Counter-Intuitive Wisdom
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Good evening! Please open your bibles with me to 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.
Last week, we got our first look into the corrective nature of this letter. Paul is writing to the Corinthian church to address the division in their ranks as splinters were forming under the guise of their favorite teacher. Some gathered under Paul, some under Apollos, some under Peter. All of these teachers taught the same thing so their divisions were by a mere matter of personal preference.
Paul knew the importance of unity within a church and called the church to be united in both their doctrine and practice. He finished that section by introducing the next major theme, the wisdom of man and the foolishness of God.
17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its effect.
Tonight, we are beginning a mini-series within a series where we are looking at wisdom and foolishness. The question that this series is aimed at answering is why only some people believe.
In the first of our four week series, we are looking at the the fact that God’s wisdom is counter-intuitive to ours, meaning His ways are not our ways and to the unsaved, His ways seem foolish. Paul will often refer to God’s wisdom as the ‘foolishness of God’ to provide a contrast between what is really foolish and what we think is foolish.
Outline:
An Un-saved vs. Saved View of the Cross (18)
The Wisdom of Man Discarded (19-20)
The Wisdom of God Exalted (21-25)
An Unsaved vs. Saved View of the Cross
An Unsaved vs. Saved View of the Cross
Please read with me in
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved.
Paul is painting a contrast that focuses on how people view the cross. To those who, he says, are perishing, the cross of Christ is foolishness. To the perishing, the cross of Christ is foolishness.
What do we know about those who are perishing? The perishing ones are those who are headed towards eternal separation from God. The perishing Paul refers to here is the second death. The Bible explicitly refers to three different kinds of death.
There’s physical death, when the body ceases to function.
There is spiritual death, which is the state we are all born in to and only those who believe in Christ escape.
And finally, there is the second death, where the sinner is forever, eternally separated from God and cast into the Lake of Fire.
Physical death is a reality we all face. At some point in time, we will all die. It is not how God had originally intended His creation to operate, but the result of sin was clearly laid out to Adam and Eve.
17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”
Later in this very letter, Paul will expand on the idea of the pervasiveness of physical death
22 For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
The author of Hebrews also refers to the physical death when he says
27 And just as it is appointed for people to die once—and after this, judgment—
Physical death is an inevitability that all face. To quote a song from Hamilton, “death doesn’t discriminate, between the sinner and the saint, and it takes and it takes.” That is the reality of our existence. We are, as Solomon says, but a vapor. What we can take from that though, is this idea of how we are using our time. How are we using our time.
We are all born into a condition called the Spiritual Death. This is where we are alive in body, but separated from God because of our sin and that we haven’t believed in Christ. Not believing in Christ means we rightly stand condemned before God.
18 Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.
And why is it this way? It is because of sin. Like we talked about last week, all have sinned, right? And the wages of sin is death! Sin is not something we can deal with on our own - we are completely incapable of doing anything about our own sin. Ray Comfort, an evangelist in California, uses a method in his evangelism where he walks people through the 10 Commandments to show that we have all broken the law and deserve judgment.
The law given in the first 5 books of the Bible was part of the agreement between the Lord and the Nation of Israel. He was to be their God and they were to be His people. As His people, they were to be different than the gentiles - they were to show the world how awesome God is by their special relationship. The intention was to be what we would call a witness to God’s goodness, but Israel messed up over and over again. They eventually came to a point where they thought that they were God’s chosen people because they somehow deserved His favor, that they had merited it. We see it so clearly in the lives of the Jewish leaders in the time of Jesus. They obeyed the law as written but missed the mark by a mile.
The Law was intended to show us just how sinful we can be and the horrible position in which sin leaves us. It was designed so that those under the law would be forced to trust God in faith.
Look at what Paul says in
9 Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again
10 and I died. The commandment that was meant for life resulted in death for me.
11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.
12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
13 Therefore, did what is good become death to me? Absolutely not! But, sin, in order to be recognized as sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment, sin might become sinful beyond measure.
Sin makes us spiritually dead if we are apart from Christ, but therein lies the good news!!
When we believe in Christ, when our spirits are regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are no longer spiritually dead, by God makes us alive in Christ!
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins
2 in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient.
3 We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us,
5 made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
We will all face physical death, we all experience spiritual deadness before we are made alive in Christ by His grace through faith.
Being dead in our sins, but made alive by a man who died doesn’t make any rational sense. If you ask any person in the mainstream scientific community, they will try to explain Jesus away using human reasoning because they cannot grasp the concept of God working supernaturally. Creation must be a myth because we can’t observe it! (Which is interesting that they choose evolution, another non-observable process to explain how everything came into being!). The way God chose to work His will is counter-intuitive to how we think. If things worked the way we thought they should, we would be on a works-based system and none of us would be able to be good enough to restore our relationship with God. Only Christ and His sacrifice on the cross on our behalf could accomplish that.
In our passage, it says that the cross of Christ is foolishness to those who are perishing. That is not referring to the physical death, it’s not referring to the spiritual deadness we all live in before Christ, this verse specifically refers to the second death.
The second death is referring to those who die physically while they are spiritually dead. These are the people who have run out of time to place their faith in Christ and will live in the consequences of their condemnation for all eternity. The second death is the only form of death that is completely foreign to the believer - we cannot and will not ever experience it.
In the book of Revelation, Jesus speaks to the church in Smyrna, speaking about the tribulation and persecution the church will endure. On speaking of this, Jesus says,
11 “Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will never be harmed by the second death.
we will never experience the lake of fire and eternal damnation of the second death. Why?
Because of the cross of Christ. He died for us as a substitute. In the same we he took our punishment, He clothes us in the righteousness of Christ so we can be presented before Him as blameless on the day of judgement.
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved.
The cross, what is foolish to man, is the power of God for those who believe. We know that the cross, more specifically, Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross, is the vehicle that God chose to accomplish His will to save the elect and bring himself glory. It is counter-intuitive to how we think!
That is where carnal man gets tripped up! That is why people who don’t believe in Christ can’t understand it to be a display of power because it doesn’t make any logical, human sense.
And that is why we exult, why we praise God, that His wisdom is greater than that of any man.
The Wisdom of Man Discarded
The Wisdom of Man Discarded
Please continue to read with me in
19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the intelligence of the intelligent.
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish?
The way that God has orchestrated the gospel makes no logical sense to those who live without the Holy Spirit. And God did it on PURPOSE!
“For it is written” is all the argument that is needed, and it is enough. It is saying that God has spoken on the issue and it is settled. He quotes from Isaiah 29:14. The originally context talks about one of God’s many warnings to Israel, but this passage in Isaiah specifically talks about not trying to match wits with the Lord. It pleased God to show the world through the gospel that His ways are far superior to ours. And why did He care so much to show it? Because why would someone be inclined to worship a god with less intellect than they have? Why would someone worship a god with less of a grip on reality than they had themselves? God is God. He is of infinite wisdom and infinite goodness. And what does that mean for us? We can trust Him! We should trust Him! We need to trust Him!
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding;
6 in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight.
We talk so much about God’s wrath, or God’s grace that we often forget the vastness of His mind.
In His creativity, he designed life! Did you know that a single human cell is more complicated than an entire space-shuttle?! Did you know that humans and bananas share a 60% similar genetic code? It’s crazy!
In His reasoning, He placed the stars in the heavens with their exact configuration so that we could learn to navigate the seas, figure out the calendar and the annual seasons?
Can you imagine that having all this in His mind, He was able to create everything in six days?
What are humans good at? Being bad. We are good at figuring out more creative and effective ways of killing each other, of doing for ourselves instead of doing for others.
CS Lewis is credited with saying
"Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity.
No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it." ~ C. S. Lewis
God destroyed the wisdom of men in order to accomplish a purpose - for us to see and trust Him as God.
The Wisdom of God Exalted
The Wisdom of God Exalted
Read with me again starting in:
22 For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom,
23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.
24 Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God,
25 because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
While both the Jews and the Greek were a very religious people, there was a vast difference in their religious practices. The Jews were more connected to God because of their history, so I believe there was definitely more of an honest belief in God, but they were always so skeptical. The Pharisees and scribes demanded that Jesus give them a sign to affirm what He said about Himself. Even when He rose from the dead, they wouldn’t believe.
The Greeks, however, had much more of a secular practice of their religion. In the area of Corinth, one of the major industries was the services of the temple prostitutes. They way they worshipped was a mixture of enjoying the fruits of the flesh while trying to stick to a fallacious moral and ethical code. There was no personal relationship with their gods because they weren’t real. They didn’t have the history with the gods that the Jews had with God.
In their culture, the most famous past time was learning different philosophies and ideas. It puffed them up but without the Lord, all their wisdom was useless because they were going to perish. It did make the witnessing ground ripe for an evangelist like Paul to introduce them to the wisdom of God.
The Jews saw the messiah as a political leader - one who would restore the kingdom to Israel and overthrow the Roman government. The idea that the messiah would be killed was very counter-intuitive for them because their version of Him had taken control of everything and was pleased with them because of their adherence to the Law (regardless of the condition of their heart). They had in their minds a messiah of their own design and they expected Jesus to do what they wanted Him to do. The idea that he would die is crazy! The word for stumbling block in σχανδαλον, where we get our English word scandal from. This notion of a crucified Christ was extremely scandalous!
To the Greeks, who loved learning new things about different beliefs, the idea of a god coming to die on behalf of his people was totally asinine. Why would someone want to follow a dead god? How could a god be killed? They applied what they knew about their gods to Jesus and that made the gospel look extremely foolish to them.
But God did it this way for a purpose - so that no one who comes to Him can say that they figured it out on their own. God is sovereign in salvation - meaning that it is He who called us, He who elected us, He who drew us in to Himself, He who gave the gift of faith, He who gave the gift of repentance, and He who regenerated us from death to life. These all go the glory of God and has nothing to do with man.
Johnathan Edwards, an amazing Puritan pastor from the 1700’s said this, “You cannot contribute anything to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.”
To those who are called by God, those elected by Him unto salvation, to those, the cross of Christ is both the power and wisdom of God. God uses what the world had deemed foolish to bring glory to the Son. It was His pleasure to put man in our rightful place and show us just how awesome He is. This should bring us to a place where our only response can be to thank God and fall down and worship Him! When we try to match wits with God, He wins, He always will. We have no enemy nor ally that can outsmart the Lord. Trusting in Him, even when it is hard and comes with sacrifice, is the best possible place to be.
Whether you are broke or wealthy, sick or well, lonely or surrounded, trust God - He knows what you need better than you ever could! He wants what is best for us and wants us to love Him, so trusting Him is the absolute best thing we can do. Trusting in God is counter-intuitive because we can’t see Him or touch Him, but His Word assures us He is there and wants us to come to Him!
Conclusion
Conclusion
God destroyed the wisdom of man and used what man thought foolish to save those who would believe in Him.
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration.
9 “For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
We often think of God and focus on what He has done for us; attributes like His mercy and grace and love. But how often do we focus on God’s greatness? The greatness of His mind that we see evidenced all around us in creation. The greatness of His heart we see in the unfolding of human history and His interventions along the way. The greatness of God in spirit, who after dealing with all our garbage and sin still saw it as good to come and die that we might live. The greatness of God in power who could not be held by the grave! Who are we compared to Him? We are nothing. The span of our days is around 100 years - that’s nothing compared to the eternality of God. We get one chance at life, He is all powerful and does all things right. Our passage tonight specifically focuses on the how the wisdom of God is better than the wisdom of man. Our series is discussing why sonly some believe and not all. God’s wisdom is counter intuitive to ours so that He would receive the ultimate glory as the only one capable of saving us.
Let’s pray.