The Wisdom of God

Alright, who feels ready to tackle more wisdom? We're hitting on a stretch here from Paul where he wants to make sure that this church body doesn't have any sense of confidence in human wisdom. And when we're done with this stretch today, this passage today, hopefully Not only will you agree with Paul that human wisdom has some shortcomings, but also you'll have a deeper sense of how God provides spiritual wisdom for us as believers, so that we're not left in the lurch with just doubt of human wisdom, but no confidence in an alternative source. So hopefully this will be a fruitful time. I'm going to go ahead and read this out loud so that it's nice and clear on the recording. We'll dig in here in just a moment.

So Paul writes, Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. But we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory. The wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.

But just as it is written, things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him. For to us God revealed them through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. Which things we also speak not in words taught by human wisdom but in those taught by the Spirit combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

Alright, so we have here a continuation of the idea of foolishness and wisdom. And I always like to reiterate whenever we use a word like wisdom, we want to reiterate a working definition that is a compelling definition that we can all operate with. So I've got mine here. Wisdom is knowledge applied. It is the reflection of spiritual truth having a deep impact on those who are being conformed to the image of Christ. Okay, so we have God's wisdom and we have God's provision in these things. But Paul is continuing on after having attacked earthly wisdom in verse 4. He says, we speak wisdom to those who are mature.

And I have to tell you that that one word is probably the biggest wrestling point that I've had in all of my preparation for this Sunday school class. And that is not because the translators did a terrible job. It is because the word could be translated mature, but it could also be translated perfect.

And so I wrestled with that because Well, I'm not perfect. As far as I know, no one else in this room is perfect. You know, it is Valentine's Day. We could ask everybody's sweetheart and find out how perfect they are, right? But the reality is that mature is one of...

It is a possible translation and it is a worthwhile translation here. So, perfect. is not the only translation of that word, and Paul, I think, is not trying to imply perfection. We can look at other Bible verses, right? Where do we find out that we're not perfect anywhere else in Scripture? We're being perfected, our position is perfect, but as far as condition is concerned, right?

We're not perfect. we could go to, say, 2 Corinthians 3.18. Let's jump there. One of my favorite passages to meditate on. He says, But we all with unveiled face, because our position is unveiled, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the Spirit. If we were perfect, would we need any further transformation? No. So mature is a reasonable translation. We're not doing any gymnastics and we're not wrestling with what Paul has to say there. Yeah.

It's kind of like looking at the year of corn. Well, it's fully mature and in full growth mode, but the years haven't appeared yet. The stalk is showing, but it hasn't finished producing the fruit and the cycle is done. If we were to look at Romans chapter 8, we would see that we're being conformed to the image of Christ as well, but that conformity is going to come to a final point when we either pass away and are, I'll say, fast forwarded to the rapture or the rapture happens and then our position and our condition will be joined and unified in one place. But until that point, our condition is one of growth, right? So maturing is taking place. But Paul is concerned about this principle of maturity Does the church in Corinth so far seem to manifest that maturity?

Does division reflect maturity? The answer is yes, sometimes. Sometimes we divide ourselves from sin. Sometimes we separate ourselves from wickedness and deception and carnality. Those are reasons sometimes to have separation. But that's not what's causing the division. There's not a specific issue of of this is a false teacher and this is a righteous teacher.

This is an issue of people being immature. So Paul calls them on the carpet. He says, listen I'm talking to you about wisdom that a mature person would get. Which unfortunately means that he's also calling them out on their immaturity. He's going to explain to them as we go through this passage about that wisdom, about how they should be growing to that point and expecting that and being able to think God's thoughts after him. So the mature listeners are maybe few and far between in Corinth.

But Paul is trying to set their minds on things above. Let's take a quick look to further clarify on this principle of maturity at Ephesians 4, 11 through 16. We have a lot of verses to go over in 6 through 13, but I think it's worthwhile to take just a small rabbit trail over here and take a look at the picture that Paul paints.

So Ephesians 4, 11 through 16, he says, And he gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of service, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ. from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself and love." We can almost say that those few verses reflect the story arc, if you will, or the topical arc of 1 Corinthians. because he wants them to not have division and to seek growth and to work as a body and come together into the fullness of who Christ is. Those are actually all key topics we went over in the introductory lesson. But we see here that this principle of maturity is what he's carrying a heavy amount of weight in.

I've got a quote here, which I don't normally quote secular sources, but I'm going to quote this because I think it actually reflects the error of human wisdom. Because Paul is talking about the wisdom of the rulers of this age, and he's talking about the way that the human mind thinks. And so here's this quote from T.S. Eliot, he says, Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? And of course T.S. Eliot passed away in 1965, so this isn't that old of a quote.

But I happen to work for a company that makes a lot of money trying to take in lots of data and turn all that data into information so that we can have information that would lead us to knowledge so that we can be wiser than our competitor. So we can reverse the flow of this quote and that's what my company tries to do, at least in part, for revenue. But I think if we look around at our culture today, what we find is a tremendous glut of information. We have Wikipedia. We have a tremendous amount of knowledge. You can get a constantly dynamic encyclopedia 24 hours a day.

But is there wisdom in it? Tom? Well, I'm thinking there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that catches some of it, if not more of it, might not even be true. Well, I think we can argue that, yeah, there are errors in Wikipedia, but the truth of the statements isn't even often the focus because it's humanism that is their foundation, right? And that humanism, the idea that we will derive what is true and be founts of that wisdom is maybe arrogant. So I've got there in italics this question underneath that quote and it says, has man gotten any wiser since Paul wrote this?

And I think we can say no. The first sentence in that next paragraph is, Wisdom from God comes from an omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal being. God is able to speak from outside the time-space continuum. If you were in the apologetics class, and I think a few of you were in the apologetics class, we talked about the idea of knowledge and truth there in one of the classes, epistemology.

And one of the questions I like to ask people who say that they don't walk by faith, they don't think that atheists have faith, the question I like to ask them is, do you know for certain that there has never been, there is not presently, and there never will be, in all of the universe, in all of the time-space continuum, unicorns? And the answer to that question that any rational human being must tell you is that they don't know that there was never a unicorn, there is not presently a unicorn, and there never will be a unicorn in all of the universe. They can't tell you that. So any statement they make about unicorns is a statement of faith.

But the God of the universe can make authoritative, exacting statements about wisdom and anything else that would reflect that wisdom. Absolutely. Because he is outside the time-space continuum. He's from before. If we were to stretch, if my arms outstretched were to reflect all of history, which is a very short history, because I don't have that wide of an arm reach, still would not be that important. God is outside of that, and he can make declarative statements about that whole breadth. And God is not passing away. The rulers of this age are passing away. Their wisdom is short-lived, their knowledge is small, and they're passing away.

Wikipedia, where we just mentioned that, is this place where we thought, oh great, we'll have one single repository of information that we can pass down from generation to generation. Great! How much of that can you store in your head at one time? That's not useful for one mind of an earthly sort to hold on to that information. We still can't hold on to all of it. So, let's keep going here in Paul's thinking, not in mine.

1 Corinthians 2.7.

And Andy says, But we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood. For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. So Paul says we speak wisdom in a mystery. And of course, mystery is fun because it leads us to a whole topic of discussion about God's sovereignty.

So when we talk about mystery, of course, Roger mentioned last week, my dad had the moose for the Moosterion for the Greek, but mooses aside, why is it that the sovereign God of the universe, who was revealing by the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, truth, Why is it that he chose to leave the church out of the equation? Or did he? If the church is defined as Christ being present of its members, then it never was outside his reach. Well, it wasn't outside of his reach, but it wasn't revealed, right? Like, if we go to the Old Testament, we don't find a really strong statement.

However, we do find that in God's promise to Abraham that he was going to bless all the nations through Abraham's seed. So we have glimpses of this thing that's going to happen. But Paul is speaking about a mystery here, and this wisdom from God was a a mystery about what would happen in the church as part of the bigger picture here. I've got a list of three. There's a longer list, but I just wanted to highlight some things that were previously not revealed that Paul writes about.

So, 1 Timothy 3.16, he writes about the mystery of godliness. How much Holy Spirit-empowered godliness existed in the Old Testament? Really, the Holy Spirit was given for purposes. To indwell craftsmen, to build things, God had purposes. The Ark, the Covenant, things like that. To live a godly life, I was trying to think about that. That's kind of interesting. Did you find some other ones?

The thing that's interesting is that, for example, Saul, The Holy Spirit empowers him after God sets him aside to be king. The Holy Spirit comes on Saul and Saul runs with the prophets. And so while Saul is running with the prophets, he's indwelt by the Holy Spirit to speak and live out this godly life that would show God's hand is on this leader to be the leader. And then the Holy Spirit departs from Saul.

When we read Psalm 51 in the Psalms, what does David write? That's why we don't sing that song in church. What does he write? He says, take not thy Holy Spirit from me. The Holy Spirit cannot be removed from the believer. We don't have the Holy Spirit coming and going. I used to be charismatic and we used to pray, come Holy Spirit. Why? He's in you all the time. He dwells you all the time.

But the mystery of godliness, if we look at 1st Timothy 3.16, he says, By common confession great is the mystery of godliness. He who is revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, and taken up in glory.

The mystery of God coming down and showing up on the earth fully God, fully man, the hypostatic union, was something that the Jews weren't expecting. They didn't understand it. We can go back and read Isaiah 53, right? And we can say, wow, this is huge. In a little bit, we'll go over Isaiah 64, which also is a very similar parallel passage where there's this characteristic that we can look back on and see that's God. That is totally God coming to the earth. But the Jews weren't expecting it. They were waiting for a Messiah to come and reign, but they didn't understand the Messiah who would sacrifice his life.

The mystery of Christ in you, Colossians 1.26-28. Take a quick look at that as well.

That is the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to his saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We proclaim him admonishing every man, teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ." Christ in you. Christ the God-man in you. Not only were they not expecting Christ the God-man, they were really not expecting Christ the God-man inside those who believed. So another mystery there.

Ephesians 3.1-11 tells us about the mystery of the church, and we kind of alluded to that a bit earlier. So here is the mystery of God's wisdom being revealed to us in a form that we could wrestle with and contrast earthly carnal thinking.

How many of you are familiar with the idea of the Roman mystery cults? Anybody familiar with those? You've heard about those before? The Roman mystery cults, or mystery religions sometimes are called when people are generous. The Roman mystery religions or cults were basically focused on certain subgroups in Rome. So you might be a guard, a centurion, And you would have the centurion mystery religion. And you'd have a guru. The Corinthians, as it turns out, had a temple, multiple temples, for these gurus. And what you would do is your mystery sect would have its mystery religion, and you weren't supposed to tell anyone else about it. It's our secret. None for you. Tom? It makes me think about the Masons. Sure, the Masons might do that, yeah. But this is our secret.

And you'd go into a special room and you'd empty your mind of things and you would then theoretically be filled by the god of your mystery religion and start speaking gibberish. And then the guru of your mystery religion would tell you whatever the message the gods had through you. That sounds sort of like some of the charismatic stuff I had. The thing that's interesting here is this is a mystery religion where everything is a secret.

And so Paul comes here and says, here's the mystery. The mystery is not a mystery anymore. This is God's wisdom and we're sharing it openly and publicly. The mystery of religion was for building yourself up and you could say we have our own special truth and you don't have it. This is ours. And Paul says you don't get that special isolation. you get the special knowledge and you have to share it.

You're trying to be arrogant and that's not the purpose here. So, the last question I've gotten there is how the pagans embrace mysteries. Well, they would embrace mysteries in ways so that they could build themselves up. I want to walk away from this experience and feel like I am superior to everyone else.

Paul is not going to leave them there. The church in Corinth doesn't get the luxury of arrogance. If it is a luxury. Then he continues on to talk to them about being predestined. The hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory. The New Testament is replete with reminders of God's plan through Christ to deliver man from sin and to create the church. The Old Testament has this mystery. It leaves some things in there. When we look at John 17, 24 or Ephesians 11 or 1 Timothy 1, 9 or 1 Peter 1, 20, I'll leave that as an exercise for the class at home.

You're going to see that there was a very specific purpose and that God predestined and had a plan. When you go look up those verses, you're going to see those things go all the way to eternity past. God had a plan. If my arms again are the time-space continuum expanse, it's before that one. It goes out before that.

God the Father and God the Son knew that this needed to happen. God's intent was for his sovereign will to be executed at a precise time in history with a precise outcome for his glory. The propitiation for sin and man's salvation. So, predestination. Not the Calvinistic twist on it. Predestination here is something that God didn't have this mystery and it accidentally leaked out.

He was waiting, sovereignly, for this time. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn because this is supposition, but I think that God waited for the Greek language. God made the Greek language and Alexander the Great and the simplification of the really, really complicated Greek language before the Koine Greek into the form that we have because it was precise and it would carry truth so that you couldn't twist it.

Yesterday some Mormons happened to stop by my neighbor's house. They don't go to our house anymore, they don't like us. They stopped by our neighbor's house And I was sad because I know that my neighbor has not got the skills to address hermeneutics and language.

But Joseph Smith has a whole long list of places that are full of errors in the scripture. Did you know that? They have their own King James Version of the Bible that's annotated by Joseph Smith showing all the errors that are there. And you know what's funny?

Those errors are based by supposed divine revelation but they're not errors in the translation. I can go to the Greek, you can go to the Greek, and we can study it, and we can learn the language, and we can do the translation, and we'll come to pretty much the exact same results that we have today, independent of someone else, because the language was clear and precise, and we can transform it that way. So, God predestined all of these things, bringing these things together, so that we would have this truth and we'd have wisdom and it would cease being a mystery and instead it would be shouted from the rooftops. Instead it would be told from house to house.

Not like the Mormons. So Paul says this wisdom is predestined to the ages to our glory so that we would be glorified with him and we would grow with him And then he says something in verse 8. Verse 8 is a little cantankerous, so I'm just going to call that out right now. Verse 8 he says, "...the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had understood it, they would have never crucified the Lord of glory." Now Paul has made a problem for us.

We'll just put it that way. What happens if the rulers had the wisdom of God? What would have happened if Jesus shows up on the scene and the Jews go, Oh, this is the Messiah we've been waiting for. And they're not shouting for Christ to be crucified.

Crucify him. Crucify him. Lie about it. Get him crucified. Give Judas 30 pieces of silver to betray him so we can crucify him. What if the rulers don't do that? Instead they go, Oh, sweet. It's Jesus. then they wouldn't have crucified him. But what would have happened? And we can only suppose. Well, God demanded the death of his son. It was required.

Otherwise God's wrath would not have been poured out and the sin issue would not have been dealt with. So all I can give you is something I learned in seminary from Dr. Fruchtenbaum that is a supposition. This is not theology, okay? This is not revealed by God. This is an idea that someone came up with.

But since Paul asks this hard question, I'm going to give you the best answer I have. And that is that the Romans probably would have swept in saying... because Israel would have unified if the Pharisees had said, this is our Messiah. They would have unified, come together, revolted, and the Romans would have swept in and killed the revolt, and definitely killed the leader of the revolt, which would have been Jesus, and he would have been risen on the third day, and there would be no church. Because the mystery would be not needed anymore. But we've already established that God had the mystery of the church planned out from history past.

That's the best answer I have for that question. If you've heard of other theories, I'd love to hear them just for the novelty of it, but That's not how it went off. Could you repeat what you said? Which part? I've been talking for 20 minutes. What was the last thing you heard? How about I ask it that way?

If they had known who Christ was, and Simon is the Messiah, then they would have... And then that's when it cut off for me. The Romans would have done something. If Israel would have come up behind Christ and risen up, and said this is our Messiah risen up the Romans would have swept in to the revolt and they would have killed the revolt and definitely killed the leader of the revolt which would be Jesus right they would see him as a competing king and they would have crucified him and he'd have risen on the third day and there would be no church but that's not what God had predestined right so so we have this but Paul is calling out the error of the wisdom They didn't identify God. That's really the focus here. We have this error of wisdom and they haven't identified what is there.

The rulers of this age saw Christ, when he was crucified, as cursed. If you look at Deuteronomy 21-23, it says, Cursed is anyone who hangs from a pole, which a cross is. So the rulers of this age didn't believe that Christ was the Messiah. He didn't come in reigning. They didn't believe He was the Messiah, nor could He be, because He hung on a pole.

But they didn't understand that He was cursed for us. Their wisdom didn't see Christ as cursed on our behalf. Their wisdom was Christ is cursed. And they're done. But God wasn't done. In their eyes, no true prophet could be cursed, right? You don't have a leader who's cursed. But they didn't see the resurrection. They lacked that wisdom.

It was God's will that the crucifixion take place, right? He predestined it. He agreed to it. Christ wasn't surprised. He did say in the garden, if it's your will, take this away. God said, oh, it's my will that you go. And Christ said, okay. And he was obedient. We agree to this.

So Paul has focused in on the foolishness of the rulers because they didn't understand that the wrath was to be poured out. And then in 1st Corinthians 2.9, Paul says, Paul is kind of quoting offhand the Septuagint's translation of Isaiah 64.4.

If you look for Isaiah 64.4, it does not say this word for word. It says this approximately. But Paul is citing this, I think from memory, but it reflects almost the exact same word structure as the Septuagint. Does everybody know what the Septuagint is if I say that? That's the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

So Paul is transitioning here from earthly wisdom to heavenly wisdom, and he's going to talk to us about how, instead of looking at this foolishness, what do we get to look at instead? What do we have that's empowered by God for the believer so that we have heavenly wisdom or spiritual wisdom?

So in 1 Corinthians 2, 10-13, he says, For to us God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God." So I'm going to stop there, but we'll pick up where we left off there in a few moments.

Let's talk about the Spirit's work in Revelation. For to us God revealed them through the Spirit. Peter writes, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. In this we see that the Spirit has for all of history given very specific revelation as an agent of God's message. God cares about revealing His message, preserving the meaning and intent of His message, and He delivers it with precision and clarity through the Holy Spirit to the human recipient so as to reveal truth.

What does the skeptic think about the Bible? Where does the skeptic say the Bible came from? He sees it from man to start with. Yeah, it's from man. It's man's writing. And what is it full of? What do they always like to say it's full of? Errors. What were you going to say? Fables. Yeah, myths, errors, fables. They don't take those literally either. They assume it's not literal. It can't be literal. It can't be a flood. It can't be this. It can't be that. So what you end up having here is you have a whole worldview forced on the book, but what can't be derived out from the book.

God is the very beginning. In the beginning, God. And I don't normally quote T.S. Eliot, nor do I normally quote Billy Graham, but I did hear a quote from Billy Graham. He said, if the first words of the Bible are true, I can believe the rest of it. And I think that's a good point. The atheist wants to attack Genesis so badly for the creation account, because if you can dismiss the creation account, you can dismiss everything after it. But in the beginning, God. In the beginning, God. And the Holy Spirit had to reveal all of Genesis chapter 1, and half of Genesis chapter 2.

How many humans were up to Genesis 1.26? Zero. Only God was there.

And he did it out of order from an evolutionary standpoint. God had to say, I'm God and I'm sustaining this. And he put it in place. And then he told mankind about it. Hey Adam, this is what I did before you were here. So the Holy Spirit comes and the Holy Spirit reveals with precision. And he reveals truth and he communicates it.

For the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. Now stop for a second. I'm going to shut up for a minute. I know I normally talk while I'm up here, right? And I want you to think, what does it mean for the Holy Spirit of God to search the depths of God's thoughts? And just think about it. I'm going to be quiet for a minute. And then you can raise your hand or whatever and share what you think that means. Because this verse hit me hard.

All three were there all along, but the Holy Spirit had unique characteristics that made it the Holy Spirit, not the Son, not God the Father. The Holy Spirit took the things that the Father and the Son had and made them real back then. And that's about all I can say. Okay, so that's the Trinity. in effect, but what does it mean for the Holy Spirit to search the depths of God and his thoughts?

He called it good. Okay, he called it good. Roger? It makes me think that we're dealing with an infinite God, so if you take that aspect of God's character, and so the Spirit's searching the depths of God, that's a that's an eternal process. So we're dealing with eternal ideas here and it's going to blow our circuits pretty quickly because he's going to search the depths of God. Well that's eternal. The depths are eternal.

So I mean just that little thought process there is pretty mind-boggling. Yeah, the thing that kind of struck me is just this massive roadblock for my mind is that you have an infinite God that it would require an infinite Holy Spirit to be able to search the depths of an infinite God.

And then, and this is the part that is also just amazing to my mind, is that then he takes the infinite and he brings it down, and lovingly, and caringly, and precisely communicates it to us in our finite, simple, human ways. so that what we walk away with is still 66 books of the Bible, still some things we don't maybe have all the answers to that we'd like to understand, but with clarity and precision and preservation of this truth and this wisdom, so that when the human mind comes against it, it's a solid thing that the human mind comes against. to learn and grow and develop in. And so the Holy Spirit reveals these things. He searches all things, even the depths of God. And then in verse 11, for whom or who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?

So he uses this analogy that from the outside I can't tell what you're thinking. From the outside I can't know what you know. from the outside I'm gonna assume all over the place. That's the don't judge a book by the cover idiom. We can't know the insides of God so God has to know the insides of God and then reveal it.

But then the Holy Spirit comes as a counselor Jesus said, I have to go so that the counselor can come, right? From John. John 16, 7. The thoughts of men are hardly as deep as the thoughts of God, right? We all know that. Sometimes I think the depths of my thoughts are pretty shallow, because often they're about food, clothing, shelter, and money. All right, so we got the basic needs. Now what? But the Spirit, when we're saved, does the Spirit indwell us? We've covered that already, but yeah. So the Spirit knows the depths of God. He's the only one who can. besides the rest of the Godhead, right? But then He indwells us, and so He knows the depths of who we are.

And actually, Roger, when you taught about the prayer, what a rich and powerful... There's connection back to this. When I was reading this one, I thought, wow, the connectivity back to this verse is just huge. I have heard that passage taught several times, and I'm not saying this to lift you up in any particular way, but no one has articulated the statement that you articulated, that Sunday morning when you taught about the Holy Spirit with these deep groans, that God wants to answer prayer. The Holy Spirit is praying on our behalf. God wants to answer prayer. And that dot connecting for me was like, okay, I'm done. Church is over. I don't care if we sing songs. I got to just chew on this for a while.

But here we have this principle that the Holy Spirit knows the depths of God. The Holy Spirit is in the heart of the believer and he knows the depths of our hearts. And he's coming together and bringing these things in a meaningful way so that in verse 12, now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God so that we may know the things freely given to us by God.

We have God as our adversary, even as believers. We have God as our adversary many times. Boy, the scriptures paint a totally different picture. He is so desirous of us to be in fellowship with Him and thinking His thoughts and communing with Him. It's just amazing. I just said, I feel like a lot of my thoughts aren't that deep. Right? But they can be deep. Why?

Because right here, freely given, when we talk about the 34 things here at Holly Hills, and you'll hear it every Sunday school class, and every church, whenever we do the main service, there's not a book that has been taught that since I've been here. Someone hasn't taught and said, don't forget the 34 things. And then there's the Sunday school classes where we go over the 34 things. But who we are in Christ are the things that are freely given to us by God. All 34 of them or 215 depending on whose list you go by. We may know these things revealed by the Holy Spirit given to us.

Things for our thoughts to be deep and after the thoughts of God. When I was in seminary there was one guy in particular who liked to say that sentence over and over again. Our minds are given to us that we may think the thoughts of God after Him. He liked to say that a lot and it was maybe lost on me because he said it so much I got numb to it. Ah, that again. Okay. Except for that Having the thoughts of God to think after him means that the prayer requests that we had this morning, God is rejoicing over the life of the new baby. And he is loving and understanding the mourning of the loss of the other baby.

And he's understanding Norm's pain and suffering and saying, this is a thing. The suffering is real inside my son, Norm. But you know, Norm doesn't complain about his suffering. If you talk to Eleanor and you say, Eleanor, how's Norm doing? She'll tell you how he's doing. But you won't hear suffering. That word just doesn't come out of their mouth.

Even though it's real. Even though there is suffering. Even though neurological signals are getting triggered through his body and pain is real and it's really happening. Because the Lord has grown them to see the value in those things and instead of talking about pain and suffering, What do they tell you about? They tell you what the Lord is doing. They have a spiritual perspective of this thing that the world just goes, well, I hope they give them heavy enough drugs to cover the pain. Because pain has no value. It's a weakness. Except for God says, no, no, no, it's valuable.

So Paul closes this this set of verses here with something that the Greek is very terse and it's kind of funny, but he says, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. That's the English translation. It's combining the spiritual and spiritual, if I were to try to make that a more literal Greek to English translation. Here's a church that's suffering in poverty. and carnality, and arrogance, and division.

And Paul goes right to the very core of the issue. He says, you're not thinking the spiritual thoughts that God has given you. You're not thinking about the spiritual words that God has given you. And he knows they've got them, because he delivered them. This is his second letter, right? This is his He's already been there and visited. He knows that Apollos has been there. They have spiritual truth. They have it, and they're not thinking on it.

We already read 2 Corinthians 3.18. They won't get that until later, right? That's the fourth book. But in there, he talks to them about this principle of beholding. Beholding the Lord. thinking the thoughts after him, being consumed in a good way with the spiritual thoughts and the spiritual words that are there. Where's the division in that?

If you and I are divided over a political thing, let's say we've been watching the debates, and I hope you haven't. I pray you aren't. But if we're divided, let's say that you like Candidate A and I like Candidate B, and it doesn't matter which party they're in, is Christ our source of life? Is Christ our eternal focus? Is Christ our source of wisdom? Has the Holy Spirit indwelled you? Yes. Has He indwelled me? Yes.

So if I come to you with any other perspective, any perspective, besides you are my co-heir and my co-saint, there can be division. But there can be none if the Holy Spirit is indwelling us and we come together and we set aside those differences and we say, those are earthly things, those are carnal things. Let's sup together. I can smell the food in the potluck. Let's sup together on God's word.

This is the spiritual truth. This is the thing. This is eternal life. This is revealed so that we can have these things freely given to us by God. Let's live there. It sounds a whole lot like spiritual intimacy is not based on anything we did, just like our salvation.

So that's the end of my notes. I don't know if you have any other thoughts, anything that stands out to you. We have a few minutes before Brian's going to ring that bell again. Well, actually, less than a few minutes, maybe one. But any other thoughts?

Otherwise, we'll close. Pat? Well, getting back to, let's say I'm looking at this verse 1, 21, it says, Please God, through the foolishness of the message, preach to those, preach to save those who believe. But in order to believe, you have to have spiritual wisdom, which is from the Holy Spirit. Okay. Your dad talked a little bit about that whole process. Well, how can you come to that point where you cross over from Adam to Christ as far as your source? The whole process.

Because you need the Holy Spirit in order to see the truth. Sure. So the thing that the scripture... That's a really important question. The thing that the scripture tells us is that the Holy Spirit woos us or draws us to himself. But we still believe. The last act of the flesh... Mike put it bluntly one time when he was teaching. The last act of the flesh is suicide. as soon as it believes, we're identified with Christ on the cross, in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating. But the Spirit calls us, and we believe. We are spiritually made alive because the Spirit draws us and woos us to Himself. But that's the last act of the flesh. That's the last thing it does. The Holy Spirit says, And we respond to the gospel, because we realize that we have nothing that we bring to the table. And that's it.

The flesh is crucified. It's the very reason, and this is actually really important when we talked about the Old Testament briefly, and the Holy Spirit indwelling in the Old Testament. The Old Testament saints believed God because the Holy Spirit was wooing them, just the same way that we do. They have the opportunity to believe.

Abraham was not indwelled by the Holy Spirit later on. And we can tell in a few places where there's kind of some dumb moments where he trades off his sister, Sarah, like she's just his sister. And then the king has to have a dream and come and chastise Abraham and tell him to never come back. He gets Sarah back, that's nice.

But the Holy Spirit draws draws man and woos man, but that's the last act of the flesh, so that then we can grow in the spiritual life that we get after those things. Does that answer your question? In this thing where it says the mystery of godliness, it says that the spirit justified Christ. I think that was one of those in the Mysteries.

1st Timothy 3.16 was vindicated in the Spirit. It's the one where it says that in the Spirit Christ was justified. Was it vindicated or justified in the spirit? Oh yeah, it was in 316. Justified in the spirit. What does that mean to be justified in the spirit?

Alright, so I'm going to first of all own up to not having a good solid answer for you on that and I feel like the responsible thing for me to do is dig into that and come back to you with a good solid answer if I can because otherwise I could wing it. I got some wing it ideas but I'd rather not be that teacher.

Prudence says I'll have to dig into that for you and give you a solid. The biggest problem I find often is that the Greek, and this is not an answer but is a quick thought, the Greek sometimes has multiple translations for one word. Vindication would be like the spirit comes down like a dove and says, you know, the father says this is my son. That's a quick thought that you might authorize or show the validity. But I will dig into this and get you a better answer for next week so it's not just me winging it. Just a bit lead on to that last thought, which you're holding.

Spirit enables us to compare spiritual things to spiritual, which the natural man just plain can't do. And they go into default and say, I'm out of here. That's the old nature saying. so so we'll take a look at I will try to either do a write-up or something or or at least get some sort of answer and I don't know if there'll be time next week I might be able to give you a one minute answer but we can do something so all right let's close in prayer because we're definitely over and we'll see what what next week holds Heavenly Father we come before you thank you for the Holy Spirit not only searching your depths but also searching us and then revealing to us the truth in the mind of Christ so that we can grow and walk in these things. Lord, I pray that we would come to a point of unity in our body to a depth that we never imagined before as a consequence of these truths just radiating in our lives. That the life of Christ would be lived out in a rich and deep and plentiful way. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.