1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5

Paul says, “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with words of human wisdom …”
“not with wisdom of words.” There was no wisdom of eloquence, with wisdom of rhetoric. I haven’t come with the wisdom of word; I have come with the word of the cross.

The message of the cross brings division to the entire human race

Every culture has various ways of classifying people. In the ancient world, there were slaves and there were free. Paul divides the race into those who are perishing and those who are being saved.

One billion years into eternity, it won’t matter too much in your short life on this earth whether you were slave or free or barbarian or Greek or white or black or British or Native American.

The only thing that will matter is, whether you’re saved or perishing.

The question always is; is the person reconciled to the living God or not?

The dividing point between the two groups is the message of the cross.

To the one it’s foolishness, but to the other, it’s not only wisdom, it’s transforming power, it’s life-changing. “It is written, then he quotes Isaiah 29. God has already declared himself on this issue.

The message of the cross is God’s way of doing what he said he would do. He would set aside and shatter all human pretensions to strength and wisdom.

All of this is within the Bible’s view of sin. Sin is defiance of our Maker. In the beginning, God was, and we were related to him. As Adam and Eve, walked with God in the cool of the day. As they, so with us, if we wake up in the morning we would think about him. We would be rightly related to others because we would be rightly related to him, and so would they be.

Since sin has taken over, now we think that we are at the center of the universe. So now, if sin causes my focus, my aspirations, my hopes, my values, how I perceive the whole world, turns on how the world touches me, then God, if he has the courtesy to exist, must exist for me, and other people must exist for me.

Suddenly my criteria on is what is acceptable to me or to my group, is based on what I think, not God.

That’s the whole problem with sin. If I get to make the final call on what is important then God, in his wisdom, if he’s going to reconcile rebels to him at all, is going to find a method which is not bound up with our principle of self-interest.

Paul is writing to Christians and he assumes that they see the importance of the cross. He says, “use that as the message, as the standard.” Then he asks three stinging rhetorical questions.

“Where is the wise man?” The wise man in the Greco-Roman world was a person with a kind of public philosophy that explained everything.

Your philosophical worldview explained your world for you, and it was advanced by the academics of the day in the marketplace and in teaching platforms as the best way of understanding life, and describing family, and ordaining moral structures in a society.

Paul ask, Which of the schools of philosophy of the day figured out the cross? Who came up with the cross to fix man and God relationship?

Philosophy was much concerned with questions of social justice, but did it imagine its way, did it think its way through to a God who would reconcile human beings to himself by the cross?

Let’s move it close to home, How about capitalism?

Does democracy as a system, as a political way of organizing a nation, lead us to the cross?

Paul ask, why do you hold up these world views up as if they are at the very top of what is central and good and wholesome, if they cannot get to what is foundational in reconciling men and women to God?”

“Where is the expert in law?

The word refers to someone who is a Jew who knows the law very well and is applying Old Testament exegesis to explain all of structure and society and make laws for the family and church.

Today we would say, where is the theologian? Do theologians, by themselves apart from what God has disclosed, lead us to the cross? It is amazing some of the most listened to preachers say that we don’t even need the Old Testament to tell us how to live or be right with God. Can they get us saved without the Cross? Does their reasoning lead us to the cross without the Bible, God’s revelation?

What about, the philosopher of this age?

God has exposed the folly of philosophy by coming and saving human beings with a system of thought, a way, a means, a structure that is outside anything they could have conceived.

“For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased, through the foolishness of what was preached, to save those who believed.”

The wisdom of God determined that the world, through its wisdom, would not know him. If God did not do it this way, man was simply going to pat themselves on the back for all eternity about how wise they were to think up some way they could manage to outsmart God or save themselves.

This is destructive because it leads to a source of human pride, and this constitutes the worship of the creature, not the Creator. Romans 1

At the cross God has outsmarted human wisdom and his weakness has overpowered human strength.

The foolishness of the one and the power of the other,

“Jews demand miraculous signs, and Greeks look for wisdom.”

The Jews, who were much interested in authenticating who Christ was by demanding signs, look for a certain kind of authority, a power that they can control. They said, If you will only do such-and-such, we will believe.

Even on the cross, “Come down from the cross and we’ll believe you.” If Jesus had done that, they could have come back the next day and said, “Well that was fine for yesterday, but what about today?

Pretty soon, then, Jesus becomes more or less like a genie in Aladdin’s lamp than the Sovereign God. Then, the real question is who controls the lamp?

The Greeks seek for wisdom.

This Greek philosophy of life is still with us today. This system says, especially in this postmodern age, this group has this values system and this group has that values system. I’m comfortable within mine, and that’s the end of it.”

The Greeks say God must present his credentials to human beings, they must approve him, and he must meet our criteria,

The Christian perspective is that culture-transcending truth turn on a God who is above all and who knows all.

“We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

“It’s foolishness to the Jews,” Paul says. They thought that anybody who was hung on a cross was cursed by God.

This foolishness of God transforms men and women, builds the church, reconciles rebels to God, and prepares a heaven. Everything that they have thought foolish has been the most sublime demonstration of the love and wisdom and power and strength of God himself.

The Cross Reaches Out to Lost Mankind

Paul turns to focus especially on those who accept it, and he finds that who they are supports his main point.

The people in Corinth who have become Christians are not the wise or the glamorous or the gifted or the saintly. No, by and large, with some wonderful exceptions, they’re nobodies.

“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called.” Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.” In other words, Paul wants the church to recognize the point.

The world in general has always looked at Christians as basically being a motley crew of slaves, stupid people, rejects of society, the scum.

The second century pagan Celsus sneered about Christians in these terms. “Their injunctions are like this, ‘Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near, for these abilities are thought by us to be evils, but as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.’ ”

Christians have always drawn from every stratum of society.

Paul moves to the underlying theological principle. “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are.”

Why?

“So that no one may boast before him.” No one is going to stand before God on the last day and say, “Well, you know, the gospel came to a lot of people, a lot of friends, and basically I was smart enough to make the right decision.”

Paul it is because of what God has done that you are in Christ Jesus.

‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ “Christ has become for us wisdom from God.”

He’s our wisdom along certain axes. Righteousness is in the legal realm. Holiness is in the religious realm. Redemption is in the realm of social structure, slavery.

In the righteousness realm, how is a guilty person, a rebel, to approach a holy God, a God who is right, who demands that people be right? The answer that Paul articulates elsewhere, by sending his dear Son to die in their place.

He liberates us from our guilt, from all the things that shame us and declare us guilty before God, and so he is not only our righteousness, he is also our redemption. He frees us from our slavery.

Those Who Proclaim the Cross

Paul’s own example when he first went to Corinth and preached to them showed he had self-consciously turned away from showmanship and self-reliance.

Paul writes, “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” That was a time and place where rhetoric was viewed with great honor.

Until the turn of the century, rhetoric was taught in all the major Western universities.
Paul is not a crypto anti-intellectual, in Thessalonica just two or three cities back, he is persuading people, and arguing. One city back in Athens, according to Acts, chapter 17, he debates and takes on the most brilliant minds in the hottest university of his day.

Then a few cities before that, well, he’s in the Jewish synagogue crossing swords with experts in Scripture.

With all of your discipline, if you offer up your best to God with your intellect, but at the same time, you must never, ever think that you reason people into the kingdom or that intellect alone saves.

At the heart of all that transforms is the cross.

Paul says. “I determined,” he says, “when I was with you to focus on Jesus Christ and him crucified. I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Paul said, “but my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words.” “I wasn’t manipulative, or trying to fool you.

Paul said I simply told you the truth of the cross in a reasonable, understandable way.