen verses contain the positions laid down by the Apostle, in order to meet the errors of Cerinthus; that these positions, which are merely affirmed in the introduction, are proved in the progress of the Gospel, by the testimony of John the Baptist, and by the words and the actions of our Lord; and that after the proof is concluded by the declaration of Thomas, who, upon being convinced that Jesus had risen, said to him, ‘My Lord, and my God,’ St. John sums up the amount of his Gospel in these few words: ‘These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;’ that is, that Jesus and the Christ are not distinct persons, and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The Apostle does not condescend to mention the name of Cerinthus, because that would have preserved, as long as the world lasts, the memory of a name which might otherwise be forgotten. But, although there is dignity and propriety in omitting the mention of his name, it was necessary, in laying down the positions that were to meet his errors, to adopt some of his words, because the Christians of those days would not so readily have applied the doctrine of the Apostle to the refutation of those heresies which Cerinthus was spreading among them, if they had not found in the exposition of that doctrine some of the terms in which the heresy was delivered; and as the chief of these terms, Logos, which Cerinthus applied to an inferior spirit, was equivalent to a phrase in common use among the Jews, ‘the Word of Jehovah,’ and was probably borrowed from thence, John by his use of Logos rescues it from the degraded use of Cerinthus, and restores it to a sense corresponding to the dignity of the Jewish phrase.”