1 CORINTHIANS 2:10-16 - The Depths of God

Introduction

A couple weeks back I was walking in to work on one of my days on campus, and I noticed a crew from the Physical Plant digging a ditch along Curtin Road right by my office. They were apparently replacing some drainage culverts, and as I walked by I saw they had a big trench box ready to drop into the ditch as they were working—even at a depth of a few feet, dirt collapsing on someone is extremely dangerous!

Our text this morning is about what it means to be a spiritual man or woman—Paul makes a distinction between a “natural” man and a “spiritual” man in Verses 14-15 in terms of how they relate to what he calls “the depths of God”:

1 Corinthians 2:14–15 LSB

But a natural man does not accept the depths of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually examined. But he who is spiritual examines all things, yet he himself is examined by no one.

The Greek word translated “depths” there is bathos, which gives its name to the bathysphere, a steel diving sphere invented by the early 20th Century scientist William Beebe—it allowed him to descend thousands of feet into the ocean off the coast of Bermuda in 1934. He was able to descend far deeper into the depths of the ocean than anyone previously thought possible and saw things no one had ever seen before because he was equipped with that diving vessel.

This is the distinction that Paul is making here with respect to the natural man (who has not experienced the New Birth) and the spiritual man who has come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. The spiritual man is equipped to see (and marvel at) the wonders of the depths of God revealed in the Gospel.

Paul has just reminded us of the glorious Good News of the Gospel that God revealed to us:

1 Corinthians 2:9 LSB

But just as it is written, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, And which have not entered the heart of man, All that God has prepared for those who love Him.”

And starting in Verse 10, he shows us how God revealed that glorious Gospel to us:

1 Corinthians 2:10 LSB

But to us God revealed them through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.

Paul lays out the difference between the natural man and the spiritual man in these verses: The spiritual man is equipped to see and delight in the depths of God’s glory revealed in the Gospel—it is a capacity that the natural man simply doesn’t have.

And so the way I want to summarize this passage for us this morning is to say that

The spiritual man can never SETTLE for a SHALLOW Gospel

It was said that when William Beebe went on his first dive with the bathysphere, the captain of the ship above him kept radioing him that he needed to surface, but Beebe wanted to keep going deeper because of the wonders he saw—bioluminescent fish species that had never been seen by human eyes. In the same way, once you have come to see the glories of God in the Gospel revealed to you by God’s Spirit, you will have a hunger to go even deeper into that Gospel; you can never get tired of it, never come to the end of the wonder of it.

The spiritual man can never settle for a shallow Gospel, because

I. He has been GIVEN God’s SPIRIT (1 Corinthians 2:10-12)

Look with me at Verses 10-11:

1 Corinthians 2:10–11 LSB

But to us God revealed them through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the depths of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the depths of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.

These verses, by the way, are one of the texts that show us that the Holy Spirit is equally God along with the Father and the Son—if the Holy Spirit of God fully and completely knows the depths of God, then He must be fully divine as well.

Just as a man’s spirit knows his own depths—no one knows you better than yourself, right? So no one knows God’s depths better than God. And so when His Spirit reveals the glories of the Gospel to a believer through the New Birth,

His EYES are OPENED (vv. 10-11)

Having your eyes opened to the depths of God’s glory in the Gospel means being alive to the profound wisdom and beauty of what God accomplished through Jesus on the Cross. The Gospel isn’t just academic to you; it’s not just a set of propositions that you arrange in your head in a particular order. A truly spiritual man or woman doesn’t just acknowledge the truth of the Gospel; they delight in it. You have a feeling sense of your tiny little soul perched on the beach of an ocean that stretches far beyond your sight; you are gazing up into the infinite reaches of the night sky dusted with innumerable stars; you are standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon utterly taken with the depths and the glory and the wonder of what Jesus did for you on that Cross, and you never get enough of it.

A spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow Gospel—his eyes have been opened by God’s Spirit to the wonders of the Gospel, and

He is STRUCK by GRACE (v. 12)

1 Corinthians 2:12 LSB

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the depths graciously given to us by God,

When our eyes are opened to the depths of the Gospel, what strikes us most is the unbelievable grace of God in our salvation. Paul strikes a contrast between the spirit of the world and the Spirit of God in this verse—all the spirit of this world can give us is condemnation. Paul has written extensively in the last chapter of what you will hear if you listen to what the world’s wisdom tells you—it will use guilt to manipulate you, it will threaten to shame you if you do not comply; it will beat you down with your past and throw every rotten thing you did or said back in your face; it will make you hard and unforgiving, train you to “look out for number one”. The spirit of the world will look at the depths of the Gospel and say it’s stupid, foolish and weak.

But to the one who has been given God’s Spirit, whose eyes have been opened to the depths of the glories of the Gospel, all they can see is the amazing grace of God toward them! The spirit of the world is all about condemnation; the spirit of God is about grace and mercy and peace. To look with eyes wide open on your sin and guilt and shame and all the condemnation in the world that you deserve, and then to look to the grace you have received in Christ is to be utterly undone by it! There is nothing shallow about the depths of God’s grace in the Gospel to the one who sees with eyes opened by His Spirit!

The spiritual man can never settle for a shallow Gospel because he has been given God’s Spirit. Paul goes on in Verses 13-14 to show us that the spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow Gospel because

II. He has the WORD of the SPIRIT (1 Corinthians 2:13-14)

1 Corinthians 2:13 LSB

of which depths we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual depths with spiritual words.

Paul says in this verse that he and the other Apostles speak not by their own human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit—this is a description of the process by which the Holy Spirit inspired Paul and the other authors of the New Testament to write the Scriptures:

2 Peter 1:20–21 LSB

Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes by one’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by the will of man, but men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Through His work of inspiration of the authors of the New Testament (including Paul), the Holy Spirit has provided “Spiritual depths combined with spiritual words” to provide the spiritual man with

The SOURCE of his WISDOM (v. 13; cp. 2 Peter 1:20-21)

The spiritual man finds his wisdom here in this Book; the result of the moving of the Spirit of God in a unique and unrepeatable way in the words of the Biblical authors of the Old and New Testament. And in this Book we have the words of God Himself—we have His wisdom treasured up for us; the spiritual depths of this Book have been explored by lifetimes of men for millennia and no one has found the bottom yet! There is nothing shallow or boring or uninteresting about God’s Word to the spiritual man, the spiritual woman. It is the source of real wisdom about this world, real truth about our lives, and real comfort in our trials.

In Verse 14 Paul goes on to remind us again that the source of this wisdom in the Holy Spirit-breathed Scriptures is considered foolishness by the world around us:

1 Corinthians 2:14 LSB

But a natural man does not accept the depths of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually examined.

For the spiritual man, the Scriptures are the source of his wisdom—but they are also

The REASON for his REJECTION (v. 14)

The source of the spiritual man’s wisdom is also the reason he is considered a fool by the world around him. But for the man who has been granted to hear and understand the words of God Himself, the ridicule and dismissiveness of the world doesn’t matter to him! The man or woman who has been equipped to search out the depths of God’s wisdom can’t just walk away from that wisdom because people who do not have the Spirit of God think they’re foolish for believing.

But we have to make a careful distinction here—it is possible to be despised and ridiculed by the world for being a jerk about the Bible. If you are known for being argumentative or arrogant, if your commitment to the Bible is only so that you can show yourself superior to the person you’re arguing with, that’s not the kind of spirituality Paul is writing about here.

When Paul draws this distinction between the spiritual and natural man in their attitude towards God’s Word, one of the defining differences is that the spiritual man has a great deal of affection for God’s Word. It’s not just his tool to use to win an argument or prove a point; it is his delight. As the psalmist writes:

Psalm 119:15–16 LSB

I will muse upon Your precepts And look upon Your ways. I shall delight in Your statutes; I shall not forget Your word.

What sets the spiritual man apart from the natural man is his delight and joy in God’s Word that no ridicule or rejection from the world can affect. The revelation of the depths of God’s wisdom in the Gospel through His Word is his joy and his refuge and his treasure.

The spiritual man can never settle for a shallow Gospel—he has been given the Spirit of God, he has been given God’s Spirit, and in Verses 15-16 we see that

III. He has the MIND of CHRIST (1 Corinthians 2:15-16)

Paul says that the natural man cannot understand the depths of God’s wisdom because he rejects the wisdom of God revealed by His Spirit in His Word. But as for the spiritual man,

He has deep UNDERSTANDING (v. 15)

Paul says in Verse 15

1 Corinthians 2:15 LSB

But he who is spiritual examines all things, yet he himself is examined by no one.

Now, this isn’t saying that the spiritual man is unquestionable or accountable to no one; the idea here is that through God’s Spirit dwelling in you and God’s Word illuminating your understanding, you can know real truth. There really is truth that would be true whether you ever lived or not; there really is a way to know truth, and the one who has God’s Spirit dwelling in him and has God’s Word teaching him can know truth in a way that the natural man simply cannot.

This is why, for instance, Jesus got to call the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” in Matthew 23:27 but they didn’t get to call Him that. His assessment of them was true, and their accusations about His character were false. In the same way, the spiritual man is able to speak the truth about the sins and rebellions of our day, because he has been given the capacity to truly examine and evaluate what is true. And at the same time, the world cannot judge what he knows to be true as falsehood or foolishness—the truth that he speaks cannot be judged as false by the world. He has boldness because he has real understanding!

To have the mind of Christ is to have real understanding:

1 Corinthians 2:16 LSB

For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will direct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.

And see here in Verse 16 that the spiritual man not only has real understanding,

He has a deep FRIENDSHIP (v. 16)

with Christ. The spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow Gospel—and so he cannot settle for a shallow relationship with Christ. To “have the mind of Christ” does not just mean that we have real understanding of this world, it is a mark of intimacy with Christ Himself. Our Lord says this so clearly to His disciples on the night He was betrayed:

John 15:14–15 LSB

“You are My friends if you do what I command you. “No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.

The spiritual man has Christ for His friend—he has a Friend that takes an interest in his troubles, Who intercedes for him before His Father in Heaven. He has a Friend Who invites him into His counsels to show him what He is doing to bring the world to salvation through His work.

The spiritual man does not take this friendship for granted—it does not mean that since he has Christ for his friend that he is exempted from serving Him; instead, it means that he is able to offer delighted and loving obedience; his life is marked by a devotion to Christ that shows itself in a regular, earnest and powerful prayer life; it shows itself in deep and abiding trust in Christ even through the most painful or difficult circumstances; it is revealed in the spiritual man’s sense of mission in this world; a life that plainly bears lasting fruit in his life and the lives of those around him.

A spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow Gospel; he cannot settle for a shallow reading of the Word; he cannot settle for a shallow relationship with Christ. Beloved, what does God’s Word reveal about your heart this morning? Do you see those signs of depth in your own life? Are there those moments when you are utterly swept away by the grandeur and power of the Gospel; the grace of God that saved you and the mercy of God that keeps you and the power of God that grants you victory over sin—are you drawn to the depths of that Gospel? The natural man simply cannot grasp the glory of that Gospel; those depths mean nothing to him.

A spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow Bible—the Holy Spirit that dwells in him opens his eyes to the depths of God’s Word. Bible reading is not a chore that has to be checked off your list; it draws you. Spending time reading the words of God Himself in this Book are life and breath to you. You don’t just consume it in order to be well-armed for your favorite theological debate; you take it in like air and water; you sit down to it like a favorite meal. Every circumstance or event that takes place in your life or the world around you triggers the same question in your mind— “What does the Bible say about this?”—because you are confident that the depths of God’s wisdom revealed in His Word is sufficient for everything in your life and your world.

You are unshaken by those who call God’s wisdom in His Word foolishness; you cannot be embarrassed by it; you refuse to make excuses for it or try to sand down its rough edges to suit a society that would use “being offended” as a weapon against you. Creation in six literal days six thousand years ago, iron axe heads floating in water, the sun standing still in the sky, wives submitting to their husbands as lord, homosexuality an abomination, the restriction of the office of pastor to men, the utter sovereignty of God in election and salvation, eternal suffering in Hell for those who refuse to repent—the spiritual man, the spiritual woman does not back down from the depths of God’s wisdom revealed in His Word, because they know that only the wisdom found in this Word can reach into the depths of pain and sin and shame and hopelessness in this world with life and hope and forgiveness and cleansing and peace!

A spiritual man cannot settle for a shallow walk with Christ—a once-a-week check-in on Sunday morning to go through the spiritual motions of devotion so that you can go on with the rest of your week on your own terms. Your time with Christ to hear Him speak to you in His Word and to speak with Him in prayer takes priority—the Puritan author Thomas Brooks once wrote:

I have read of a devout person, who, when the set time for his private devotion was come, whatever company he was in, he would break from them with this neat and handsome come off, ‘I have a friend that stays for me; farewell.’ (Brooks, T. (1866). The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks (A. B. Grosart, Ed.; Vol. 2, p. 167). James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; G. Herbert.)

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the meme online of the so-called “blobfish”? It is In the pictures you see of specimens on an examining table it is a grey, shapeless lump of blubbery flesh with a big bulbous nose hanging down over what look like giant rubbery lips, its eyes set way back on the sides of its head—a very forlorn and sad looking animal.

But at its native depth of 4,000 feet off the coast of New Zealand, it is a beautiful, compact tadpole-like creature that feeds off of crustaceans and sea urchins, compact and muscular as it swims through those crushing depths that keep it alive, healthy and strong.

So let me ask you: do you become a blobfish when you are no longer in the depths of God’s Word, no longer living and moving in the depths of His grace in the Gospel? When you neglect the gathered worship of God on the Lord’s Day; when you let days go by between meeting with Christ your Best and Greatest Friend; when the glorious depths of His grace are no longer precious to you, when you start having your head turned by the false and destructive lures of sin in your life; do you turn into a “blob” with your family, your friends, your co-workers?

At one time or another we all turn into blobfish as we wander away from the depths of the Gospel—Paul has to address the Corinthians as “blobfish” in the next chapter:

1 Corinthians 3:1 LSB

And I, brothers, was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ.

We can take ourselves out of those depths of God’s Spirit by toying with sin instead of fighting it; we can find ourselves gasping in the shallows because of our physical frailties that take away our energy or afflict us with pain that prevents us from being able to focus on our pursuit of God; we can become weighed down and burdened by the sins and frailties of others or the responsibilities we have to others who need us; there are so many ways in this weary and fallen world for us to find ourselves out of our home in the depths of God’s wisdom and grace and faithful love.

But the great promise that you have this morning, Christian, is that your Greatest and Truest Friend will never leave you to the shallows! He has delighted to call you “friend”, He has lavished the depths of His Spirit’s wisdom on you, and He will always answer your call! There is no sin that has you by the throat that He did not conquer on that Cross, and when you call, He will deliver you! There is no weariness of spirit or frailty of flesh that He cannot set aside, and renew your strength like the eagle’s when you wait on Him. There is no boredom or apathy towards His Word that He cannot fan into flames of joy and delight as He speaks to you through them when you seek Him with your whole heart.

And if you are here this morning and you realize that none of these things are particularly attractive to you; that the depths of wisdom offered here in the Spirit-breathed Word make no sense to you or have no appeal to your heart; if you’ve been politely sitting through this service, happy to come along for the ride but not really seeing the point of any of it and not really “getting” it; understand from the Word of God this morning that the reason that it doesn’t really “hit” is because that capacity to accept these depths has to come as God graciously reveals it through the work of His Spirit in your life

This is the invitation to you this morning—stop trying to make sense of the world and your life on your own terms. Stop looking for ways to justify your behavior, stop defending your choices that have brought you so much pain and heartache. There is a depth of wisdom for your questioning; a depth of forgiveness for your guilt, a depth of grace for your shame, a depth of love for your loneliness that you simply cannot fathom in this Good News that Jesus Christ has taken all of your guilt and shame and broken-hearted pain and He has suffered all of the punishment that you deserved, sinking down into the grave with all of your sin and then leaving it there. And He has risen again, bringing you a completely new life—a New Birth of purity and righteousness and freedom from the penalty of sin and the power of sin. You can have depths of wisdom and grace and love and holiness and purity that you never dreamed possible when you cry out to Him—He will hear you, and He will save you, and He will become the greatest and truest Friend you will ever know. So don’t put it off; don’t wait any longer; come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Hebrews 13:20–21 LSB

Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus, equip you in every good thing to do His will, by doing in us what is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

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