Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament Studies from 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5
What would you think of a woman student who entered the college quad wearing an earring stamped with the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima on it? What would you think of a church building adorned with a fresco of the mass graves of Auschwitz, the worst of the Nazi death camps?
Even to ask questions like that produces a kind of shudder of embarrassment. The images are so grotesque and abhorrent and shocking because of Western history in the last 50 or 60 years, but that was the sort of shocking overtone associated with the word cross or crucifixion in the first century. In the first century, the Romans had a variety of ways of executing people, but the worst of them by far, not just in terms of pain but in terms of cultural shock value, was crucifixion.
It was reserved only for non-citizens. No Roman citizen could be executed by crucifixion apart from the explicit sanction of the emperor. In general it was reserved for traitors and slaves, and in the literature from 200 BC to well into the present era, whenever the cross is mentioned there are overtones of shudder and horror. It is the sort of thing you don’t talk about in polite company.
Yet today, crosses dangle from our ears. We sport them upon our lapels, if there are any lapels left in people who have a dress code that the varsity shudders at. We put them on our buildings. Our bishops wear them around their necks. Nobody’s embarrassed, and thus it is hard to hear the sheer audacity of a verse like 1 Corinthians 1:18. “The message of the cross is foolishness to those that are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
That just trills right off our lips without any wincing whatsoever, but to understand the sheer power of what Paul is saying we need to think ourselves back into the first century and then work forward again to our present era. It may be helpful to follow the theme in the three paragraphs of our text: first, the foolishness of the cross, then second, the outreach of the cross, and then lastly, the proclaimers of the cross.
1. The foolishness of the cross.
Verses 18–25. There is actually a pun here that connects verse 17 and verse 18 that we lose because we’re in translation. At the end of the previous section Paul says, “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with words of human wisdom …”
The exact expression is “not with wisdom of words.” That is with wisdom of eloquence, with wisdom of rhetoric. “… lest the cross be emptied. But the word of the cross,” he says, “is power. I haven’t come with the wisdom of word; I have come with the word of the cross.” Now in this paragraph Paul makes two dominant points.
First, he insists that the message of the cross, by God’s determination, divides the entire human race absolutely. Every culture has various ways of classifying people. In the ancient world, there were slaves and there were free. In the Roman Empire, a little more than 50 percent of the people who lived there were, in fact, slaves. Then there were Greeks, that is, Greek-speakers who embraced most people in the empire, and then there were the barbarians. Then, of course, there were the Roman citizens, and then there were the non-citizens.
There were various ways of classifying people, but here Paul sets forth the only polarity that is of ultimate importance. He says, “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.” That is, he divides the race into those who are perishing and those who are being saved.
50 billion years into eternity, if I may dare to speak of eternity in the categories of time, it won’t matter too much whether in your threescore years and ten you were slave or free or barbarian or Greek or white or black or British or Danish or whatever. It will matter whether you’re saved or perishing.
In other words, from an absolute perspective, however important questions of justice and the like are in this world, and the Bible has a lot to say about them, the ultimate polarity is … is the person reconciled to the living God or not? “Now,” Paul says, “on the axis of that polarity, the cross will appear one way to one group, and it will appear another way to another group.”
The dividing point between the two groups is the message of the cross. To the one it’s foolishness, and to the other it’s not only wisdom, it’s transforming power. It’s life-changing. Indeed, Paul emphasizes God’s purpose by citing Scripture. This did not come about accidentally. He says in verse 19, “It is written …” Now he quotes Isaiah 29. God has already declared himself on this question, so for Paul it is settled.
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise …” God has said. “… the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” That is, the message of the cross is nothing other than God’s way of doing what he said he would do. He would set aside and shatter all human pretensions to strength and wisdom. “I will destroy such pretensions,” he says.
In fact, strictly speaking, this is bound up with the Bible’s view of sin. Sin is not seen in the Bible primarily as a social pathology or something naughty. It is seen as principled defiance of our Maker. In the beginning, God was, and we were related to him. So in that kind of framework, if I woke up in the morning I would think about him. I would be rightly related to others because I would be rightly related to him, and so would they be.
But if now I think that I am at the center of the universe.… Oh, not literally, but if my focus, my aspirations, my hopes, my values, how I perceive the whole world, turns on how the world touches me, then God, if he has the courtesy to exist, must exist for me, and other people must exist for me. Suddenly my criterion, my fundamental criterion, is what is acceptable to me or to my group, to my church, to my culture, to my race, to my heritage.
Do you think this is going too far as a description? Supposing I were to hold up a picture of your sixth form graduating class. Where will your eye go first? Or say you have a real good, knock-down, drag-out argument with somebody in the CU … A really good one, behind closed doors, but it’s just short of violence, lots of personal abuse and things said that shouldn’t have been said.
We used to speak at Tyndale House of the Tyndale House form of argument. Thesis, followed by antithesis, followed by personal abuse. You know the kind of argument I have in mind. Then afterwards you go away, and you’re still seething, and you play it back, and you think of all the things you could have said, and you think of all the things you would have said if you had thought of them fast enough. When you play it all back, who wins?
I’ve lost many arguments. I have never lost a rerun. That’s the whole problem with sin, you see. If I’m the final criterion, God then, in his wisdom, if he’s going to reconcile rebels to him at all, is going to find a method which is not bound up with our principle of self-interest. That is what the Old Testament text already says, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. The intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Indeed, in the light of the cross, what is left of the pretensions of this world?
Now Paul is writing to Christians. He’s assuming that they see the importance of the cross. “Now,” he says, “use that as the message, as the standard.” He asks three stinging rhetorical questions. “Where is the wise man?” He asks. Now, the wise man in the Greco-Roman world was a person with a kind of public philosophy that explained everything.
You were a Stoic or you were an Epicurean or you were a Sophist, and if you held that kind of worldview, then that worldview explained your world for you, and it was advanced by the academics of the day in the marketplace and in teaching platforms as the best way of understanding life, and describing family, and ordaining moral structures in a society.
Paul is saying, in effect, “Which of the schools of philosophy of the day figured out the cross?” To put it in our terms, did Kantianism think up the cross? It was much concerned with questions of social justice, but did it imagine its way, did it think its way through to a God who would reconcile human beings to himself by the cross?
How about capitalism? Capitalism presupposes that people are sinful, which is very useful when you try to build an economic system, because at least it has that point right, but on the other hand, did it think its way through to the cross? How about democracy as the kind of summum bonum for the way you structure society? Does democracy as a system, as a political way of organizing a nation, think its way through to the cross?
Have you met the most brilliant postmodernist thinking their way through to the cross? “But if you’re a Christian at all,” Paul says, “why do you hold up these competing structures of thought as if they are at the very acme of what is central and good and wholesome, if they cannot get to what is foundational in reconciling men and women to their Maker?”
Or we’re asked, “Where is the expert in law? Where is the scholar?” The word actually suggests someone who is a Jew who knows the law very well and is applying Old Testament exegesis to explain all of structure and society and make laws for the family and church. We might say today, “Where is the theologian?” Do theologians, by themselves apart from what God has disclosed, do they think themselves through to the cross?
Well what about, then, the philosopher of this age? In the ancient world that meant the public orator, the speaker who is highly acclaimed as a presenter of views and as someone who challenged all of society to think clearly. Within this kind of framework, then, Paul says, “Has not God instead made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Hasn’t he utterly befooled it, literally?
That is, he has actually exposed its folly by coming and saving human beings with a system of thought, a way, a means, a structure that is outside anything they could have conceived. The point is that in the cross God has already passed judgment on the world. How has God done this? Verse 21: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased, through the foolishness of what was preached, to save those who believed.”
The wisdom of God determined that the world, through its wisdom, would not know him. That is, once this world has already rebelled against him, once this world has already become so self-satisfied and smug, whether in its political or its social or its religious systems, that in fact it’s self-proclaimed autonomy is precisely at the heart of the problem, God determines, through his wisdom, to save men and women outside all the wisdom they can think of.
Because otherwise they’re simply going to pat themselves on the back for all eternity about how wise they were to think up some way they could manage to outsmart God or save themselves. It pleased God, therefore, through the foolishness of what was preached, through the foolishness of the message proclaimed about the cross, this ghastly symbol of horror and shame and odium, to save those who believe.
You see, the reason why this is so destructive of the world’s wisdom is that a god discovered by human wisdom will be both a projection of human fallenness and a source of human pride, and this constitutes the worship of the creature, not the Creator. Supposing God were to allow in all the Democrats or perhaps everyone with an IQ of above 120 or anyone who gets a double first at Oxford?
Would this breed humility? Would it drive people to recognize our arrogant self-centeredness? Would it encourage people to think of the centrality of God and find our delight in his glory and holiness and wisdom and truth? The gods of the wise are not gracious to those the wise deem foolish.
The fact of the matter is, children may believe. Men may believe and women may believe. The rich may believe and the poor may believe. Slaves may believe and the free may believe. Different races may believe. Thus, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know him. God determined that it would be that way, and since this was so, God was pleased, through the foolishness of what was preached, that is the message of the cross heralded, to save those who believe.
Secondly, the message of the cross proves that God’s folly has outsmarted human wisdom and his weakness has overpowered human strength. Verses 22–25. The contrast in verse 18, the foolishness of the one and the power of the other, is now expanded and unpacked and given precision. Paul divides those who perish into two groups who represent the fundamental idolatries of every age.
Verse 22: “Jews demand miraculous signs, and Greeks look for wisdom.” That is, the Jews, who were much interested in authenticating who Christ was by demanding signs, look for a certain kind of authority, a power that they can control. You recall how again and again, according to the Gospels, people came to Jesus and said, in effect, “If you will only do such-and-such, we will believe.”
Even on the cross, “Come down from the cross and we’ll believe you.” Now have you never read those passages and thought to yourself, “Why didn’t Jesus just come along and for once do what they ask for and shut them up, call their bluff?” The trouble is, of course, that if Jesus had done that, they could have come back the next day and said, “Well that was fine for yesterday, but what about today? You know yesterday’s grace isn’t really sufficient for today. Do this and we’ll continue to believe.”
Pretty soon, then, Jesus becomes more or less a trained poodle taught to do miracles on command. He’s more like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp than the Sovereign God. The real question is who controls the lamp? So there is the kind of approach to religion, there is an approach to spirituality that wants to be connected with transcendence. It wants to be connected with God. It wants to have some experience of spirituality. It wants to feel that there is something out there, but at the end of the day, it has to be something that you control, and if it is, who’s really God?
“Or alternatively,” he says, “there’s another approach to the whole thing. Instead of having a religious structure of thought that you basically control, the Greeks seek for wisdom.” That is, you develop a kind of outlook, a philosophy of life, an approach, a values system, and in the postmodern age you might very carefully say, “Well this group has this values system and this group has that values system. I’m comfortable within mine, and that’s the end of it.”
But at the end of the day, in the Christian outlook, fundamental questions of culture-transcending truth turn on a God who is above all and who knows all. He knows everything, and he demands that he be at the center of our worship, of our acknowledgement, and of our devotion. In both cases, in other words, that represented by the Jew and that represented by the Greek, there is a profound self-centeredness and God is not taken on trust.
He’s basically not known. He must present his credentials to human beings. We want to approve him. We want him to meet our criteria, and thus people write books with a title such as The God I Can Believe In. The God I can believe in? Isn’t anybody interested in knowing about the God who is there?
By contrast, Paul says (verse 23), “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” This is the place in the text where first-century readers would either fall in worship or they would be embarrassed to tears. We preach a messiah crucified?
That’s an oxymoron, like fried ice. You can’t have fried ice. You can’t have a crucified messiah. Messiah means anointed, king, powerful, prestige, honor, glory, strength, integrity; and you’re talking about a crucified messiah, dying in shame, executed ignominiously, forsworn, abased, an odium in the nostrils of the empire? A crucified messiah? “That’s who we preach.” Paul says.
“It’s foolishness to the Jews,” Paul says. They thought that anybody who was hung on a cross was cursed by God. Jesus was proved a failure. Sheer folly. Utter stupidity to those of the Gentiles who have their locked-in little philosophical systems. “But,” Paul says, “to us who believe, this is the wisdom of God and the power of God.” For truth of the matter, Paul insists, is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”
This doesn’t mean that God really does have real foolishness, and if you put everything on a scale you get the highest part of human wisdom and the lowest part of God’s folly, and God’s folly is still above our wisdom. That’s not what it means. What it means, of course, is that this thing that the world counts folly, this foolishness of God, turns out to be, in fact, sublime wisdom.
It transforms men and women, builds the church, reconciles rebels to God, and prepares a heaven. Everything that they have thought foolish has been the most sublime demonstration of the love and wisdom and power and strength of God himself. So this is the folly of the cross. Then in the second place, Paul says something about …
2. The outreach of the cross.
Verses 26–31. Paul has been looking especially at the people who reject the message of the cross, and he’s said some pretty strong things, but now he turns to focus especially on those who accept it, and he finds that who they are supports his main point. By and large, the people in Corinth who have become Christians are not the wise or the glamorous or the gifted or the saintly. No, by and large, with some wonderful exceptions, they’re nobodies. That’s what he says.
“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called.” Verse 26. “Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.” In other words, Paul wants the church to recognize the point.
“Brothers …” He addresses them, writing to those who were converted, and then he describes them using some words from Jeremiah, chapter 9. It’s worth reading Jeremiah 9:23–24. There the prophet writes, quoting God, “ ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts, boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness and justice and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight,’ declares the Lord.”
You see how Jeremiah there talks about the wise man not boasting in the wisdom, strong man not boasting in strength, the rich man not boasting in riches. Now Paul picks up the same categories, slightly modified. “The wise person.” Same category as Jeremiah. “The influential.” That is, strong in that sense, strong in the sense of powerful, a person with clout.
“The person of noble birth,” Paul says, because in those days it was usually the people of noble birth who did have the money. There wasn’t much of the sort of intermediate middle business class. You either had nobility and money or you had no nobility and no money, so Paul rewrites it to be understood in the Roman context. Now it’s very important to observe that Paul does not say, “Not any of you were wise. Not any of you were influential. Not any of you were of noble birth.”
He says, rather, “Not many were wise by human standards. Not many were influential.” At the time of the great evangelical awakening in this country in the 1740s and beyond, under the ministry of Howell Harris in Wales, George Whitefield, the two Wesley brothers, and many others, there were many, many, many tens of thousands converted, and many were of the working class.
But people were converted from every walk of life, and one of the most notable of these was the Countess of Huntingdon, who used to say that she was saved by an M, the difference between not any and not many. People have sometimes tried to depict first-century Christians as basically being a motley crew of slaves, stupid people, rejects of society, the scum. That’s not quite fair.
Even in the second century, the pagan Celsus sneered about Christians in these terms. I’m quoting him now, “Their injunctions are like this, ‘Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near, for these abilities are thought by us to be evils, but as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.’ ” Sounds like the varsity.
“By the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of their God, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, the dishonorable, the stupid, only slaves, women …” Sorry about that. “… and children.” Yes, there were pagan sexists, too. In fact, it has been repeatedly shown that in the first century there were Christians drawn from every stratum of society.
Part of my job now takes me to various corners of the world. In Pakistan, most Christians are from poorer strata. In Singapore, most Christians are from the upper economic strata. But worldwide, for all kinds of Christians who are without nobility, without prestige, without money, without education; if there were poor and ignorant people in the first-century church, there were also people like Crispus, Gaius, Philemon, Erastus, and minds like Paul’s, brilliantly trained, writing a sheaf of letters that become one-quarter of the New Testament.
Paul is not saying here that you cannot be a Christian if you have a decent mind. For a start, he’d exclude himself. He is saying, “Look around the world. Look in your own church. Look at who are Christians. Does God give a certain kind of extra percentage, a handicap, perhaps, to certain people and not others? So what are you boasting about? Why are you so enamored by various systems of thought that come along?” No, no.
Being wise, powerful, or wellborn cannot be a criterion of being a Christian, and it is important to understand that at Cambridge University. This is a great place. I love it dearly. I keep coming back, but it is never a criterion for being a Christian. If anyone approaches God on such terms, he or she is necessarily excluded. That would be a kind of domestication of God by the wise or the educated or the wealthy or the wellborn.
That is why so many people the Lord calls are the poor and the disenfranchised. God delights to overturn the values of a proud world, to insist that what Celsus sees as the shame of Christianity is, in fact, precisely what brings glory to God. After all, we serve a master who suffered the shame of the cross. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. That’s what God did.
Paul moves from the empirical observation in verse 26 to the underlying theological principle. “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are.” Why? What was the ultimate end here? “So that no one may boast before him.”
No one is going to stand before God on the last day and say, “Well, you know, the gospel came to a lot of people, a lot of friends, and basically I was smart enough to make the right decision.” A legitimate boast for all eternity. Not a single person is going to be able to say that on the last day. No, God acts this way so that no one will boast. His actions prove that he is gracious. He does not owe the world forgiveness, and he chooses the people who seem most in need of help.
He shames the wise. That does not mean he makes them feel ashamed. It means he disgraces them. In all their pompous arrogance, he writes them off. That is why Paul elsewhere asks the rhetorical question (Romans 3), “Where then is boasting? It is excluded.” And so the positive case is put in the last couple of verses.
“It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus.” That is, it is finally because of God. Oh, I know you came to believe, but you came to believe finally because God was working in you. When I was an undergraduate, we used to sing the hymn:
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
he moved my heart to seek him, seeking me.
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
no, I was found by thee.
Thou didst put forth thy hand, and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-swept sea.
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold,
as thou, dear Lord, on me.
No. “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ ” Now it’s worth pausing just for a moment in this verse 30. “Christ has become for us wisdom from God.” Then Paul unpacks that. “That is,” he says, “our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.”
That is, Christ is not our wisdom in the same way that the Jews look for wisdom or the Greeks look for wisdom, in a philosophical structure that explains everything. He’s our wisdom along certain axes. Righteousness is in the legal realm. Holiness is in the religious realm. Redemption is in the realm of social structure, slavery.
You see, in the righteousness realm, how is a guilty person, a rebel, to approach a holy God, a God who is right, who demands that people be right? The answer that Paul articulates elsewhere, in Romans 3, is that God preserves his reputation for rightness, for being right, while still forgiving people who are abominably wrong, by sending his dear Son to die in their place.
He takes their punishment. That’s why Paul says the cross is the place where God is both right and the one who makes right, who puts right, who declares right, who justifies (same word), those who are guilty and sinners. That’s what the cross has done. Then the holiness word group is in the religious category, the Jews and those who would come to read the Old Testament. They had read the book of Leviticus.
In Leviticus everything you do either makes you holy or makes you clean. You get up in the morning, you put on the wrong clothes, and you’re dirty. Put on the right clothes and you’re holy. You eat the right food and you’re holy, you eat the wrong food and you’re not holy. Then you go outside and you see a bit of mold on the wall of the house, and what you do next depends on whether you’re holy or whether you’re not holy.
Then you touch a dead carcass, you’ve got to bury your dog, and then you’re unholy, and on and on it goes. Everything you do is bound up with … either you’re getting more holy or you’re getting more dirty, and every time you get a little more dirty then there’s a sacrifice that has to be offered.
Now it was a way of teaching to a social system that God makes distinctions between that which is reserved for him and that which is running away from him. It was a teaching device, and finally, everything that lives for itself, in alienation to God, is bound up in what is dirty. How then shall we approach this Holy God, before whom even the angels cover their wings and cry, “Holy, holy, holy”?
The answer in Leviticus, of course, is the whole sacrificial system. The way you got holy again was to wash yourself and follow the prescribed rites of sacrifices, and now along comes Christ who is called the Lamb of God, who is slaughtered on our behalf. We are made holy because of him.
Then, redemption. In the ancient world there were no insolvency or bankruptcy laws, so that when a person’s business went belly-up or the farm didn’t produce, eventually you had no recourse if you were in debt but to sell your wife and children and yourself into slavery, and you could not possibly get out, because anything that you might have earned was owned by your owner.
The only way you could get out, apart from the grace of an owner, would be if someone else, maybe your brother-in-law, worked day and night overtime finally to produce redemption money that would free you. In a sense it can be viewed that way, too, can’t it? It enslaves us. We’re owned. Sold out. No hope of freeing ourselves, but Christ was the redemption money that freed us. He emancipates us.
He liberates us from our guilt, from all the things that shame us and declare us guilty before God, and so he is not only our righteousness, he is also our redemption. He frees us from our slavery. Now it is in that framework, Paul says, that the wisdom of God is worked out. “He is our wisdom,” he says. “That is, our righteousness, our holiness, and our redemption.” Now we come to the last paragraph, and it’s the shortest one …
3. The proclaimer of the cross.
The pretensions and arrogance of the Corinthians were opposed not only by the foolishness of the cross, and exposed by the outreach of the cross, but also by Paul’s own example when he first went to Corinth and preached to them. That is, even the preacher who had introduced them to Jesus had self-consciously turned away from showmanship and self-reliance.
Paul writes, “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” Now it’s hard for us to come to terms with a verse like that, because we no longer live in days where rhetoric is viewed with great honor. Nowadays we have talking heads to us on the television set, and a posh accent comes across and tells you about people who are slaughtering other people in Rwanda.
Then it’ll tell you about what the weather is like in the Midlands, and it’ll also say something about whether the pound is going up or going down, and who won the latest football match. There is nothing of scale in all of this. It’s all determined by some editor whose face you never see.
A few shots can be fired anywhere in the world, and you may see them all tonight at nine o’clock on the news or ten o’clock on the news, provided the editor can’t find something else that he or she wants to put on above that matter. There’s no shock. There’s no rhetoric. There’s no training. There’s no evaluation. It’s just a talking head.
Until the turn of the century, rhetoric was taught in all the major Western universities. Rhetoric was on the curriculum at Cambridge University, and it was judged to be part of a proper education, to know how to speak, to present a case, to know the forms and devices of rhetoric. The trouble is, when that is done it can become an end in itself, so how you say something may be more important than what you say. That’s the kind of thing that Paul faced in the first century.
The closest example I know of it in the modern world is in some places where Arabic is spoken. A friend of a friend of mine in Egypt speaks beautiful Arabic, high Arabic. He was a journalist and became a Christian, began to preach, and because his Arabic was so smashing, just so wonderful to listen to, crowds began to gather until he was preaching regularly to 800 people who came to hear his fluent, florid Arabic, but it suddenly struck him that he wasn’t seeing people converted so he started using street Arabic.
The crowds dropped to less than a third the size, but he started getting conversions. Now I can’t think of an exact parallel in our society today, but the attitude of not manipulating people by that which they may want and instead going for that which is fundamentally the truth of the gospel is absolutely critical. Paul makes a conscious choice.
“When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom …” What he means is the wisdom of philosophical rhetoric. “… as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” What did Paul do when he was there? First, he says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
Now it’s very important that that verse not be misunderstood. Paul is not a crypto anti-intellectual, and I would not want you to leave the place tonight thinking that’s what I’m suggesting for a moment. After all, you find Paul in Thessalonica just two or three cities back, persuading people, and arguing. One city back in Athens, according to Acts, chapter 17, he debates and takes on the most brilliant minds in the hottest university of his day.
Then a few cities before that, well, he’s in the Jewish synagogue crossing swords with experts in Scripture. One of the astonishing things about Paul is that he has used his training and his cross-cultural experience to be able to preach the gospel to biblically literate people and cite text after text after text after text to prove that Jesus is the Messiah.
Then he can go to Athens, to people who have never heard of the Old Testament, never read Moses and don’t know anything about a Bible, and start still preaching the same gospel to them in ways that are culturally relevant. Oh he used his mind, all right. Elsewhere he can say, “Knowing the fear of God, we persuade men.” Oh, he’s interested in persuading people, all right.
Then did not Jesus himself say, “The first and greatest commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength”? Have you ever thought about that? What does it mean to love God with your mind? In fact, the text is even stronger than it appears, for our word for heart is associated with emotions.
You’re to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength? Oh, one of the four at least is mind, but in the ancient world, heart is bound up with the center of your personality. It’s closer to what we mean by mind. In the ancient world the symbolism for the seat of emotions was your gut or your kidneys. Thus in the King James Version, the Authorized Version, you find words like reins … les reins in French … for kidneys. That’s the seat of your emotion. Or bowels of compassion in Philippians.
You know, the young man says, “I love you with all my kidneys!” That was the way the symbolism worked in the ancient world. The heart was, rather, the seat of your will and your thought life, your personality. So now the text says you’re to love the Lord your God with all your … what shall we say? With who you are … with your mind and with all your strength and with all your mind and with all your soul.
You see, the least that it means is that Christians, if we’re to love God at all, must bring all of our thinking and our values and our thoughts into line with God’s thoughts. That is why those who would become kings, according to Deuteronomy, chapter 17 … If they were to enter this task of serving as king, they were to begin by copying out the Pentateuch, in Hebrew, by hand, not downloading from a CD onto their hard drive, copying it out by hand and then reading it every day, so that they would learn to fear God and not think of themselves as better than other people.
You see, all of this has to do with the mind, and then Paul elsewhere can insist that we’re to think about whatever is clean and whatever is pure and whatever is noble. In 2 Corinthians 4, he says, “We take captive every thought that raises itself in pretension against God.” In the context it’s quite clear that he does not mean, “We want to have very pure inner lives so that every single thought we think is nice and holy.” I’m sure he would say that, but that’s not the point.
He’s saying he wants to take captive every thought system, every worldview, and every structure that elevates itself in arrogance against the God who has made this world. We go after it. We take it captive for Christ. In other words, never, ever reduce your Christianity to some touchy-feely thing that leaves the mind untouched.
In all of your discipline, offer up your best to God with your intellect, but at the same time, never, ever think that you reason people into the kingdom or that intellect alone saves. At the heart of all that transforms is the cross. That’s what Paul says. “I determined,” he says, “when I was with you to focus on Jesus Christ and him crucified. I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
“Not only so,” he says, “I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling.” After all, he’d gotten beaten up and thrown in jail in Philippi a few months back, run out of town on a rail in Thessalonica, been in pretty horrendous debates in Athens, and now he comes to Corinth, a bit of the armpit of the empire. It’s not surprising he’s a bit nervous at this point.
But it is frequently when the preacher is ill or weak or overwhelmed or afraid that the power of God comes down and people are transformed. He was determined to focus on the cross, not to impress people with his eloquence. He himself was scared witless and sometimes ill. In fact, according to Acts, chapter 18, God had to give him special encouragement even for him to stick it out.
“Not only so,” he said, “but my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words.” That is, “I wasn’t manipulative. I wasn’t fooling you.” I once spoke at a youth convention in Australia where the leader of this group of about 7,000 young people called together all the regional directors and the leaders of the individual house groups who had come to this larger meeting, and he said to them.… I’ve never heard a youth leader say this.
He said to them, “It is essential that you see that your charges get enough sleep, because I do not want people making decisions for Christ or committing themselves in obedience because we’ve worn them down and exhausted them until they have no further reserves of strength.” That’s exactly right. I don’t want people to be converted because they’ve been manipulated. Let the gospel and all of God’s truth have free course and argument in the university and elsewhere. Play it out. Be bold, never manipulative.
And then above all, Paul says, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on man’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” In this context, this does not mean an ample supply of miracles. Paul sometimes did, by God’s power, perform miracles. That’s not what he has in mind here.
When Paul habitually speaks of the power of God resting on him or working through him, it is, as in Ephesians, chapter 3, the power of God, working by the Spirit in what he calls our inner being, so that we become more holy, so that we’re transformed. What he’s saying here, therefore, is not, “I can do more powerful things to win your awe and appreciation …” He’s just finished telling the Jews that he does not want the gospel to be based on signs. No, no. “… but with the demonstration of the Spirit’s power in life-transforming conversion …”
When people are genuinely converted you can tell the difference. He wants this “… so that your faith may not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” Some of you are entering university for the first time. Some of you may not be believers. What I want for you above all is that you’ll come face to face with Christ crucified and see that in him is your only hope of being reconciled to the God who made you.
He died for sinners like you and me, despite the varsity Christians, regardless of the clothes they wear, who are not particularly holier-than-thou types; they’re more like poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there’s bread. We’ve found our sins have been forgiven by one who died for us. We’ve found that the Spirit of God was poured out because Jesus died on the cross. We’ve found that we’ve been reconciled to our Maker because our Maker provided a sacrifice for us.
We’ve known that our guilt and shame, our frequent self-deceits, our constant moral rebellion, our constant self-assertiveness has been paid for, atoned for, covered over, cancelled because one who was perfectly without sin took our sin in his own body on the tree that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, and we hunger to see you believe that Christ and trust him, too.
For those of us who have known Christ, this is a time to resolve, at the beginning of another university year, perhaps the beginning of a university career, to devote your mind to that which is absolutely central from an eternal perspective, the gospel of Christ crucified. Discharge all your obligations as a student, by all means, give up your best to the Master, but understand that at the heart of all that is best is a joyful recognition that Jesus is lord because he died for your sins and rose again the third day.
May the power of the gospel utterly transform all of your living and being during this year and for all eternity, amen.
