Back in July we packed the kids in the car and drove the twelve hours down to Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch of the Mars Perseverance Rover. So when it touched down on the red planet last week, I was glued to the computer screen. This morning, as I was in the midst of my reading plan in 1 Corinthians, Perseverance came back to mind.

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. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him” —

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. (1 Cor. 2:6-10)

We often falsely assume Paul’s quote above from Isaiah is referring to heaven, but he is, in fact, describing the wisdom God has for believers here on earth in His Word.

Which brings us back to the Rover and this quote from JB Phillips,

“Man has truly extraordinary intellectual powers. He has explored the secrets of the atom and learned much about the marvels and mysteries of space. He has split the atom, explored the genetic structure of living things, and put men on the moon. There seems nothing man cannot do when it comes to science, technology, and engineering. However, God is not to be discovered by gazing into a microscope or a telescope. We can see His fingerprints everywhere in creation, but we can never know Him, His mind, His heart, His will, apart from divine revelation. The great truths revealed in the Bible never could have been thought out by the mind of man.”

It is said that man has two great resources: observation and reason. This is what enabled us to successfully send Perseverance on a 300-million-mile journey.

However, both are equally useless in discovering spiritual truth, apart from the Holy Spirit’s:

• Revelation – imparting to the Bible writers truth incapable of being discovered by man’s unaided reason;
• Inspiration – enabling the Bible writers to write down in God-chosen words, infallibly, the truth revealed;
• Illumination – enabling believers to understand the truth given by revelation and written down by inspiration. (Wuest)

As Charles Spurgeon once said, “Spiritual men have an inner eye and ear to which the Spirit grants discernment.”