Written for the 10 am Bible Study at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Orlando FL.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
26 Consider your own
call, brothers and sisters:[a] not many of you were wise by human
standards,[b] not many were powerful, not many were of
noble birth. 27 But God chose
what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong; 28 God
chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to
nothing things that are, 29 so
that no one[c] might boast in the presence of God. 30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus,
who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and
redemption, 31 in order that, as
it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in[d] the Lord.”and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Footnotes:
- 1 Corinthians 1:26 Gk brothers
- 1 Corinthians 1:26 Gk according to the flesh
- 1 Corinthians 1:29 Gk no flesh
- 1 Corinthians 1:31 Or of
18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
I can’t help it, but when I come across the word “fool” or the word “foolishness,” I think of Mr. T in the old A Team television shows. He would always say, “What you talking ‘bout, fool?” And in one of the Rocky movies, Mr. T played the opponent who talked about how he “Pitied the fool” who would go up against him.
So I’ve seen that term as a comic term. But in the Bible, it was a very negative and strong word.
The fool is lacking in sense and intelligence.
Paul makes frequent ironic reference to foolishness, particularly in 1 and 2 Corinthians. Human understanding erroneously takes God's wisdom to be foolishness and God's strength to be weakness since God's actions do not fit human reason or expectation. Indeed, from a worldly perspective God uses the foolish thing and calls the foolish person.
19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
This is a quotation from Isaiah 29:14.
20 Where
is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did
not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our
proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For
Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but
we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to
Gentiles, 24 but to those who are
the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of
God. 25 For God’s foolishness is
wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Paul begins by making free use of two quotations from Isaiah (29:14, 33:18) to show how mere human wisdom is bound to fail. He cites the undeniable fact that, for all its wisdom, the world had never found God and was still blindly searching for the Lord. That very search was designed by God to demonstrate our own helplessness. We cannot find God, until God reaches out to us.
To the Jews, that message was a stumbling-block. There were two reasons.
First, for Jews it was absurd that someone who had died on a cross could possibly be God’s chosen one. In fact, the Jews had a law in Dt 21:23 that said, ‘Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse’
To a Jew, the crucifixion, did not only fail to prove Jesus was the Son of God, the crucifixion disproved.
It may seem difficult to understand, but, even with Isaiah 53 before their eyes, the Jews had never dreamt of a suffering Messiah. The cross, to the Jews, was and is a barrier to belief in Jesus.
Secondly, the Jews were looking for divine signs. They were desperate for the kind of Messiah they wanted, not the kind of Messiah God was sending.
At the time Paul was writing, there were lots and lots of false Messiahs.
All of them had various rates of success in tricking and deceiving the people into accepting them by the promise of wonders.
In AD 45, a man called Theudas persuaded thousands of people to leave their jobs and their homes and follow him out to the Jordan. He promised that he would command the Jordan to divide and he would lead them across without getting their feet wet.
In AD 54, a man from Egypt arrived in Jerusalem. Another Messiah. He convinced 30,000 people to follow him out to the Mount of Olives by promising that, at his word of command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall down.
That was the kind of thing that the Jews were looking for.
In Jesus, they saw one who was meek and lowly, one who deliberately avoided the spectacular, one who served and who ended on a cross – and it seemed to them an impossible picture of the chosen one of God.
To the Greeks, the message was also foolishness. Again - two reasons
First - In Greek thought, the first characteristic of God was apatheia. Sounds like our word “apathy” but it means more than not caring, it means the complete inability to feel.
That word means more than apathy; it means total inability to feel.
The Greeks believed that if God can feel emotions, such as joy or sorrow, happiness or grief, anger or love, it meant that God was too human and not divine.
A God who suffered was to the Greeks a contradiction in terms.
They went further. Plutarch, who was a great historian and philosopher, declared that it was an insult to God to even involve him in human affairs. God, he believed, was completely detached from humanity’s concerns.
St Augustine, was a very great scholar long before he became a Christian. He said that in his studies of Greek philosophers he found parallels to almost all the teaching of Christianity; except in one respect - he never found: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’
Celsus, who attacked the Christian faith towards the end of the second century AD. He had this to say: ‘God is good and beautiful and happy and is in that which is most beautiful and best. If then “He descends to men” it involves change for him, and change from good to bad, from beautiful to ugly, from happiness to unhappiness, from what is best to what is worst. Who would choose such a change? For mortality it is only nature to alter and be changed; but for the immortal to abide the same forever. God would never accept such a change.’
To any thinking Greek, the idea of “God incarnate” was a total impossibility.
Secondly, the Greeks sought wisdom.
Originally, the Greek word for wisdom, sophist, meant a wise man in the good sense; but it came to mean a person with a clever mind and quick tongue. It meant a person who would spend endless hours discussing hairsplitting trivial matters. Wisdom, became less the subject of truth, and more the showing off of one’s ability to debate.
28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
PAUL glories in the fact that, for the most part, the Church was composed of the most straightforward and humble people. However, it is not true that the early church was made up only of slaves.
In the New Testament we see that people from the highest ranks of society were Christians.
There was Dionysius at Athens (Acts 17:34). He was a judge.
Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Crete (Acts 13:6–12).
There were the noble ladies at Thessalonica and Beroca (Acts 17:4, 2)
Erastus was a city treasurer, probably of Corinth (Romans 16:23).
In the time of Nero, Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, was martyred for her Christianity.
But it remains true that the great mass of Christians were ordinary and humble men and women.
Somewhere about the year AD 178, Celsus wrote one of the most bitter attacks upon Christianity that was ever written. Ironically, what he was critical of was really what was so appealing to Christianity, especially to the ordinary people that he ridiculed. He declared that the Christian point of view was:
‘Let no cultured person draw near,
none wise, none sensible;
for all that kind of thing we count evil;
but if any man is ignorant, if any is lacking in sense and culture,
if any is a fool let him come boldly.’
Elsewhere he said of the Christians, ‘We see them in their own houses,
wool-dressers, cobblers and fullers [people who clean clothes],
the most uneducated and vulgar persons.’
30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
The quotation with which Paul finishes this passage is from Jeremiah 9:23–4. Rudolf Bultmann, a theologian, said that the one basic sin is self-assertion, or the desire for recognition. It is only when we realize that we can do nothing, and that God can and will do everything that real faith begins.
It is the amazing fact of life that it is the people who realize their own weakness and their own lack of wisdom who in the end are strong and wise. It is the fact of experience that those who think that they can take on life all by themselves are certain in the end to meet with disaster.
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