First Corinthians 1:18-25
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 · Mike Doyle · Apr 26, 2020
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 05
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261918374896

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Let's open with some prayer. Father how we thank you that we can be together even though it's in this format and we trust that in the just in the not too distant future we can start to gather together again and fellowship together and be together as a body of believers which we so look forward to and we we pray specifically for that. So we ask that your spirit would teach us today and that we through this process could continue to grow in the knowledge and grace of our dear Savior, the Lord Jesus. And we pray in His name. Amen.

Okay, so we're going to talk today about 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 18 through 25. And over the next three weeks, I'll work my way down to chapter 2, verse 5. So, as Courtney said, these are really interesting verses and actually sort of fit in with what we were talking about at Sunday school. And notice what Paul does. Last week Roger ended up talking about a contrast between the cleverness of man's speech and the cross in verse 17. In verse 17 it said, For Christ didn't send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void.

I wanted to spend a minute on this word, cleverness. It has intrigued me all week as I've done some research on it and talked about it. I've come to this conclusion about cleverness. One of the aspects of being highly educated is that you're usually pretty clever. And a lot of times we are, in our body of believers, we have these very well-educated, learned men that are clever, but they're not spiritual. And so I think as a warning, as you go forward in your life, try to be able to distinguish between the cleverness of the educated pastor, teacher, whoever he might be, and how the cross of Christ and his intimacy with Christ fits in. So cleverness to me was just a really interesting word. It's a mental putting together of speech. It's the way in which you say things, and the more education you have, the more clever you are with the language.

And next Paul's going to develop a contrast in a series of arguments. He's going to point out that the gospel is not form of human wisdom or cleverness. His message is of a crucified son of God and you know what that message doesn't appeal to the wisdom of men and that's basically what we'll talk about today. Next week we'll talk more about that the recipients of this message were not necessarily especially wise men in the world system. So, and that's verses 26 through 31.

And then third, which will probably be two weeks, three weeks from now, Paul's preaching was not impressive in its human wisdom, but it did produce really, really powerful results. And so the word of the cross actually has the ability to produce opposite effects in those who are either on the way to perdition, which we'll see in a minute, or those who are on the way to glory.

In Romans 1.16, Paul talks specifically and contrasts foolishness with weakness. And he says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation. to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. It was really important to Paul to distinguish between human wisdom and the cross of Christ, because the cross separates. And then the last thing we'll talk about three weeks from now is Paul preaching was not impressive in its human wisdom, but it had and produced terrifically powerful results.

So the arguments in three steps over these next verses. Paul makes the main point here in these verses we'll talk about today and then he'll confirm that point in the next verses with an appeal to the Corinthians in their own situation and then he'll further confirm it with a reference to what and how he preached the gospel in Corinth. The Apostles thesis is disclosed first in Verse 18, for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. So twice he restates this then in verse 21 where he says, and since the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom didn't come to know God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message priest to serve those who, to save those who believe. and in 23 and 24, but we preach Christ crucified.

To the Jew, it's a stumbling block. To the Gentiles, it's foolishness. But again, to those who are the called, both Jew and Greek, Christ is the power of God and He is the wisdom of God. We're really talking about, from the world standpoint, the folly of a crucified Messiah or a crucified Savior.

I think this paragraph that we're talking about today is crucial, not only in the present argument, but this argument will find its way all the way through the entire book of 1 Corinthians. It's one of the truly great moments, I think, in the Apostle Paul's teaching. And he argues, and he takes in Old Testament support, which will be in the next verse, that God has always intended and had foretold in the prophets he has now accomplished through the crucifixion. Everything that God promised from Genesis 1 up until the time of Christ has all been accomplished by the crucifixion of the Savior. He's brought an end to human self-sufficiency as it is evidenced through human wisdom and human devices.

The phrase, the word of the cross, is really important, I think, to take a look at. Word, obviously, is the Greek word logos, which means message or doctrine. And the doctrine of the cross becomes the theme of the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians. Think of it as a caption that stands over The first two chapters that Chester McCauley used that made that phrase. It's it's a caption.

So So what is the doctrine of the cross? The doctrine of the cross is the teaching that Jesus Christ the Son of God became a man and that he died a death were in the guilt and the penalty of man's sin was placed on him and And why is that important? Because it made it possible for salvation to be extended to those who believe in Christ and His work. It is stated in God's Word that by the death of Christ two really important things happen. The first one was that the penalty and the guilt, obviously, that every single human being has to bear was now borne by the man, the Lord Jesus Christ. All of the guilt and all of the penalty for sins for all the whole world was borne by Christ. And the second thing, we talked a little bit about it last week at the Lord's Table, the second thing the cross did is that it allowed for the judgment of the source of your sin, which is the sin nature, And it broke that judgment and power of sin over you as a believer, as a child of God.

It's a really important aspect. And to accomplish this, for the Lord to accomplish this, only He could do it. It was a problem of infinite magnitude. Why? because sin is primarily against God, and He alone is the only one that can deal with it. We can't deal with our own sins, we just don't have the capacity to do it. The Word of God pictures sin as it is seen from divine standpoint, and it's important as you read God's Word, especially in the New Testament, that you look at sin from God's viewpoint and not your own. But it also unfolds God's one big huge problem, which was created by sin, and it records his exact manner and method for the solution, the cross. He's taken up the sin question.

He has solved it for all men in the death of a substitute, the Lord Jesus. And because of this, God can now save from the penalty of sin all those who believe in Him. this verse begins to talk about or starts out by talking about the foolishness of the cross is to those who are perishing so I thought we might want to talk a little bit about who are these perishing folks and what what is it about them that makes them foolish and the word perishing is interesting it's in the present tense which it means it's going on right now you could say the word means to destroy or to lose or to die and that kind of thing and because it's in the present tense the emphasis is not merely on what's going to happen in the future what it focuses on is that those who are not believers are perishing right this very minute they're perishing it isn't that I remember when I was first a believer, the man that led me to the Lord, he used to make a great statement.

He said, most people think that they live on the yellow line, and if they do enough good things, they get into heaven, and if they don't do enough good things or sin too much, they go to perdition. What this verse teaches is, in his words, this is the best hell's ever going to be. Those who don't believe in Christ are perishing right now. They're not gonna, they are now.

And notice how the perishing and the saved are designated by where they're headed. You could say that they're named relative to their destiny just as the saved are designated by their destiny. So the perishing view the cross as foolishness. And this word foolishness is actually in several of the verses that we're going to talk about. We're going to see this word a lot. And we get the word, the Greek word is moria, M-O-R-I-A, and that's where we get the word moron. So the perishing look at the cross of Christ as moronic. It appears it just doesn't fit their framework. It doesn't fit how they think. And the perishing, the gospel is measured by the human intellect only, and that's why it's moronic to them. They don't understand what the cross of Christ really means. The perishing try to call God before them. In other words, those that are perishing would have a judgment seat in which God would have to come before them and answer for what he was doing. And he came up with this cross and his son.

The second thing about this word foolishness is that it has a connotation of being feebly minded. So a person who's lost looks at the cross of Christ and probably looks at believers as being feebly minded and that we're morons. We don't know what we're doing. Philosophers prefer their learned dissertations and therefore the preaching of the cross to them is totally moronic. the smarter, the more educated a man is in the secular world, the more he looks at Christianity and the cross of Christ as moronic.

The wise of this world don't see the glory of the person who was nailed to that cross and therefore they don't see the love of God that gave him for them and to suffer for them. They don't see the holiness of God that demanded such a sacrifice, and they don't see the utter ruin as set forth in the cross. One of the problems you run into, and every believer has had this experience, how can you preach salvation to a man unless he knows he's lost? If he's okay, why would you preach salvation to him? He doesn't think he needs it.

What they, when they look at the cross, what do they see? They see a man nailed up on a cross, a wooden cross, in between two thieves. That's all they see. They don't really understand. And if we've talked about in a couple of Good Friday services, what was going on on Calvary that day, and those people standing around and looking, and do they understand what was really happening there? No, they didn't. The apostles didn't, none of them did, until I think at Pentecost when the Lord began to show them what that was all about.

So the preaching of salvation through the cross appears to the natural man as just folly. Why would you even want to do that? I would much rather, they say, be religious than to have to submit to the death of the cross. Those who think that way are the perishing. The cross brings the wisdom of the world to be exposed and brought to nothing. It makes no sense.

The world had ample time, though, to develop its own wisdom, which it has, the result being that all the wisdom of the philosophers was shown to be folly inasmuch that it left man in complete ignorance of God. The end of all man's wisdom is that the world by wisdom knew not God. In verse 21, with all of that wisdom, man never knew who God was. And it's not that the world by ignorance or stupidity knew not God. It was by wisdom that they didn't know him. I'm going to say that again. It's not that man didn't know about God because he was ignorant or because he was stupid. He didn't know it because of his wisdom.

That's what the Word says. The net result is, all the wisdom of the ages, the combined efforts of the keenest intellects in the world, is to leave man in utter ignorance of God and utter ignorance of himself. He doesn't understand. So, when the complete failure of man's wisdom has been demonstrated, What happens next? Now God is pleased by the foolishness of the preaching of the cross to save them that believe.

So let's evaluate the saved. How did the saved view the cross? To those of us who are being saved, the cross is what? It's the power of God. The cross represents the power of God, for thereby God can do what? He can do the one thing He wants to do. He can righteously save the vilest of sinners. The vilest of sinners. You cannot out-sin the cross of Christ. It's impossible to do that.

When a believer views the cross, what does he see? He sees the power of God. That's why the message does not need to be adorned by anecdotal human experience or by clever, there's that word clever again, clever salesmanship or the approval of human wisdom. It doesn't need that. Those who are saved measure the cross by the effectiveness of what it did and they believe it. If my sins have been taken care of, if my sins have been, my guilt has been taken care of at the cross, I believe that.

In the first part of verse 18, if you look at it carefully, man is the measure of wisdom. In the second part, God is the measure of wisdom. Okay, verse 19, it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside. And that comes from Isaiah 29, 14, where Isaiah said, Therefore, behold, I will once again deal marvelously with these people, wondrously marvelous. And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed. I went back and I looked back in Romans 1, chapter 1, verses 18 through 23.

And it's very similar there, but God lays out in these verses that man doesn't have an excuse. Because he says in 18, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. So every man knows about God, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, you know about God because his attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. God makes this pronouncement. Because you can see me in my creation, you're without excuse. You don't have an excuse. It doesn't matter if you say, I am excusable. You're not. The Word of God takes issue with that.

For even though they knew God, they didn't honor Him as God or give thanks. But they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Now notice what happens. Every man knows, and God says you need to honor me as God, and you need to be thankful. But if you don't do that, what happens? The word here says they became futile in their speculations, there's that wisdom kicking in again, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.

And they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man, of birds and four-footed animals and crawling things. So these are consequences that are associated with coming into contact with the truth and the truth of the cross and the body of Christ and believers and rejecting it. There is a consequence.

And I took some notes out of W.R. Newell, a commentator on Romans, and I'd share some of this with you because I think it amplifies what we're saying. He says, man had the light and that from God. The light was his eternal power and divinity were from creation onward plain to man and from his works. Men secretly believe that there is a power above them. All men do. We're studying Genesis on Wednesday night and we're finding that Pharaoh and some of these other persons would recognize there is God. And they would refer to him as God. And that their evil deeds deserve the wrath of his power. In sudden peril they scream like a guilty wretch as they are, God have mercy. Knowledge of God though not acquaintanceship with him lay behind Pharaoh's words.

I've sinned against Jehovah and against you Pharaoh out of Exodus 10 So in verse 20 Paul challenges them he says where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? It's a challenge Where is the debater of this age? has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world and The logic of this verse is as follows. If the doctrine of the cross is true, and it is, human wisdom rejects it, and it does, what can be concluded about human wisdom? The answer is God has made it foolish. God has made foolish the wisdom of the world.

Why? Because they've rejected the cross. The point is enforced in a rhetoric question Where is the wise man? Where is he? This would be reference to the Greek philosopher. How many of them understood and believed the message of the cross? Not many. What's a scribe? A scribe points to the Jew. It points to a Jewish thinker. A scribe.

And then he uses the term the debater of this age. He gets Jew and Gentile together, all the people who love logic. There they are. In Acts 6-9, Paul was in the synagogue, and in Acts it says, But some members of the so-called synagogue of the free men, together with some Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and men from Roman Asia, were aroused to encounter Stephen in a debate. This is where Stephen stood up in front of the whole group and laid out the gospel and they went crazy because it didn't fit their paradigm. Acts 17, 17. So he had discussed in this, this is Paul now, he had discussed in the synagogue with the Jews and other worshipers and in the marketplace day after day with those whom he happened to meet.

This is what Paul's doing. A few of the Epicureans and the Stoic philosophers also encountered him. Some of them asked him, what is this beggarly babbler to say? That's how they viewed Paul's message. His business, said others, seems to be to cry up some foreign gods.

This was because he had been telling the good news of Jesus Christ and the resurrection. See how they listened to it and how they reacted to it? What is human wisdom's highest good? And that's on your overhead, or in your handout. Verse 21 says, For since the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom, did not come to know God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message to preach, to save those, message preached to save those who believe. God has judged human wisdom because it's failure to achieve its highest good.

What is it? To know God. And that message has not changed. From Romans chapter 1, knowing God, he says, you know who I am because you can see my power. You can see that I'm divine and I require you to be thankful. And now, in Corinth, Paul is preaching the same thing, and he says, all of that wisdom didn't bring him to the one thing that human wisdom should bring you to, and that is to know God. And we as believers, what do you think, in my mind anyway, what do you think the most important thing is for me as a believer?

It's coming to know Christ personally and intimately. God has judged human wisdom because it's failure to achieve knowing God. So God saves by a message that really insults human wisdom and pride. The message will hear nothing of man's logic, will have nothing to do with God's works. Again, back to talking a little bit about what Newell had to say. Every human being knows several things. One is they ought to give his being over to the Creator's worship and glory. Every man knows that. He ought to be continually thankful for life itself and for its blessings.

But men refuse both worship and gratitude. They become godless and thankless. They could not free themselves thus easily from the conscience and terrors, so Here comes idolatry. First they resorted to vain speculations and reasonings to escape the thought of God and their duty to him.

Then the judicial result. He quotes Alfred who says, their heart, the whole inner man, the seed of knowledge and feeling became dark. They lost the little light that they had and wandered blindly in the mazes of folly. What an indictment. Think of a whole race of created beings knowing but refusing to recognize their creator. Of their eating from his hand daily but refusing even one thanksgiving.

Yet such godly ones, godless ones, such unthankful ones are all around us now. That's what Newell says. The silliness of this modern I so admire, you know, I made a criticism of men to start with their craftiness or cleverness, but this is Newell. Listen to his cleverness of language. He says, the silliness of the modern shallow pan days, how men are rushing back to the old pagan pit out of which God's word and his gospel would have delivered them. they suck up sin, they flurry in wickedness, and they profess to be wise.

They sit at the feet of professors whose breath is spiritual cyanide. They idolize the hog-stye doctrines of a rotten Freud and count themselves wise. They say, God is not a person, Men evolved from monkeys. Morals are mere old habits, self-enjoyment, self-expression, indulgence of all desires. This, they say, is the path to wisdom. It is the path of those who go quickly down to the pit and on to judgment. The very morals of Sodom, as our Lord foretold, are rushing fast upon us, and God will bring again the unlawful doom of Sodom. That paragraph, those two paragraphs, were written in 1937. 1937. So Newell says, well, what if somebody objects to this language? This is a strange introduction to the gospel of grace. Yes, it is.

He says, we answer, it lies here before us, this awful indictment of Romans 1, and cannot be evaded. Moreover, until man knows his state of sin, he wants no grace." So, how does a person get to where they can't understand? Or they don't want to understand? The first thing is they have to encounter the truth. They have to be presented with the truth. And in Romans 1, who God is, is presented to them every single day in His creation. They must hear it and they must see it. They must understand it.

But if you hear it, or you see it, like the gospel of the cross, you can't just let it go. The message of salvation, in and of itself, demands that you and I react, that we make a decision. If we react positively, we believe the message and we're saved. If we react negatively, we can do it either by rejecting it or just ignoring it. The effect of the truth will be determined by the road we choose. If we believe, we grow as believers. If we reject, we suffer hardness of heart.

That's quite an indictment, but I think that's true. It's a wonderful thing that there is a part of God's character that's referred to as long-suffering. I for one am really glad that he suffers long because it takes a lot of time for the Spirit of God to implement the cross in our life so that we will begin to see what is well pleasing to the Father and the cross of Christ is the center of all of that. So men are always free to refuse God's truth but they're not free to do it without consequence.

So, verse 22 says, for indeed the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks search for wisdom. We could say the Gentiles search for wisdom. 23 says, but we preach Christ crucified to the Jew a stumbling block to the Gentile foolishness. So, God has a way of revealing himself to man and in that process of blessing man equally, Jew or Gentile.

And the Jews always were looking for a sign because in the Old Testament, one of the ways if you had a ministry from God, let's say you were a prophet, you had to be able to do things that were a little extraordinary or supernatural. One of the men that really recognized this was Nicodemus. He went to the Lord and said, I know you're from God because you couldn't do the things that you do. He could do miraculous signs or miraculous interventions that appeal to the senses.

That's what a Jew looks for. The Gentile doesn't necessarily look for a sign. He looks for philosophic reasoning to be an appeal to his mind. He's got to be able to figure it out. But God doesn't appeal to that. He appeals to a man's conscience, he appeals to a man's heart, and he does it through Christ crucified. That's how he does it.

This, however, is a stumbling block to the Jew and foolishness to the Gentiles. In Matthew 12, 28, The Lord, but if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. The Lord said, if I'm showing these signs and I'm casting out demons, the kingdom is here. The kingdom is a person.

In Galatians 3.1, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? And in 5.11, Paul says to them, But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished. If Paul began to succumb and preach circumcision as something that was effective, then he has walked away from the stumbling block of the cross of Christ.

In 1 Peter 2.8, Peter says, In a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, for they stumbled because they are disobedient to the Word, and this doom they were also appointed."

So, the Jews were looking for a Messiah who could reign in power from a throne. One who would revive the kingdom, put down their enemies, and set Israel as the head of all nations. Well, that's going to happen, but not yet. Christ reigning on a throne they couldn't understand. Christ crucified on a cross was... I'm sorry, let me back up. Christ reigning on a throne they could understand, but Christ crucified on a cross... I didn't say that right, did I? Christ reigning on a throne they could understand, but Christ crucified on a cross was an offense to them. So let's close.

Today I want to pray about how the cross of Christ is an appeal for us to understand that what God has done, what he intends to do, all centers and begins in that cross. And a man said to me one time, Mike, it matters how you view yourself. Which side of the cross do you live on? Do I live on the side where I look to the cross to accomplish for me the things that I need? Or do I look at the cross from the other side where everything has been done and I now rest in the grace of God?

So let's close. Dear Father, how thankful we are for your Son's cross and how wonderful it is for those of us who are saved. It is the power. It's everything to us in terms of how we function, how we view you and how we live as believers. And we thank you, Father, for the Lord Jesus Christ and His cross. We pray in His precious name. Amen.