I Corinthians, 1:18-25
Roger Henderson · Jan 24, 2016
1 Corinthians, No. 04
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926526484711

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So last week you guys covered verses 10 through 17, which is the section that I labeled divisions in the church. And that's the first section that we kind of get into here that's going to talk about issues in the Corinthian church. And it's going to kind of go on through well into chapter 4. We first had in verses 1-9 the salutation to the church, and then Paul talked about these divisions. I thought it would be good if someone could read that again to set the stage for today.

Could someone read 1 Corinthians 1.10-17? The Lord Jesus Christ, that we all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same church. For it is clear enough to me of you, my brethren by then, which are of the house of the Holy, that there are contentions among you.

This I say, that every one of you says, I am of Paul, I am of Paul, I of Cephas, and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Christ Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Christ was engaged, guys. lest any should say that I am baptized in my own name. And I am baptized also in the household of Shabbat on us, just as I don't know now whether I am baptized in heaven. For Christ has sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel of the wisdom of the Lord, and the cross of Christ in me to benefit. I agree. Thank you. Thank you.

Basically, we see in that section in 10-17, which Randy covered last week, We see the stages kind of set that Paul talks about the fact that there are divisions among you. So we're going to see as we move into the rest of this chapter, we're going to see those divisions talked about.

But what's interesting is, what Paul's going to do is, as he talks about these divisions, he's going to teach us some really wonderful truths about our Lord Jesus. the Word of the Cross. So it's interesting, in answering the divisions among the Church and Corinthians, he's going to teach us about other subjects. So I have an outline here, I borrowed from Macaulay and kind of modified it a little bit. So basically he has the first two verses, which just were read, the problem of division stated. Then he has Paul's teaching on unity, which is basically starting from 13, verse 13 in this chapter 1, through verse 21. And then he further divides it down into all these sections here. And we're going to focus on section number two here today.

Unity is achieved by considering the true nature of the gospel, the word of the cross. And what I kind of found is that, and I hadn't actually thought about this before, the gospel, the good news, we find that actually in 1 Corinthians, right? 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Christ died for our sins. He was buried and rose again on the third day. But the word of the cross is closely associated, and I put IE in there, the word of the cross, or the message of the cross, or the doctrine of the cross, is closely associated with the gospel. In fact, actually it's like the details, if you will.

The gospel is pretty high level, right? It just kind of tells you what happened, what happened to Christ, what he did. But the word of the cross in scripture, we're going to see, gives a lot more detail. It gives a lot more detail associated with the phrase, the word of the cross. And so that's something I hadn't quite realized in the past, but it's really interesting. So when you think of the gospel, I think it's also good to think, well, the word of the cross, how does that fit in with the gospel?

And I would say it's a gospel expanded, if you will, or explained. OK, so we're going to focus on number two here. Randy kind of covered, and this is Macaulay's outline, and you could make some arguments about, you know, he basically has the person, the work of Christ, the true nature of the gospel, the membership of the church. the nature of truism, the nature of Christian service. You know, you look at different authors and they'll divide up the chapters a little bit differently, but I liked what he did, so I'm going to use it when I teach. So we're going to focus in on 18 through 25 today and talk about the Word of the Cross, which is kind of the gospel expanded and explained.

That's what Vern likes to say, so I'll use that phraseology there. okay so now can I have someone read another person I read 18 through 25 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 for it is written I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside where is the wise man where is the scribe Whereas the debater of this age, has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified to Jews a stubborn block and to Gentiles foolishness. but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

And 25. All right. But because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Great. Thanks so much. If you look here, the word wisdom and foolishness, or foolish, made foolish, appears a bunch of times. We're going to be talking about those two topics.

What's interesting is we're going to see man's foolishness as judged by God. We're going to see man's opinion of God. Man calls God's message foolishness. And God will turn around and judge man and call what he says foolishness. So it's interesting. It's sort of like, think about with Pharaoh. Remember when he himself hardened his heart and then God turned around and hardened Pharaoh's heart.

So we see sort of a judgment in the midst of this of when man rejects what God has proclaimed, there is a penalty for that. Salvation is in view always, but there is a penalty for rejecting the truth. So we're going to see foolishness and wisdom all through these verses here.

OK, so let's look at another outline. And this is going to outline just 18 through 25. Again, it's from Macaulay. And we kind of drop down another level. Unity is achieved by considering the true nature of the gospel, i.e., the word of the cross, called the gospel expanded and explained. So we're going to see two evaluations. 18 is kind of a critical verse. We're going to see two kinds of people in verse 18. how the perishing evaluate the cross, the unsaved, the perishing, and how the saved evaluate the cross.

They evaluate it in a totally different way. One sees it as a wonderful blessing. One sees it as the power of God. The other sees it as foolishness. Actually, it's a word from moron, moronic. It's actually, in the Greek thinking, they saw it as a feeble mind. You just aren't You're not with it. You don't think very well if you believe this kind of message. And actually, as a Christian, you realize that people in our world view it the same way. They see the word of Jesus Christ, the word of the cross, as those people... I don't know about those people.

And they have that same view. It's in Paul's time, and it's in our time too. So 18 is pivotal. And then from 18, these two expand. We see basically the two evaluations analyzed. We see the perishing example expanded and explained, so to speak. And then we see the saved expanded and explained.

And once again, we're going to see in the midst of the perishing expanded, we're going to see God's judgment in there. Because they have evaluated the cross as foolishness, God's going to come back and say, since you've done that, And you might say, well, that seems very harsh of God to do that. But God's wisdom is higher than man's wisdom. An axiom. You cannot go beyond that. God, in his great mercy, is not willing that any should perish.

But in terms of what he has proclaimed and done, he's going to judge man based upon that. And there's not really a... I kind of struggle with this a little bit. He talks about judging man and what he's going to do, but what's always in view is his grace. He doesn't say, I judge you, and once I judge you, He doesn't give a timetable to that. He knows man's heart, but he does judge man for his view of the cross, his unacceptance of that cross. Any questions?

I'm just going to jump into verse 18. We're going to be talking about the perishing and the saved, and then we're going to talk about wisdom and foolishness. Those are the four areas we're going to be talking about through all of this. And really, what I realize, and Randy and I and Bob are all going to have this challenge, even though we've divided it over 52 weeks, there's really so much in some of these verses that we just are not going to be able to go as deep as we could. But we'll do our best. We'll do our best. Okay. So the first one, first verse, verse 18.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. So we're going to start off with the unsaved, the perishing. And their evaluation of the Word of the Cross is that it's foolishness. So the question is, what is the Word of the Cross?

And I kind of already alluded to that. I called it the Gospel Expanded and Explained. But before I give my answer to that, let's look at the word, word. And it's Logos. And actually, remember that word or have been acquainted with that word. If you remember, I have at the very end, it's a title given to the Son of God and John. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. So the word Logos is the idea of a message or a doctrine.

So you could say the message of the cross. In fact, some Bibles will use that translation, the message of the cross or the word of the cross. What I found interesting was The gospel seems to be always associated with proclamation. In fact, it's where Euangelion is to say or preach out a message.

In this situation we're talking about a doctrine or message or content. So you need both. You need the proclamation of it and you need the content. And this is what's cool. The Word of the Cross is the content. What makes the cross special, what makes it so wonderful is that it's God's message to man to save him.

So let's look at a couple of verses I want to look at. Let's look at, can someone read Acts Acts 13, verse 26. 13, 26 in Acts. And it's going to use this same word, Logos. Brethren, sons of Abraham's family and those among you who fear God, to us the message of this salvation has been sent. Very simple. In this case, it says the message of the Logos of this salvation has been sent. That's one verse.

Another verse is really cool. is just down the road there, a couple chapters down, in Acts 15.7. Could someone read that?

Acts 15.7.

After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, Brethren, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe. Now notice here, actually I usually go over this with Bonnie and Ryan at home, and so Bonnie said, well Roger, look at this, it says the word of the gospel, this is the word of the cross, and it can get a little confusing, But I think, once again, the word or message is to explain what's going on. So this uses the phrase, the word of the gospel. So what would be the important aspects of this message? The word of the cross. So I took a crack at it. And I think these are at least three, I'm sure there's more we could add, at least three vital points. First of all, the person. Who's the person involved here?

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died. Second, his death satisfied a holy God about man's sins, giving eternal life to all those who believe in him. And then third, and this wouldn't always, you know, I'm so thankful that I've come to understand this. This wouldn't always be put in the list. Unfortunately, it would be left out. His death also separated all who believe in him from the source of their sin, their sin nature. making it possible, as they walk by faith, to live a life for God, i.e. in fellowship with Him.

So that's at least three aspects of the wonderful Word of the Cross. And as you go through Scripture, you're going to see so many things tied to the Cross, and that's a detailed explanation of what transpired at Calvary. And that's what we're spending our time as waiting for the Lord, to understand more about what happened at Calvary and how that affected us and our relationship with God.

Any thoughts you want to add? That's what I thought was at least the key elements of the Word of the Cross. So you're kind of getting the idea. Gospel's up here kind of high level. Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose again on the third day. The Word of the Cross gets down to the meat. It gets down to the meat of what happened. OK. So a couple more points.

Foolishness. And this is always referred to as before. Foolishness is this word in the Greek, moria. It comes from the word English for moron. And the Greeks, like I mentioned before, they thought they used this for a feeble-minded person, a person that wasn't too with it. He might have actually a physical issue, but they used that word to describe that kind of person. And there's at least one verse I want to read here, which is really important. Which kind of ties in really well?

Could someone read 1 Corinthians 2.14? Which is going to use this word foolishness.

1 Corinthians 2.14. because they were spiritually discerned. Good. A pretty familiar verse, but it talks about this person, and we're going to see this. In fact, I kind of tweaked the schedule a little bit with Randy's. I kind of tweaked it because I like the section about the three kinds of men, and this is one of the three kinds of men. This is a person, the unbeliever. It would be the perishing.

This is the unbeliever in 1 Corinthians 2.14, and he's called the natural man or the psychicos man. He can't accept the things of the Spirit of God. They're foolishness to him. They're moronic. They're feeble-minded. They don't make any sense. And you can see that.

Without the illumination of the Holy Spirit, things don't make sense. Have you ever read, go to King Soopers or someplace, and you'll find these Christian cards, Christian birthday cards, whatever, and you open them up and you start reading the message and you look at those and you say, It doesn't make sense. They don't understand it, so they take verses and they apply them in weird ways and they say all kinds of weird things. That doesn't make sense.

That's because the Spirit of God, that we have the Spirit of God in Illumina, we understand that. A person outside takes verses and they have them all kinds of cockeyed ways and saying all kinds of things that don't make any sense. So, it's really true. We need the Spirit of God in our lives to show us the truth of God. OK, so that's foolishness.

OK, the perishing, this is a word that's interesting. And Vine has it here. Those who perish, who are perishing, and it's important to realize the verb tense here, means those who are exposed to eternal death. So we're going to see here, and this is really interesting, the perishing are in a state continually, much like when Christ said, allow the dead to bury the dead.

And what I mean by this, it's a little confusing, the perishing A believer doesn't start on a neutral playing field. He doesn't start in the middle. And that's what I thought. I remember before I was a believer, I thought, well, I can choose God or I cannot choose God. I'm in the middle. I don't have to choose Him. I think Hal maybe had a similar thing. I can be in the middle. No, you can't be.

The Word of God says that you're perishing. You've already, before you, when you come into this world, and you come from Adam's line, you're already perishing. And that's the verb tense, are perishing. You are perishing. Notice it says, those who are perishing, they're in the process of perishing. So what God wants to do, He wants to take us from perishing to living, to having life, to move from the state of perishing to life.

And it's very similar, when Christ said, I thought it always just kind of Kind of shocks me when Christ said, allow the dead to bury the dead. I'm alive and I'm burying a dead person. How can you call me dead? Well, Christ called them dead because they didn't know him. So the unbeliever is perishing. He's dead. It's impossible for him to know God.

But God wants to take him from that state to life. So that's what's kind of interesting. It says, for the word of cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. They're in that continual state. So they can't make sense of it. It's impossible for them to make sense. So it describes the continual state of the unbeliever. Let's see, was there a verse I wanted to look at there?

And there are several verses, maybe in the interest of time we won't cover those, but there are verses in 2 Corinthians 2.15 and 4.3, it talks about how the gospel is veiled to those who are perishing. And it makes sense. They don't have the equipment, they don't have the understanding to understand the word of the cross.

Now here's the flip side, but to us who are being saved is the power of God. The flip side of that is, for us who are being saved, wow, thank you Lord, I understand what you're doing, thank you that you've accomplished this. And what's interesting is, we had our perishing, And now we are being saved.

We have two continual states. We are either continually perishing or we are continually being saved. And this is another important point. I think you guys probably have heard this before. There are three aspects of salvation and we are in the process of being saved. We have been saved in the past when we accepted the Lord as our Savior. We are being saved presently from the power of sin, as I mentioned earlier. And we shall be saved from the presence of sin. So, salvation is a process. And that our being saved is one of the many places in scripture that you can go to and say, wow, salvation is a process.

Where am I in that process? I'm in this middle place right here. I'm being saved by the power of God, the Holy Spirit working in my life. And it's the power of God who accomplishes this. So there's so much in these verses. This is just the first one. Fortunately, we can go a little bit faster. But this is a key verse. This verse, verse 23, is a really wonderful verse. They're all wonderful. You ever listen to Jay Vernon McGee? Every verse is wonderful. And they are. Every verse is wonderful. I love that when he does that. OK. Verse 19.

So now we're going to see God's judgment come into view here in this verse. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside. So this is going to start the section in 19 through 22, where he's going to talk about the judgment on the perishing for their view of what God has given them. OK. So his judgment is as follows. And I just recopied what I had up there. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, I will set aside the cleverness of the clever.

This is a quote from Isaiah 29.14. Basically, it's very similar to that, but just maybe highlights of that. If you go look at that passage in Isaiah, you'll see that He talks about a people who draw near to me with words. They come to me with words. They come to me with lip service. This is verse 13, Isaiah 29, 13. They come to me with lip service, but their hearts are far from me.

So they come to him and they kind of, and you kind of, we kind of see that where people will make allusions to God, and they'll say, the guy upstairs, they'll have things that they don't know what they're talking about, but their hearts are far from me. And he basically has the same kind of words he has here in Isaiah 29, 14.

And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning will be concealed. So basically, he says the wisdom of the I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. And destroy here is not extinction. It's basically ruin or loss, loss of well-being.

And it's used like in Luke 5.37, it's used with the wineskins. Remember the passage where if you put new wine in old wineskins, it basically ruins them. They get ruined. I think they will tear. And the other passage in Luke 15 is the one about the sheep, the lost sheep. So it's ruin or loss. So destroy is the idea of ruin or loss. So he's not destroying people, but they're suffering something.

And then the other words here are the cleverness. This word denotes the ability to understand and see relationships between things. And then set aside. Set aside means to make void or null. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this. Let's look at what Macaulay says.

Paul quotes from Isaiah 29.14. This passage in Isaiah deals with what may be called judicial blindness. It centers about the fact that there are consequences for coming into contact and truth in rejecting it.

That's kind of why I was pointing out God judges that, and He judges it righteously. So there'll be no person that says, well, you judged me, and therefore I couldn't believe the gospel. No person can do that before God, because He's not willing that any should perish. But He does judge that. And how that exactly works together, I'm not sure I can tell you. But this is a passage that talks about His judgment on the unbeliever. So now he goes through this kind of iterative process where he argues, this is like an argument.

Where is the wise man? The wise man is believed to be kind of like the Greek philosopher. And we see both Jews and Greeks in this, all through this, Jews and Gentiles, Jews and Greeks. Where is the scribe? This points to the Jewish thinker. And then we kind of have a, where is the debater or the age?

And this was a person that would debate His logic, you know, we saw that if you're in the Acts class, which we had a couple of times ago, we saw that when Paul and his missionary journeys, he would come across people that would debate him and they'd be very wise and they would realize how brilliant Paul was.

But at some point they would break away. They'd say, he's crazy because he would present the gospel, the word of the gospel. And they'd say, that doesn't make any sense to me. They attracted him because he was a very brilliant person. But when it came down, when he presented the truth, the simple truth of the gospel, simple truth of the cross, they left him. They went away from him. And that's kind of this debater. He wants to debate and get into arguments. And he loves that process.

But that's not going to lead you to Christ. So what's God's judgment? God has not made foolish the wisdom of the world. And so actually, I kind of diagrammed it a little bit. Basically, made foolish is the idea that God has, at a point in time, passed point action. He has judged the world, the wisdom of the world. OK.

For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God. I found another translation I liked a little bit better than for the A part of this verse. For since, in accordance with the wisdom of God, the world had in reality, by means of its wisdom, come to know God."

So basically, man wants to figure out a way to know God. He wants to circumvent what God has accomplished, what God's word says. He wants to find a way In his mind, I'm going to discover God. I'll discover God in the stars. I'll discover God this way. Man wants to create something that's outside of God's provision. God's provided his word, the Holy Spirit. He wants to find some way.

So this verse is kind of saying that. For since in accordance with the wisdom of God, the world had never in reality, by means of its wisdom, come to know God. So that's kind of cool here. And this verse just came to my mind. I always like this verse because it keeps me straight. Isaiah says, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. So it's good to keep that in mind.

But what's wonderful is God has given us his word to understand. It doesn't mean we stop short and say, well, I guess I can't understand anything, and throw our hands up and walk away. No, it says, don't forget, you're dealing with a holy, infinite God, and you're not going to always understand everything. You'll understand what God, you know, he's given you enough information to come to salvation to understand him. But keep this verse in mind. I always come back to that verse.

So the last half of the verse says, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. So this is God's message. He's going to save man through a message which the perishing view, the man outside of Christ view as foolishness. He's going to save men that way. And that message is, as we'll see in verse 23, but we preach Christ crucified. One of his favorite verses, I would say, he preached Christ crucified. When he did that, that was offensive to people. And that's offensive to people today.

Michael McCauley said, God has judged human wisdom because of his failure to achieve the highest good, to know God. As a consequence, God saves men by a message that insults human wisdom and pride. It will hear nothing of man's logic and will have nothing of his works. That's the way God operates. God is going to save man by his ways, and his ways are holy and righteous and just. And then 22, for indeed, Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom. So kind of the two different mindsets here. The Jews asked for signs. Remember signs in the New Testament and the Gospels?

They were always coming to Christ and they would say, it's sort of like, show me your stuff. They'd say, do a miracle for us. We'll believe you. Do a miracle. I want to see something. And actually, in some ways, that was their heritage. That's the way God revealed themselves in the Old Testament. He did do miracles. So when Christ came along, they said, well, do a miracle and maybe I'll be interested in you. But that's not how God is working. He worked that way in the past. He's not working that way now. And that's some of the verses that talk about that.

And then the Jews search for wisdom. And the wisdom is Sophia in the Greek. And Zodiates kind of had a comment about that. The learning of philosophy current among the Greeks and Romans in the apostolic age intended to draw away the minds of the men from divine truth, which stood in contrast with the simplicity of the gospel. So the gospel is simple, straightforward. Man wants to make it complicated. He wants to have a complicated... I want a complicated God. I want a real...

So I can take credit because I'm smart and I can figure it out. It was simple and easy. Anybody can understand them. Randy, go ahead. One of the things I think is interesting is for the Jews, the signs became novelty. It was as though they had gone to a theater and seen David Copperfield, and they stopped to recognize the intent. And for the Greeks, that wisdom was so critically appreciated for pride. Just like today, when you hear a politician talk, they talk about some kind of idea, or an ideal that they have, and as soon as they get into office, it doesn't matter.

They just knew what you wanted to hear. They just knew it was a new thing. Tell me a new thing you're going to do. Tell me a new truth. But it didn't matter if it was applicable, it didn't matter if it was practical, it didn't matter if it would change things. You just had to have mental assent. Right. And we see that in the You know, like an ax there are places where the people, they want to, tell me a new thing I haven't heard. Tell me a new, you know, what's the newest thing? And our society is so much into the newest thing. It was a cartoon. Go ahead, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, with the Jews asking for miracles, it's like he did miracles. Do another one. It's not enough. What have you done for me lately? Exactly. More and more and more. More and more miracles, right.

My wife showed me this cartoon about this kid who just got the newest phone, the 2016 phone. And as soon as he got it, there was an advertisement for the 2017 phone. And he's so upset. Oh, I just got my 2016 phone and now there's an advertisement for my 2017 phone. What am I going to do? I have to wait a whole year for the 2017 phone.

Man, we're so much like that. It's kind of sad. I love this verse. This is a great verse. But we preach Christ crucified. And what's the result of that preaching? To the Jew, a stumbling block. To the Greek, foolishness. This is the last section. This section is about the saved. And this is what the saved expanded message is.

Okay, so I went through and I kind of diagrammed it. The subject is we, Paul and others, and that's an emphatic statement. We, but we, emphatically, preach to proclaim an objective message, and it's in the present tense, so they're preaching it continually. So basically it's, just stop there, we preach Christ, but what about Christ? And this is the key. This is what I can remember, I hate to, you know, My sister doesn't know the Lord, and my mom died. My father already died in the past. This is 1990. My mom died. She died here in Denver. She was brought here from New Mexico, where my sister lives.

Anyway, I wanted a tombstone, and my mom had become a believer, which is neat. I got a chance to talk to her about that, which was really wonderful. So I wanted to have on the tombstone, safe in the Lord Jesus. What my sister objected to was Jesus. It was finally safe and the Lord was okay. But she wanted that tombstone to read just safe and the Lord. She didn't want to have the Lord Jesus mentioned. So I can identify.

So you can preach Christ, then people will even object to that. But you preach him crucified, what he did, oh, well, wait a minute. I'm not sure we allow that here. We can't have a crucified Christ here. And we're going to see, it really rocked the Jewish view, because Christ was the Messiah. That's not what the Messiah is supposed to do. He's supposed to come and free us from this Roman slavery and make everything wonderful. But he didn't do that. He died on the cross, an awful death.

So crucified was really cool here. Crucified is in the perfect tense. And the perfect tense is past completed action with abiding results. So trying to take it over into the English. have him been crucified in the past with results into the present and on into the future. It speaks of the completeness of Christ's crucifixion. It's as applicable today as it was when he was crucified.

And there's some verses there that talk about that. Let's see. It might be one of those. Let me see. Yeah, let's read. 1 Corinthians 2. Could someone read that? For I determined that there was nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Right. So Paul says we preach Christ crucified and what was his whole focus? He determined. So what should our focus be? If Paul says my focus is to to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. It has to be both. It has to be both. It has to be a crucified Savior. It can't be anything else.

And then Weiss kind of renders this. He does a good job. He doesn't bring through the full But as for us, we are proclaiming Christ. So the key is, we're proclaiming Christ, and the modifier to that is that he's a crucified Christ, who has been crucified. So it's hard to bring that perfect tense all the way into English. It would make it really very cumbersome.

But he does a pretty good job. OK, so here's the two parts. To the Jew assembled block. So I like what Constable said about this. A crucified Messiah was a stumbling block to the Jews because they regarded Messiah as a person whom God's blessing rested upon.

If you look at that Isaiah 11.2 passage, you'll see that that talks about, I'll just read part of it.

Isaiah 11.2, it says, the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, and the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. So that 11.2 talks about the fact that this Messiah is going to have all these wonderful things. He's not going to be one that's going to be hung on a cross and going to be disgraced. So they couldn't reconcile that. And the last part kind of speaks to that. However, Jesus' execution hung him on a tree, sure proof that God had cursed him.

And that verse is like Galatians 3.13, is cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. So they couldn't reconcile. That's why it stumbled the Jews. To the Greeks, foolishness, Moria again. To others, foolishness, revealing the two enemies of the cross, religious pride and intellectual pride.

So 24. But to those who are the called, both Jew and Greek, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Now we have the evaluation of the Savior. So first of all, we know that every believer, from a variety of verses, every believer has been called. We're saints by his calling. We're called according to his purpose. So if you look in those verses, you'll see that every believer is called.

So there's two aspects of that. Christ, the power of God, and Christ, the wisdom of God. So what I found was kind of interesting. Let's look at a couple of verses here. We saw that Christ is the power of God. So Christ, in His very essence, is the power of God. And if you go back to verse 18, we see the Word of the Cross is the power of God. All with this back part, the power of God. So we see that Christ, in His essence, is the power of God. The Word of the Cross is a power of God.

And then if you look at Romans 1.16, we'll see that the Gospel is a power of God. And there's actually a bunch of other situations. So I thought that was kind of neat.

We see God's power displayed in the very person of Christ, in the Word of the Cross, in the Gospel. God's power is displayed in various aspects, in various ways, in the very person of Christ, in His work. So that's why it's always good to remember We believe in the person and the work of Christ. You cannot separate the person and the work of Christ.

He has to be God. And that's why I had another little thing about the Word of the Cross. It has to be the person of Christ and the work of Christ. Those two things are inseparable for a saving Savior. We cannot have a Savior without those two aspects. And then we have Christ, the wisdom of God. And the constable had something to say about that. He is the instrument of God's wisdom in solving the problem of human reasoning. Human reasoning cannot unravel, namely, how people can know God and come to God.

So this knowledge and wisdom we've been talking about most of this passage, it's not to say, The focus of this knowledge and wisdom is about man's relationship to God and how man can interface with God, how he can come to God. We're not saying that what man discovers, like he discovers how the stars move, he discovers medicine. It's not saying any of that wisdom that God has allowed man to understand is foolish. It's not at all. That's wonderful wisdom. Understanding God's creation is wonderful.

But when man seeks to understand God and he goes about in his own way, that's where God has a problem, as we've looked at in many different ways. That's the rub that's being talked about here, not the overall knowledge that man gains by observing this world and writing it down in physics books and chemistry books and whatever. That's wisdom that God has allowed man to understand.

Now you can move outside that. Man comes to crazy conclusions about interactions between people and social. There's all kinds of nutty stuff there. But there's a lot of wonderful things that God has allowed man to understand. because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Well, you know, I looked at this and I actually didn't think there was much of a problem. And I started saying a little bit, you know, people have kind of, they've kind of wondered about this and they said, well, can God, can God be foolish in his essence? And maybe this is, maybe this is, you know, Maybe you already understand the intent, and I think I did too. I never had a problem with saying that this verse was telling me that God is foolish. It's just saying, well, that's man's evaluation of God. But if you look at it a little closer, there's some other renderings of this verse. You could translate the foolish acts of God as man views it. So this is man's view of God.

This is not God in his essence. It can't be. God cannot be foolish. So actually I took the time of copying these other translations in there just for your own reference. If you think about it or somebody questions you about it, that God cannot be foolish in his essence and he's not weak in his essence either. That cannot be God. That's not his character. It's impossible for him to be that.

So this verse is just saying, this is what man views God as being. And that can be a flawed view. That verse is talking about man's flawed view of God, I think. And the weakness of God is stronger than men. So to be translated, the weak act of God, as man views it, nothing of human accomplishment ever begins to rival the power of the cross to save men.

Okay, I just zoomed through this really quick. Go ahead. The thing that's interesting with this verse here is that there's a comparative quality, and Paul is kind of poking fun at the way that man defines wisdom and foolishness. Wisdom is defined in God, and so when man tries to claim wisdom greater than God, they have to steal the definition from Him, and then try to use their own derivative source to try to poke at God, and they fail to do so. They can't do it. I know, I agree with you. Cheryl?

I was going to say kind of the same thing, that God's wisdom is so much greater than man, that man is so foolish. That man's wisdom I see now I've lost the thought there. Like Randy said, he's comparing that man what he thinks his wisdom is compared to God's wisdom. Well, no. Well, we come to the conclusion that we, you know, man's pretty arrogant, you know, as we as we see the political cycle shows that off pretty well. Right. Man is pretty arrogant. You know, he's just beyond beyond reason. Right. Saying that quite right.

So we're going to say, you know, this is a section if you go back to the very I don't want to go back back through all the. The handout here, but the section here, this is a section that Macaulay kind of has. This is, you know, in addressing what's interesting in addressing divisions in the church, he presents this, which to me, you know, it just. This could just be a section of scripture unto itself. Let's talk about the word of God, the word of the cross. He brings that in there. If you think about it, why does he bring it in? He brings it in so that we'll have our focus crystal clear.

We cannot be saved by any part of human wisdom. There can be nothing of that in our salvation. Otherwise, It's not a true salvation. Paul makes it crystal clear that it has to be God's wisdom. It cannot be anything of man's. You can't say, well, I got half the way to God and then God helped me the rest of the way. No, you couldn't get to square one. I'm sorry. You couldn't get to square one.

He had to take you from square one and we all start at square one. We all start as the perishing, and that's the other thing that's so cool. You start looking at those verb tenses, we're the perishing, so we're not starting, as I said before, we're not starting from a neutral place.

I told you before, I thought, well I'll just stand here right in the middle and I'll choose God or I won't choose God. I was such a fool to say that. Thankfully the Lord opened my eyes. The Holy Spirit showed me things. It was wonderful. I can remember saying that.

I'll just be here in the middle. It's funny because you think it's a position of neutrality, but really it's a position of arrogance. It is. You're not neutral and you're very arrogant. But you don't realize that. So that's why when you see those passages that God judges that, I think you have to take that in the context of God's whole program of salvation. You can't say, well, boy, God judged me. I guess I'm up the creek. You wouldn't realize that. You couldn't realize that.

But in reading those verses, we have to keep in mind God's grace and his plan of salvation for man. But it does say we shouldn't trifle. And as we tell people about God's will, you shouldn't trifle with God's Word. The consequences of not believing it is eternal separation from Him.

So that's pretty sobering. You started to bring up the division element, and I think one of the things that's cool about this in the context of addressing division is that division shows a reflection to man's wisdom instead of God's wisdom, and that's where division comes in. Excellent. Which is all of grace.

Next week we're going to talk about the division among what he calls the membership of the church. That's going to be verses 26-31. In there we're going to see ideas about your calling. God is going to teach us things in these sections about division. that are just so wonderful truths that we need to understand for our Christian life.

So we shouldn't get too wrapped up, wait, this is just the church here in Corinth. No, these are wonderful truths for us to understand what God has accomplished in our salvation. Nothing else, we'll close. We thank you, Father. We thank you so much for this day, Lord. We thank you for the blessings we have in our Savior, Lord. Thank you for your wonderful plan. Thank you for the word of the cross. Thank you that we worship serve a crucified Lord and how important that is that we realize the wonderful aspects of that and how crucial it is to our salvation. In Christ's name, Amen.