Sunday Morning Service

I Corinthians 1:18-31 (Click scripture reference for audio access)

"The Foolishness Of God!"  •  9.2.12  •  Sunday Morning Service, Calvary Christian Fellowship

Intro.

- Before Paul had come to Corinth, he had been in a city named Athens. It was a city sophisticated in philosophy and religion, devoted enough to fabricate a statue to "The Unknown God!"

- When Paul declared with an excellent speech, the greatness of that God, he found that while several enjoyed his message, only two embraced his Messiah!

- He left Athens and came to Corinth alone, likely pondering the previous events, but with this determination as he entered Corinth: "I'm going to preach the Cross and that's it!"

- Fast forward about 3 or 4 years, and Paul is hearing that after his departure from Corinth, that the church had divided itself into factions and camps based on early church figures.

- Their division toward these figures likely stems from an acceptance of worldly wisdom and a desire to fit Christianity into that mold!

- Are we in danger of taking the message that God has given us, and seeking to fit it in with the philosophies of our day? This passage is a warning against such thinking. We will note:

I. The Foolish Message (v.18-21)

II. The Foolish Method (v.22-25)

III. The Foolish Membership (v.26-31)

Text

I. The Foolish Message (v.18-21)

• I Corinthians 1:18,19 : "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. For it is written: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.'" : Paul's message was the message of a crucified Messiah. The Savior of the World that Paul proclaimed was killed on Rome's most undignified instrument.

- To the world at large, this plan seems foolish as it runs counter to everything that we have ever learned! In that part of the world, as in ours today, dominating power was the way to success.

- Jesus showed that the Kingdom's value system is exactly the opposite. Humility leads to exaltation! That kind of thinking won't get you into Rome's Pantheon, the hall of fame for gods!

- Sadly for many today, Jesus does not fit their bill either!

- Paul says that the message of the cross is foolish to those who are perishing. Those who view the message as foolish, are currently being led to ruin viewing the gospel as silliness or insanity.

- The message of the cross is not foolishness, but if one thinks so, it simply reveals their state! This person is presently being ruined spiritually!

- With each rejection of the gospel, their pride is amassing a storage vault of judgment, which will lead ultimately toward their final condemnation!

- It is a sobering thought to consider that the rejection of God's mercy and lovingkindness brings about an eternal state of conscious punishment for blaspheming the Judge of all the earth!

- What a ruinous thought, to believe that one's goodness outweighs the standard revealed in Christ's life! Imagine the arrogance of a person who trusts in their own righteousness! Ruin awaits!

- Alternately, a person who responds to the message believing what has been revealed is being saved! They are being delivered from the judgment that is due our sinful nature.

- Unlike the unbeliever, we are being transformed, made fit for heaven. The unbeliever is being ruined while the believer is being renovated!

- How did this happen? In any of our lives, it began with a simple message that we believed! It was not a high minded philosophical idea. We all came in the same way!

- The adoption of the World's philosophies will only end in a person's ruin! Paul quotes from Isaiah 29:14. Jerusalem in Isaiah's time, had given themselves over to the wisdom of their time.

- Idolatry had becpme the norm for the people of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba. That adoption of the world's "wisdom" was destroying them, so God, in His mercy, had to judge it!

- God was going to take men's ideas, which they viewed as wisdom, and tear it down, to crush and obliterate it! He did that when both Israel and Judah were led away into captivity.

• I Corinthians 1:20,21 : "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? 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." : The wise, the scribe and the disputer are all called to the courtroom. What has their philosophy produced? Has it produced salvation? Has God been known through their methods?

- This verse reminds me of Elijah's call to Israel and his challenge to the Prophets of Baal! "Show me the end and reality of your wisdom!"

- Understand that Paul is not referring to genuine, objective learning. Paul is not anti-education or anti-intellect. He is however indicting the philosophy of the World that rejects Christ!

- He is fighting against the notion that man is a supreme being judging the merits of God!

- He asks, "Where had the wisdom of the Greek speakers and orators led their society? What about the Jewish scribe, the religious teacher or lawyer of that time? What had they produced?"

- How about the brilliant debaters who sit on university campuses? Have they come close to bringing men to God? These institutiions have served to elevate their knowledge above God!

- God has taken their wisdom and made it foolish or vain. Consider the Apostle's argument: The world's wisdom had not resulted in the knowledge of God.

- God has bypassed the wisdom of this world and made the message of the Cross His approved method for salvation! It pleased God to make this the case!

- It made God smile to think about saving people who believed a message that was proclaimed to them. "It will not be a measure of achieving or attaining. It is a simple measure of believing!"

- God is the most complex being in the universe. What we know about Him in a lifetime is infinitely small compared to His being.

- Yet, what can be known of Him, can only be known by doing the simplest thing: Believing His message! When one does that, they get moved to the front of the line and get to know God!

- I would rather sit next to a believer who dropped out of High School, but was a faithful Bible reader, than a University professor with a bunch of letters after his name!

- Chances are, given the nature of this verse, the dropout would exceed the Professor in spiritual things!

II. The Foolish Method (v.22-25)

• I Corinthians 1:22-25 : "For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." : One would think that with such a "foolish" message, God would ramp up the method! Nah!

- When Paul spoke to Jews, they desired a sign. They would consistently beg for something miraculous. They wanted flash and excitement.

- Ultimately, the wanted the flash of a sword and the military might to rid themselves of the Roman yoke! They wanted an exercise of power and Paul preached a crucified hero!

- We preach Christ crucified, the Messiah on a cross! That's akin to saying, "We declare that we believe in the power of the electric chair Messiah!"  

- The Greek audience was different, seeking after wisdom or a higher degree of intelligence.

- This referred both to something new in knowledge and something exciting in presentation.

- A good example of what Paul is found in Acts 17:21, which records that the Athenians spent all of their time telling or hearing new philosophical ideas. That was the function of the Aeropagus.

- To the Greeks, the idea of God being concerned enough with man to condescend to a lowly human body and then be treated in a sub human manner in death was unthinkable!

- The Jews and the Greeks looked for these things. They naturally sought something that would tickle their eyes and ears, but we, the Apostles and the Christians, preach Christ crucified!

- The message of the Cross is simply a proclamation with nothing attached. Between both, the message of the cross was generically foolishness, but to the Jews, it was an offense!

- The Jews tripped over the concept of their Messiah suffering and much worse, dying in a way that was considered to be a curse according to Deuteronomy 21:23.

- For the Jews, if a relative was crucified, they were not allowed to even talk about them in conversation, much less acknowledge their worthiness to be the Messiah!

- They couldn't naturally get over this dilemma, nor could the Greeks. But both Jews and Greeks who believed experienced both the power and wisdom of God!

- Paul is saying something deeply profound in this statement. It is a great piece of irony: The ones looking for power and wisdom never found it. The ones believing the message experienced it!

- For those looking to be satisfied with flash and experience before believing, I attest truly, that you will walk away wondering what the big deal is. When you believe the message, you will know!

- God's foolish proposition and presentation then is wiser and stronger than the wisdom and strength of men, for God's foolishness actually works, in terms of producing a righteous person!

- How does He do it? By announcement. Nothing fancy, nothing spectacular. A person with a limited vocabulary and no education can share the tenets of the Christian faith to any heart.

- We make little of what it means to preach the message of the Cross, but it is in the preaching, the simple announcing that deliverance and eternal life comes!

III. The Foolish Membership (v.26-31)

• I Corinthians 1:26 : "For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called." : If wisdom is that great, it would get people to the knowledge of God.

- If wisdom were the pre-requisite for heaven, not many of them would be allowed in!

- When they considered their own entry into the Kingdom, not many of them were trained in great wisdom, nor were many strong or of noble birth.

- There were some who were gifted intellectually, rich materially and influential regionally, but not many and certainly, their position in the church was not related to their position in life.

- Every person who God looks upon as His, have become so because they have believed in the message that has been preached, meaning that the standard for entry is humility, not pride!

- The people of Corinth were not real people of genius, influential or rich! Why would they now consider that to be the standard by which God was impressed with a life?

- It's sad that this is exactly how we become and will become if we are not careful. We come to Christ in one condition and then grow into something that Christ intends for us.

- When that has taken place, simply by God's grace, we look at ourselves and think that we are now the standard bearers for minimal Christian experience!

- But the truth is, not many of us are what we were when we first came in the door! We were just glad that they didn't bar the door or kick us out when they figured out who we were!

• I Corinthians 1:27-29 : "But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence." : Here is where the fit in: Foolish things!

- God has shunned the wisdom of the world and taken in the foolish, the weak, the base and the despised things.

- We get our word "moron" from the word "foolish" here, but it does not necessarily mean what you think it means, though it has come to mean that!

- The idea of a foolish person is one who had not given any previous thought to God.

- It is these who thought the least of God who God has brought into His Kingdom, the blushing embarrassment of the wise!

- The weak, the ones who were feeble and infirm spiritually, bringing shame to the strong!

- The base, or ignoble are chosen by God, not for their nobility of birth, but because they were nobodies! They had nothing to impress God with!

- Finally, God has taken for Himself the ones that are the outcasts! Nobody wants them. Nobody sees the value in them, but God does!

- Why did God do this with the Corinthians? So that nobody could claim that God picked a winner! God had taken a rag tag group with nothing to offer Him and made them rich!

- Who can stand up and speak of their great reputation as a reason for God's calling of them?

- The NASB says it the best: "As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God."

- There is not a human being in the church today that can point to some reason for God's choosing of them! All that attracted God to you was that you were not spiritually attractive at all!

• I Corinthians 1:30,31 : "But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption—that, as it is written, 'He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.'" : None of us is anything, but we are in Christ Jesus who is everything, yes, the very embodiment of God's wisdom!

- Jesus is the One that God approves of. Let that sink in.

- There is truly only One Christian and that is Jesus. Those who have believed upon Christ have entered into Christ. You are pleasing to God because you are in Him!

- God took a bunch of nobodies and made them special on account of Christ! God is saying that Christ is that valuable, that His presence in heaven makes every worthless one worthy of all!

- All that Christ represents is the very wisdom of God. Christ represents righteousness, which as we learned from Romans, is an acceptable life before God.

- It is a life declared right, receiving the stamp of divine approval! This is positional truth. Sanctification is possessional truth, not that we possess the Holy Spirit, but that He possesses us!

- The Holy Spirit resides in you, leading you daily to turn from sin and to think and act according to His Son's mandates.

- Redemption, the word of value. God legally justified you when you believed. He is changing you as you believe. But He did this at a cost. He actually legally bought you and I!

- He did this so that we would glory in Him! Paul quotes here from Jeremiah 9. It's a fitting way to end this message, by reading Jeremiah's words beginning in verse 23.

• Jeremiah 9:23,24 : "Thus says the Lord: 'Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, Let not the mighty man glory in his might, Nor let the rich man glory in his riches; But let him who glories glory in this, That he understands and knows Me, That I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I delight,' says the Lord."

Conclusion

- The Foolish Message is the message of a crucified Messiah, cursed by God on our behalf, taking upon Himself every sinful deed and attitude that every believer has ever committed.

- The Foolish Method that brought us in was that someone declared this as truth to us and we knew that they weren't lying!

- The Foolish Members were all of us, who came in not knowing anything except Jesus and Him crucified. It worked for us! Why would we not believe that it will work for others!

- The Message needs no improvement, the Method is sound and the Members will always be the ones who start it all over again! I pray we'd be faithful toward that end!