The Division of the Cross
ATTENTION
One of the first public acts of our new president was his appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast just a few weeks ago. While other less conservative politicians have seemed uncomfortable in such arenas, President Obama seems to be right at home. He used the occasion to declare that one’s faith should be a force for unity, not an excuse for prejudice and intolerance. He went on to say:
"We have seen faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another – as an excuse for prejudice and intolerance," the president said. "Wars have been waged. Innocents have been slaughtered. For centuries, entire religions have been persecuted, all in the name of perceived righteousness.
Of his faith-based program, Obama said, "Instead of driving us apart, our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife and rebuild what has broken; to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. This is not only our call as people of faith, but our duty as citizens of America.
Now, let me just say up front that just about any politician from any party would have been comfortable making a statement such as that. In fact, as Americans, we expect our presidents to be inclusive and tolerant in speaking of religion. After all, he isn’t just the president of Christian Americans, he’s also the president of Muslim Americans and Atheistic Americans too.
But . . . While our politicians may call for a uniting of faiths and while the politically correct might applaud the equating of one faith with another, they would, to the surprise of some, I’m sure, find themselves at odds with Jesus. You see, Jesus didn’t say that He came to bring people together. Quite the contrary. Jesus said:
Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. 35 For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; 36 and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’ 37 He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38 And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. 39 He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.
You know, I just don’t know if Jesus would do very well at the National Prayer Breakfast. I have the feeling they might not invite Him back!
And just what was He saying with all that? Does Jesus really want us to be at war over religion? Well, that’s a good question, but it really misses the point. You see, Jesus isn’t compelling bloodshed in the name of faith. He isn’t urging us to go to war with one another, He is telling us that we are already at war with God. He is, in this passage, forshadowing the death that He is about to die when He speaks of us taking up the cross. He is speaking, I believe, of the radical impact His awful death would have upon the world. He was saying, “I’m going to a cross to die. I’m going to give my life and when you see the power of that awful death I will die, it will so radically impact your life that your commitment to me will drive you from every other commitment in life. You will find that my cross is a divisive thing!”
Paul echoes this sentiment in our text when he writes:
For the message of 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 bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
NEED
Paul’s words are meant for us. Some of us here today have never really put our faith in Christ. I’m talking to some of you who are right there this morning. If I could sit down and have a conversation with you, and I asked you why you have not committed yourself to the Lord, you would say something like this: “Well, I just haven’t seen enough evidence to really believe.” or “I’m still waiting for a feeling . . .some experience I haven’t had.” Jesus interests you, but He’s never invaded your life; Jesus intrigues you, but you’ve never invited Him into your heart. You’re waiting for something that hasn’t come, and, at the risk of being contrary, I must tell you, it’s never coming. What you’re looking for is found in the cross. You’re asking God for this and that to prove Himself and He keeps pointing you back to that criss-crossed beam. The cross of Christ divides believers from unbelievers.
But it also divides the followers from professors. That may be you this morning. You’ve been born again, but the helpless dependence on Christ which brought us to faith has been abandoned for self-dependence. We used to trust God, but slowly we’ve begun to trust ourselves and go our own way. I must tell yout that the cross of Christ is a divisive thing. It divides the followers from the professors.
To both groups I stand before you today to say that the answer to every issue of your life is to be found in your embrace of that divisive cross. You might say, “Why, Rusty? Why must Christianity be so exclusive? Why must the cross be so divisive?” Well this passage gives us the answer. The cross divides us because of
DIV 1: WHAT GOD INTENDS.
EXPLANATION
That “great divide” of the cross is clearly stated in v 18 of ch. 1. It says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. The word “foolishness” comes from the Greek word moria and sounds like our word moron. The mōoros would be a fool, an uncouth being, lacking education and culture, with no discernment, circumspection, or wisdom, committing countless blunders. When I think of this word I think of the keystone cops expending great energy and accomplishing nothing. Isn’t that the way the unbelieving world looks at the cross and hopelessly “deluded” Christians who really believe in all that “blood of Christ” stuff. The preaching of the cross is viewed that way by the world; it is foolishness to them.
But that’s just what God intended! The quote of v 19 proves it. That quote comes from Isaiah 29:14. In that passage Isaiah is mocking the efforts of the Jewish leaders who were scheming in their own energy to save Jerusalem from being taken captive by the Assyrians. In their desperation these worldly-wise politicians seek safety in an alliance with Egypt. Their move so alarms the Assyrians that it sparks the very invasion they were seeking to avoid. God, who had ordained their capture in order to discipline them, destroys the wisdom of the wise and brings to nothing the understanding of the prudent. And that is just what God had intended to do all along.
Paul takes that example and applies it to the cross. He says that the cross is the instrument that God uses to confound the wisdom of this world and, in so doing, he shows 3 specific groups of people whom God’s wisdom confounds. You see them in v 20 where Paul asks, “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this age?” The first group he mentions is the “wise.” The Greek culture valued “wisdom,” as they defined it at least, above all else. They wanted to reason their way to truth. God comes against their wisdom with the cross, the very antithesis of any thing they could conceive as being wise. To the wise Paul says, in verse 25, that the wisdom of God is wiser than men.
The second group he mentions is the scribe. That spoke to the Jewish culture. The scribes trusted in their obedience and preservation of the law as their means of righteousness. They were self-righteous. They found their power in themselves. To them Paul says, in v 25, that the power of God is stronger than men.
The last group he mentions is the “disputer of this age.” By this term he could have been speaking of the very members of the church at Corinth. They were the one whom, having begun with the simplicity in the finished work of the cross, were in danger of pursuing a “spiritual wisdom” or some spiritual gift that would have become idolatry to them.
To all three groups Paul says: “God has made foolish the wisdom of this world.” In other words, anything else you trust in; anything else you cling to besides the cross of Christ is worthless. And that is no accident. God intended it to be that way. God intended to destroy human effort so that only dependence on Him could possibly save man. God intended that the Cross be the dividing line of history. The cross divide those who trust from those who don’t. The cross is a divisive thing!
ILLUSTRATION
If you go to the right website on the internet you can see an amazing video. You see a smoky scene. A building is on fire. There on the ground you see a group of people looking up the side of a building gesturing to someone above who is out of the picture. All of a sudden you see the group rush towards the side of the building and as they get to the wall of the building, something flies into the picture from up above. One of the men catches the bundle before it hits the ground. What’s going on?
Well, in December of 2005, Tracinda Foxe's apartment building in the Bronx caught on fire. With flames quickly engulfing her third floor bedroom, she was forced to contemplate the unthinkable. Outside, a group of onlookers had gathered some 30 feet below her open window, and they watched with growing concern as smoke billowed around the mother and her 1-month-old child. With no fresh air in the apartment, Tracinda leaned out the window with her baby.
Finally, with all other options exhausted, Tracinda let go. The infant tumbled three stories down into the waiting arms of Felix Vazquez, a Housing Authority employee and catcher on a local baseball team. A former lifeguard, Vazquez performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the baby until paramedics arrived, which saved its life.
Moments later, Tracinda was rescued from her apartment by firefighters, and was reunited with her child. Neither was seriously injured. Asked later about the painful decision to drop her baby from the window, Tracinda said: "I prayed that someone would catch him and save his life…. I said, 'God, please save my son.'"
APPLICATION:
May I say that this story illustrates God’s intention in the cross. His whole intention is to show us our need of him and cause us to depend on him. That cross demonstrates both the intensity and the mercy of His intention. It shows the intensity of his intention in that He allowed His only Son to suffer such a terrible death. What kind of agony must that have been for God? What kind of sinners must we have been to have needed such a death? And it goes even further, for if God would allow such suffering by Christ, surely He will not allow us slide by if we refuse to receive what He did for us there. As Hebrews 2:3 says, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation.
Detrick Bonheoffer said“If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a [false] God who … corresponds to me, is agreeable to me.… But if it is God who says where he will be … that place is the cross of Christ.” “Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner … forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline … the world goes on in the same old way … grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” O, but that’s just the point: There is no grace without the cross.
Which just means that you cannot save yourself. If you’re here today and you have never trusted Christ, you need to know that you will never go to heaven without humbling yourself and actively receiving what Jesus did for you there. The cross proves that you are without hope of finding some other alternative. There is no hope apart from the cross of Christ. The cross is a divisive thing! It’s divisive because of what God intends, but it is also divisive because of
DIV 2: WHAT MAN EXPECTS
EXPLANATION
When you read these verses, you are struck by two very clear and, I might add, unmet expectations of man. In the first place, man expects a demonstration that he would not believe. The first expectation Paul mentions comes from the Jew. He says in v 22
For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks
Jews were expecting a “sign.” If you read through the gospels, you see encounter after encounter where the Jews come to Christ demanding a “sign”, some proof that Jesus was really the Son of God. Even though Jesus did miracle after miracle, however, they refused to believe, which just leads me to believe that no matter what Jesus would have done they would have rejected Him. You see, they were expecting a demonstration which, even if it came, they would not have believed it.
In fact, the great sign that they did receive not only didn’t build their faith, it caused them to move even closer to unbelief. That sign was the death of Christ. V. 23 says: “But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a what? . . . that’s right a “stumblingblock”. A stumblingblock in the Greek literally means, “that which causes offense or arouses opposition.” That is precisely how the cross impacted many of the rulers of the Jews. It wasn’t what they expected and they took great offense at it.
Doesn’t that describe modern man? The average unbelieving American says that they don’t believe because faith is illogical, or isn’t relevant to their lives. They may claim that if God did some great work to prove Himself, their doubt would turn to faith. Wrong! There is no sign which, apart from faith, will bring you faith. Signs just won’t do it! If the cross of Christ won’t do it, nothing will!
ILLUSTRATION
And many have tried the “sign” route to faith, only to be disappointed. Oliver Sacks did. He is an author and a Neurologist. He writes of his own religious experience:
There had been some religious feeling, of a childish sort, in the years before the war. When my mother lit the Sabbath candles, I would feel, almost physically, the Sabbath coming in, being welcomed, descending like a soft mantle over the earth. I imagined, too, that this occurred all over the universe—the Sabbath descending on far-off star systems and galaxies, enfolding them all in the peace of God.
But when I was suddenly abandoned by my parents (as I saw it), my trust in them, my love for them, was rudely shaken, and with this my belief in God, too. What evidence was there, I kept asking myself, for God's existence? I determined on an experiment to resolve the matter decisively: I planted two rows of radishes side by side in the vegetable garden, and asked God to bless one or curse one, whichever he wished, so that I might see a clear difference between them. The two rows of radishes came up identical, and this was proof for me that no God existed. But I longed now even more for something to believe in.
Well, you may not have tried the “raddish” experience, but I bet some of us have done something similar. We’ve asked God for a “sign” and often found nothing but the same sense of randomness that really convinces us of nothing. Do you want to know why that is? It’s because God’s sign to you is a cross and apart from that cross, you will never believe.
EXPLANATION
What does man expect? Well, he expects a demonstration he will not believe but he also expects an explanation that he would never accept. In v 22 Paul says that the Greeks “look for wisdom.” The Greek culture valued philosophy and wisdom. They wanted an explanation of God that made sense to them. They wanted God explained logically so that they could test and prove Him to be real . . . as THEY defined it. What did they get? V. 23 tells you: “but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness.” When the Greeks heard of the cross of Christ, it was completely illogical to them. It didn’t make any sense. To say that a powerful God submitted Himself to be crucified by mortal men flew in the face of everything they valued.
One commetator writes:
Thus the "Jews" and "Greeks" here illustrate the basic idolatries of humanity. God must function as the all-powerful or the all-wise, but always in terms of our best interests--power in our behalf, wisdom like ours! For both the ultimate idolatry is that of insisting that God conform to our own prior views as to how "the God who makes sense" ought to do things.
And the God of the cross just didn’t make sense to the Greek. In fact, it was utter foolishness to them.
Isn’t that just like us today. We want God to make sense. We may even ask for explanations, claiming that if God will just explain to us this, or explain to us that, we’ll let go of our unbelief and trust Him. But the truth is, no explanation would ever be good enough to convince us to believe. God knows that, and instead of an explanation, He gives us a crucifixion. He does that because He knows that no explanation would ever convince us.
ILLUSTRATION
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson marvels at what makes up human life:
No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids…in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. [For example, to make collagen,] you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence….
The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn't going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about ninety feet, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively forever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to two hundred, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all two hundred coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10 TO THE 260TH POWER (that is 1 followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms in the universe….
Yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you.
The odds against chance producing what you see around you are not just prohibitive, they’re ridiculous. To believe in random evolution is absolutely, phenomenally stupid!
And yet, even though Bill Bryson writes that and says further that conventional science and a belief in god are absolutely not incompatible, he adds, (but) I'm not a spiritual person, and the things I've done haven't made me one.
Listen! Man expects an explanation that he would not accept and a demonstration that he would never believe. Why? Because God has ordained the cross as the dividing line of history. You will either accept it or reject by faith, but you will never understand it by explanation, nor believe it because of proof. The cross of Christ is a divisive thing!
APPLICATION
So let me ask you: What are you expecting out of God? Some display of power? Some explanation?
Are you saying, “God, if you will heal me, I’ll follow you.”
“God, if you’ll just save my marriage and bring back my spouse, I’ll give you my life.”
“God, if you’ll just give me some sign that you’re there, I’ll follow you.”
Well, if so, please hear the words of Jesus. On one occasion when the Pharisees came to Him demanding a sign. Matt. 12:38 says:
Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” 39 But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Did you catch that? Jesus tells them that the only sign they will get will be his own death and burial. And that, my friend, is the only sign you will get. Listen, if you won’t believe the cross, you won’t believe the sign. The cross is the dividing line of history. It divides because of what God intends and what man expects, but it, last of all, divides because of
DIV 3: WHAT GOD DEMANDS
EXPLANATION
That demand is found in v 21. Will you read that verse with me? It says:
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
Who did it please God to save? That’s right those who “believe.” One commentator wrote:
God discovered by human wisdom will be both a projection of human fallenness and a source of human pride and this consititues the worship of the creature not the Creator. . . God was pleased to bring people into a proper relationship with himself through the foolishhness of what was preached. The word kerygma is not the act of proclamation, but the content of themessage itself, the crucified Messiah. God's purpose was to save those who would believe. This salveation does not come through wisdom, but through the preaching of the cross. And precisely because it stands in contradiction to ordinary human wisdom, it is only for those who believe, for those who will take the risk and put their whole trust in God to save in this way.
ILLUSTRATION
English author H. G. Wells, famous for science fiction novels like The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, once wrote a short story called "The Country of the Blind." It's about an inaccessible, luxurious valley in Ecuador where, due to a strange disease, everyone is blind. After 15 generations of this blindness there was no recollection of sight or color or the outside world at all. Finally a man from the outside—a man who could see—literally fell into their midst. He had fallen off a high cliff and survived, only to stumble into their forgotten country.
When he realized that everyone else was blind, he remembered the old adage: "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Wells writes:
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in me." Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see.
But they never believed him. They thought he was crazy. The man fell in love with a girl there and the girl's father, Yacob, went to talk to a doctor about him. A conversation ensued:
[The doctor said]: "I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies [his eyes!]."
"And then he will be sane?" [they asked].
"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob.
Wells goes on to point out that the man would not be allowed to marry Yacob's daughter unless he submitted to an operation that would blind him. So what would the man do? Wells writes:
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down the steeps…
It seemed to him that before this splendour, he and this blind world in the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin. And the man who could see escaped the country of the blind with his life.
APPLICATION
We live in a world that is blind to truth. Having never experienced the life that is in Christ, they can’t imagine it and think us foolish when we talk about it. They keep wanting us to return to the “sanity” of unbelief. They want us to talk in terms they understand. They want God to talk in terms they understand, but He refuses. He knows that they only way they’ll ever escape the blindness is to trust in, what seems to them at least, foolishness. The foolishness of the cross.
Yet it is that very faith that causes them to stumble. Why does man resist that faith? It’s very simple: Coming by faith requires abject humility and man is to proud for that. He is too proud to take the help he wants to earn. He is too proud to take the help he doesn’t feel he deserves. That’s why even the most down that asks for help will try to figure out a reason why you owe them what they’re asking you to give them. But listen! The person who comes to the cross must simply come saying, as that great hymn says, “Nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling.”
Have you ever come to Christ that way? Yeah, I know you may have made a “decision” sometime in your life. I know you may have grown up in a Christian home, or maybe even gone to a Christian school. I know that you may have even gone to church all your life or you may have even been coming here for a long time, but have you ever come to Christ that way. Have you ever fully let go of your own effort, let go of your own questions, let go of your desire for explanations or demonstrations, and simply said, “Nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling.”
And Christian, are you living by faith? You may have come to God that way, but you’ve been living in your own strength. The humility that brought you to Christ has become an insidious pride that keeps you from experiencing Him. Having been saved by faith and grace, you are walking by your own goodness. Listen, no matter which side of salvation you’re on, self-dependence is absolutely despised by God. No matter who you trusted in to save you, maybe even years ago, who are you trusting in right now?
You see, it is the cross that calls us to an abject rejection of self, and a complete and utter trust in God. It does that ecause it is the dividing line of History. It divides those who believe from those who do not. Which side of that line are you on?
VISUALIZATION - DVD
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