1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Welcome!
Today we continue our series in I Corinthians, Broken but Indispensable. Today’s title is The “Foolishness” of God. To make sure that nobody misunderstands
me, note that the quotation marks around the word “foolishness” are very
important! This means the supposed (so
our world says) foolishness of God. But if God, the Author of the universe and
all that is in it, is foolish, what does that make its’ creation that wants to
belittle Him? But I am getting ahead of myself.
Now the word “foolishness” or “foolish” appears 6 times in today’s passage. There are two closely related Greek words used. One is moria. So for you Lord of the Rings fans, the Mines of Moria where the dwarves hoarded gold and dug too deep in their greed, disturbing things that should not be disturbed, are really the Mines of Foolishness, a very appropriate name, I would say.
Now the word “foolishness” or “foolish” appears 6 times in today’s passage. There are two closely related Greek words used. One is moria. So for you Lord of the Rings fans, the Mines of Moria where the dwarves hoarded gold and dug too deep in their greed, disturbing things that should not be disturbed, are really the Mines of Foolishness, a very appropriate name, I would say.
The
second Greek word is moros. The
English word “morose” comes from this word, but its meaning is slightly
different – it means grumpy and irritable. Maybe this means that if you are
being morose you are really being moros.
We get another word in English from these words, a word if you are young that maybe your parents have told you not to use – the word “moron.” This word does mean someone who is foolish.
In addition to repeated occurrence of these words, the words “wisdom” and “wise” also appear repeatedly, including “intelligence” and “intelligent”, these words appear 14 times! That’s quite a lot given that we are only looking at 14 verses today! In all but two occurrences, the Greek words used are sophia or sophos. So we have moria and moros, and we have sophia and sophos. The words sophia and sophos are pretty general; they refer to both “good” (godly) and “bad” (worldly fake) wisdom. It is interesting that to me that the word “sophisticated” has this root. I’m not at all sure that sophistication is necessarily a sign of wisdom, although I do think our world tends to think so. A less-used word today is “sophistry” which is a kind of fake sophistication, the use of fallacious arguments, usually with the intent of deceiving.
Now, Sophia and Moria/Moriah are both used as “people names.” I don’t have any problem with Sophia as a name, but Moria – well, maybe the name was meant to come from the Hebrew, as in Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac. The Hebrew Moriah means “The Lord is my Teacher.” That’s a lot better than “moron”!
Of course I can’t be picky. I recently looked my own name and learned that in the Middle Ages, Carl was used as a nickname for a villain or a person of low birth and rude manners. Actually, given the topic of today’s message, I kind of like that about my name! To see why, let’s get into our passage:
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; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” – I Cor. 1:18-19
This passage starts with the word “for,” so it is completing or continuing an earlier thought. What comes before this passage? Well, last week, John showed us that it was about divisions in the church. Some said they followed Paul, others Cephas, others Apollos, and so on. Paul chastises them, pointing out that Paul wasn’t crucified for them, and that they weren’t baptized in the name of Paul. Paul expresses thankfulness that he only baptized a few of the Corinthians, implying that if he had baptized more, perhaps the problem of divisions would have been even worse. Finally, and right before today’s passage, he reminds them that Christ didn’t send him to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom (there’s that word, sophia) of words, but the cross. He says that such “wordly” wisdom might even make the cross to be of no effect.
And then he says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness (moria) to those who are perishing.” This was true a few dozen years after Christ was crucified, the time that this letter was written by Paul, and it has been true through the ages until today.
I recently came across a letter by someone named Celsus, a writer who wrote a scathing attack against Christianity around 175 AD. Celsus was kind of the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins of his day. Although an original of his main work has not survived directly, 90% of it was quoted by the Ambrosius in a letter to Origen (both men were Christians) who asked for help in refuting it about 70 years later. The fact that he was asking for help 70 years after it was written means that Celsus’ work must have gained some traction. Celsus’ letter (reconstructed from Ambrosius’ meticulous and thorough quotes of it) consists of a preface, an attack on Christianity from the point of view of Judaism, an attack on Christianity from the point of view of philosophy, a refutation of Christian teachings in detail, and an appeal to Christians to adopt paganism. Apart from that last piece of the letter, it sounds like it could be entitled “God is Not Great” or “The God Delusion.”
In the preface Celsus accuses Christianity of “separatism,” and by this he means that they claim to themselves a superior wisdom (sophia), which he says is nonsense because their ideas of the origin of the universe are by no means unique to them but, he says, are quite common. He then argues that Christ did not fulfill the requirements of a Jewish Messiah, that the virgin birth was a fabrication, that He couldn’t convince anyone of His divinity, that as for followers he had only ten or twelve “infamous publicans and fisherman,” hardly appropriate company for one who was supposedly God. The miracles, he said, were mostly fictions, and for the ones that weren’t, the Egyptians did greater things. He said that it was made up that He predicted His death, and His resurrection was also fiction.
He then attacked Christians because of their lack of unity, with many sects and groups teaching opposing things, saying this is proof of their lack of conversion or change. Like many Pagans of his time, he also attacks them for rejecting the “wise and good” (sophia again) and instead only consorting with the ignorant and sinful. He then argues that sending Christ was totally unnecessary, that if God was God, all powerful, He could have taken care of the problem directly Himself. He also disagreed that the world was made for man, but was simply made as part of God’s overall plan for the universe. (So many of these ideas run rampant today!)
He then argues that the few philosophical ideas that Christians have that are right don’t come from Christianity but from the teachings of the great philosophers such as Plato, Heraclitus, and Socrates. “The Greeks,” he says, “tell us plainly what is wisdom and what is mere appearance; the Christians ask us at the outset to believe that we do not understand, and invoke the authority of one who was discredited even among his own followers.” He says the Christian ideas of the Kingdom of God come from Plato, the ideas of the Holy Spirit come from the Stoics, and that their ideas of a future life and resurrection come from various Greek poets and the Greek ideas of the transmigration of souls. I have here a quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia about the end of his letter:
“In the fifth, and last portion of his work Celsus invites the Christians to abandon their "cult" and join the religion of the majority. He defends the worship of idols, the invocation of demons, the celebration of popular feasts, urging among other considerations, that the Christian who enjoys the bounties of nature ought, in common gratitude, to render thanks to the powers of nature. He concludes his treatise by an appeal to Christians to abandon their "vain hope" of establishing the rule of Christianity over all the earth; he invites them to give up their "life apart", and take their place among those who by word and deed and active service contribute to the welfare of the empire.”
I share this letter so that you understand that we are not unique in how we live amongst a world that sees what we believe as foolish, that isn’t afraid to ridicule us, that is bold enough to call us back “to our senses” to reason, to wisdom, to think, and to give up all this Christ nonsense. This was true in 220 AD when Origen was asked to refute the letter, in 175 when Celsus wrote it, and also at the time and place that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Given this reality, look again at what Paul writes:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” – I Cor. 1:18-19
We all see the truth of the first have of that first sentence. What about the rest of it? Is your faith secure? Is the message of the cross the power of God for you? (That word for power in Greek is the word we get dynamite from.) Do you believe that all the world’s ridicule of us, there supposed wisdom, or intelligence (that word is more literally “prudence” or “reasonableness”) will be destroyed by God? That is Paul’s message to you today.
The last part of that passage is a quote from the Old Testament, from Isaiah 29. This points out that the belief that true wisdom comes from the world and not from God goes back even to Old Testament times.
Let’s continue our passage:
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 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 believe. – I Cor. 1:20-21
There are four questions here. I believe the first is general, and the fourth answers the first. Where is the wise person? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world is the answer. The second and third questions are examples or categories of the first. The second question refers to the Jewish way of learning – from the Law, from the Old Testament. The scribes and rabbis studied the law in depth and added what they called practical steps to live it out – in reality these were simply extra rules to follow. They would also try to explain why the law said to do what it said to do, but often these were just their own opinions when Scripture was silent.
As for the third question, this refers to the Greek way of thinking. The Greeks were all about philosophy. There even was a group called the Sophists (remember, sophia means wisdom) who thought that people should use wisdom and knowledge to improve themselves. They generally didn’t believe in absolute right or wrong but believed in what today we would call situational ethics. Socrates was a Sophist, but he believed that there was an absolute right and wrong. Then there were the teachings of Plato vs. those of Aristotle; Plato believed true meaning came from general ideals whereas Aristotle believed it came from compilation of lots of little facts. Then you had the Epicureans who taught that the goal of life was to be happy, and happiness could be found seeking physical pleasures and steering clear of responsibilities. And you had the Stoics who taught that the pursuit of reason would lead to happiness, that emotions were unreliable – Spock in Star Trek would have mostly agreed, although he wouldn’t have called the goal happiness, but harmony or some such word like that. These are just the broadest brushstrokes; there were hundreds of philosophies running rampant, variations within variations, and the Greeks loved to debate and argue these things as much as people love to talk about sports today. But did the Jews have any real answers with their rules upon rules and hypotheses about motives? No. Did the Greeks have any real answers with all their philosophies and debates? No. It was (and is) all foolishness.
Both the Jews and Greeks created complicated systems, hard to understand, hard to follow, certainly hard to live by. In contrast, the Gospel message is simple to understand; Jesus said we must be like little children to come to Him. I think of the man who was questioned over and over by the Pharisees who said there were lots of things he didn’t know, but one thing he knew: he was blind but now he could see!
I think also of Peter, when he professed that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, and Jesus said (in Matthew 16), “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
This is what God does. He opens our eyes. He opens our hearts. He makes us receptive to the simple truth of the gospel when we come to Him in need and in humility. Those who stand fast in their self-effort and in their pride see nothing, feel nothing, remain closed to God’s truth.
Some of those complaints of Celsus are true. Christianity does, by and large, reject the “wise and good” of the world and instead consorts with the “ignorant” and “sinful.” One of the believers who had a big influence in my life was a man I met in Illinois as a young believer, a formerly homeless man, a former drug user, a person formerly institutionalized for complete mental breaks with reality. But all of this was before Christ changed this man. When I met him, he was a volunteer with a Christian men’s homeless shelter, and we were next to each other in line unloading a semi-truck full of materials for an Urbana Missions conference. While in line he, a man with no education or career, told me, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at one of the best graduate programs in the country, about how Christ had changed his life, how he volunteered or worked for peanuts at a homeless shelter, and how I needed to do that too. He was the teacher, he was the master; I was the novice, the student. He wasn’t perfect, and he certainly wasn’t polished, but the wisdom he had was the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of the world was utterly foolish in comparison.
I have (perhaps thankfully) forgotten the details, but at some point a local newspaper was investigating something about the shelter, and unfortunately they picked, out of all the shelter workers, this person to talk to. He was as bold and blunt as he always was, unaware that because the shelter received some public funding, it would have been more prudent to be much less bold at that moment. The shelter was put in a really difficult situation because of that interview, and the higher leadership decided to let him go. We are all really frustrated and sad at that, but he continued to serve, to love the lowly and hurting there as only he could, nevertheless.
To the world, sharing anything about your faith is a breach of etiquette; it shows that you are low-class, or uneducated, or just unaware of the unwritten rules of our society. It is viewed like the guy who TYPES IN ALL CAPS as he posts on message boards. The world rolls its eyes at us.
But the world is foolish. The emperor hasn’t got any clothes, or any sense. For all their endless talk, the problems of the world only get more intractable, more complex, more difficult. Technology has advanced, but it has not solved the world’s problems. And getting rid of technology won’t solve the world’s problems either.
The world needs Christ. In Him only is there wisdom. In Him only are there real answers. In Him only can the world really change, can people be truly changed from the inside. Someday, at the end of all things, the world will finally run out of ideas and know it has no wisdom, and understand that it never hadwisdom. In that day the world will finally agree with the truth of this passage.
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but 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. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. – I Cor. 1:22-25
If you think back on the gospels and Acts, the Jews did demand signs. They wanted signs even after all the various miracles they had either seen or heard the crowds speak of – healings, feeding thousands, etc. In Mark 8, they came to Jesus and He simply said “no” to them and left. Often their sign seeking was really a hunt for a way to trap Him.
And the Greeks did look for wisdom, in all their philosophies. Recall that Paul tried to reason with “men of Athens.” How did that go? Not so great.
A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) – Acts 17:18-21
That word for “babbler” in Greek is pretty nasty. Its literal meaning is that he is picking up words the way a crow picks up and steals seed from your crop of grain. What do you say to a crow? Shoo, shoo! They were simultaneously calling him a buffoon and a bird-brain. They were saying he was using words without even understanding what the words meant. It was astoundingly rude and dismissive. It sounds like what many Christians experience today (although their put-downs were a lot cleverer back then.)
Going on and on about philosophy was all they would do. We recently joked over the dinner table about what are the top 5 things high school boys and high school girls talk about. For girls we came up with: other girls, boys, social media, clothes, and how dumb school is, in that order. For boys we came up with: movies, video games, sports, girls, and how dumb everything is. But for these Greeks it was philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, and philosophy. I can just hear Paul talking about the historical truth of the resurrection and they are thinking “What kind of philosophy is that?”
But back to I Corinthians:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but 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. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. – I Cor. 1:22-25
The Jews wanted signs and the Greeks wanted wisdom. Neither had either! But we have both. The signs were demonstrations of God’s power. We have that power available to us. The wisdom the Greeks sought were man-made inventions of foolishness, but we have real wisdom, the wisdom of God. The things both groups wanted are available to us, regardless of our pedigree, our education, or intelligence, or anything else. They are available to the meek and lowly. Indeed, as the next verses show, they are especially available to the meek and lowly. And even a little bit of Him is greater than a huge amount of what the world has to offer.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. 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; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him. – I Cor. 1:26-29
The Greek for the “things that are not” is the most contemptible thing a Greek person could call someone – it was to call them a nothing. We don’t really have a good translation that conveys the nastiness of the word. But think back on high school – the ultimate putting-someone-in-their- place was to absolutely ignore someone when they spoke to you. I have experienced that more than once – even as a professor, by a particularly grumpy faculty member – and it is never a good feeling. Or when you talk, people don’t talk back but instead talk to each other about you – and laugh. This is what I believe Paul is getting at. Even if that is you, you are the very kind of person God chooses to shame the world. God will lift you up with wisdom and with power, if you yield yourself in humility to Him, so that in time people will be amazed just as they were by the apostles when they spoke in Acts.
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 the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” – I Cor. 1:30-31
I happened to listen to a TV show – I think it was CNN – this week, while waiting in a restaurant. Thinking about today’s topic, I was really struck that it was all about worldly wisdom. Here are the important news tidbits you need to know – we are going to heavily flavor them with our opinions so you know what to think about them. Here are some helpful tips for how to do this or how to do that – so you too can have a perfect, happy, successful, secular life even though there are no real examples of this except for the made up ideals we show you on TV. Righteousness means caring about the transgender’s – or anyone else’s – right to use whatever bathroom he or she pleases. Holiness means being set apart with your own workout program, your own gadgets that you know how to use in the most clever ways, your own perfectly decorated house or apartment. Redemption means eating healthier, or buying a hybrid automobile, or getting your kid all the educational toys.
Listen, this is all nonsense! It’s far worse than nonsense! We can get totally sucked into this insipid secular mindset if we are not careful. Beware! Choose your inputs wisely. Stay in Him – with quiet times in the word, with prayer, with fellowship with believers, with the conscious decision to share your faith even though you might be ridiculed. Live for Christ, and He will empower you and fill you with the real wisdom. But forsake Him and the roar of the world will be irresistible.
Every once in a while, I’m not sure how it happens, but TV gets something (mostly) right. The following video appeared on the news show CBS Sunday Morning. I don’t think the reporter really gets it, but despite that, you have here a perfect example of how God chooses the lowly to shame the wise…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKE4qeX5EIA
Here is a transcript of the piece:
“It all went down on this block in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Back in ’05, Jamal McGee sat, as he was minding his own business, when a police officer accused him of, and arrested him for, dealing drugs.”
(to Jamal): “You’re saying the officer made it up?”
Jamal: “Yeah, it was all made up.”
“Of course, a lot of accused men make that claim. But not many arresting officers agree.”
(To the former officer): “So you phonied the report?”
Former officer: “I did. I falsified the report.”
“This is former Benton Harbor police officer Andrew Collins.”
(to Andrew): “So were you just trying to chalk up an arrests?”
Andrew: “Basically, the start of that day, I was gonna make sure I had another drug arrest.”
“And in the end you put an innocent guy in jail.”
Andrew: “Correct. Yeah.”
(to Jamal): “You lost everything.”
Jamal: “I lost everything. My only goal was to seek him when I got home and to hurt him.”
“Really?”
Jamal: “That was my goal.”
“Eventually, that crooked cop was caught, served a year and a half for falsifying many police reports, planting drugs, and stealing. At last, Jamal was exonerated. But he first spent four years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Today, both men are back here in Benton Harbor, which is a small town. Maybe a little too small. Last year, by sheer coincidence, they both ended up at Mosaic, a faith-based employment agency, where they now work side by side in the same café. And it was in these same cramped quarters that the bad cop and the wrongfully accused had no choice but to have it out.”
Andrew: “I said, honestly, I have no explanation. All I can do is say ‘I’m sorry.’”
“And Jamal says that was all it took.”
Jamal: “That was pretty much what I needed to hear. Today they’re not only cordial,”
Andrew: “Last Saturday we went to the trampoline park…”
“They’re friends.”
Andrew: “You know, we talk about life…”
“Such close friends, that not long ago Jamal actually told Andrew he loved him.”
Andrew: “And I just started weeping, because he doesn’t owe me that. I don’t deserve that, you know?”
(to Jamal): “Did you forgive for his sake or yours?”
Jamal: “No, for our sake. Not just us, but for [waving hands around] our sake.”
“Jamal went on to tell me about his Christian faith, and his hope for a kinder mankind. He wants to be an example. So now he and Andrew give speeches together about the importance of forgiveness and redemption. And clearly, if these two guys from the coffee shop can set aside their bitter grounds, what’s our excuse?”
"I think that last question is the wrong question. The reporter doesn’t seem to understand how these guys were able to give up their bitterness, their hurt, and go on to love one another in Christ. (Or, he does understand, but he knows that if he shares it, then the producers won’t run his story.) He also got a little too cute there at the end – “two guys from the coffee shop set aside their bitter grounds?” Ha, ha.
The point is that, in Christ, we have power – the power to speak, the power to forgive, the power to love. Everything the world really wants we have in Christ. May we all, in Christ, give it to them.
We get another word in English from these words, a word if you are young that maybe your parents have told you not to use – the word “moron.” This word does mean someone who is foolish.
In addition to repeated occurrence of these words, the words “wisdom” and “wise” also appear repeatedly, including “intelligence” and “intelligent”, these words appear 14 times! That’s quite a lot given that we are only looking at 14 verses today! In all but two occurrences, the Greek words used are sophia or sophos. So we have moria and moros, and we have sophia and sophos. The words sophia and sophos are pretty general; they refer to both “good” (godly) and “bad” (worldly fake) wisdom. It is interesting that to me that the word “sophisticated” has this root. I’m not at all sure that sophistication is necessarily a sign of wisdom, although I do think our world tends to think so. A less-used word today is “sophistry” which is a kind of fake sophistication, the use of fallacious arguments, usually with the intent of deceiving.
Now, Sophia and Moria/Moriah are both used as “people names.” I don’t have any problem with Sophia as a name, but Moria – well, maybe the name was meant to come from the Hebrew, as in Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac. The Hebrew Moriah means “The Lord is my Teacher.” That’s a lot better than “moron”!
Of course I can’t be picky. I recently looked my own name and learned that in the Middle Ages, Carl was used as a nickname for a villain or a person of low birth and rude manners. Actually, given the topic of today’s message, I kind of like that about my name! To see why, let’s get into our passage:
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; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” – I Cor. 1:18-19
This passage starts with the word “for,” so it is completing or continuing an earlier thought. What comes before this passage? Well, last week, John showed us that it was about divisions in the church. Some said they followed Paul, others Cephas, others Apollos, and so on. Paul chastises them, pointing out that Paul wasn’t crucified for them, and that they weren’t baptized in the name of Paul. Paul expresses thankfulness that he only baptized a few of the Corinthians, implying that if he had baptized more, perhaps the problem of divisions would have been even worse. Finally, and right before today’s passage, he reminds them that Christ didn’t send him to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom (there’s that word, sophia) of words, but the cross. He says that such “wordly” wisdom might even make the cross to be of no effect.
And then he says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness (moria) to those who are perishing.” This was true a few dozen years after Christ was crucified, the time that this letter was written by Paul, and it has been true through the ages until today.
I recently came across a letter by someone named Celsus, a writer who wrote a scathing attack against Christianity around 175 AD. Celsus was kind of the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins of his day. Although an original of his main work has not survived directly, 90% of it was quoted by the Ambrosius in a letter to Origen (both men were Christians) who asked for help in refuting it about 70 years later. The fact that he was asking for help 70 years after it was written means that Celsus’ work must have gained some traction. Celsus’ letter (reconstructed from Ambrosius’ meticulous and thorough quotes of it) consists of a preface, an attack on Christianity from the point of view of Judaism, an attack on Christianity from the point of view of philosophy, a refutation of Christian teachings in detail, and an appeal to Christians to adopt paganism. Apart from that last piece of the letter, it sounds like it could be entitled “God is Not Great” or “The God Delusion.”
In the preface Celsus accuses Christianity of “separatism,” and by this he means that they claim to themselves a superior wisdom (sophia), which he says is nonsense because their ideas of the origin of the universe are by no means unique to them but, he says, are quite common. He then argues that Christ did not fulfill the requirements of a Jewish Messiah, that the virgin birth was a fabrication, that He couldn’t convince anyone of His divinity, that as for followers he had only ten or twelve “infamous publicans and fisherman,” hardly appropriate company for one who was supposedly God. The miracles, he said, were mostly fictions, and for the ones that weren’t, the Egyptians did greater things. He said that it was made up that He predicted His death, and His resurrection was also fiction.
He then attacked Christians because of their lack of unity, with many sects and groups teaching opposing things, saying this is proof of their lack of conversion or change. Like many Pagans of his time, he also attacks them for rejecting the “wise and good” (sophia again) and instead only consorting with the ignorant and sinful. He then argues that sending Christ was totally unnecessary, that if God was God, all powerful, He could have taken care of the problem directly Himself. He also disagreed that the world was made for man, but was simply made as part of God’s overall plan for the universe. (So many of these ideas run rampant today!)
He then argues that the few philosophical ideas that Christians have that are right don’t come from Christianity but from the teachings of the great philosophers such as Plato, Heraclitus, and Socrates. “The Greeks,” he says, “tell us plainly what is wisdom and what is mere appearance; the Christians ask us at the outset to believe that we do not understand, and invoke the authority of one who was discredited even among his own followers.” He says the Christian ideas of the Kingdom of God come from Plato, the ideas of the Holy Spirit come from the Stoics, and that their ideas of a future life and resurrection come from various Greek poets and the Greek ideas of the transmigration of souls. I have here a quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia about the end of his letter:
“In the fifth, and last portion of his work Celsus invites the Christians to abandon their "cult" and join the religion of the majority. He defends the worship of idols, the invocation of demons, the celebration of popular feasts, urging among other considerations, that the Christian who enjoys the bounties of nature ought, in common gratitude, to render thanks to the powers of nature. He concludes his treatise by an appeal to Christians to abandon their "vain hope" of establishing the rule of Christianity over all the earth; he invites them to give up their "life apart", and take their place among those who by word and deed and active service contribute to the welfare of the empire.”
I share this letter so that you understand that we are not unique in how we live amongst a world that sees what we believe as foolish, that isn’t afraid to ridicule us, that is bold enough to call us back “to our senses” to reason, to wisdom, to think, and to give up all this Christ nonsense. This was true in 220 AD when Origen was asked to refute the letter, in 175 when Celsus wrote it, and also at the time and place that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Given this reality, look again at what Paul writes:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” – I Cor. 1:18-19
We all see the truth of the first have of that first sentence. What about the rest of it? Is your faith secure? Is the message of the cross the power of God for you? (That word for power in Greek is the word we get dynamite from.) Do you believe that all the world’s ridicule of us, there supposed wisdom, or intelligence (that word is more literally “prudence” or “reasonableness”) will be destroyed by God? That is Paul’s message to you today.
The last part of that passage is a quote from the Old Testament, from Isaiah 29. This points out that the belief that true wisdom comes from the world and not from God goes back even to Old Testament times.
Let’s continue our passage:
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 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 believe. – I Cor. 1:20-21
There are four questions here. I believe the first is general, and the fourth answers the first. Where is the wise person? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world is the answer. The second and third questions are examples or categories of the first. The second question refers to the Jewish way of learning – from the Law, from the Old Testament. The scribes and rabbis studied the law in depth and added what they called practical steps to live it out – in reality these were simply extra rules to follow. They would also try to explain why the law said to do what it said to do, but often these were just their own opinions when Scripture was silent.
As for the third question, this refers to the Greek way of thinking. The Greeks were all about philosophy. There even was a group called the Sophists (remember, sophia means wisdom) who thought that people should use wisdom and knowledge to improve themselves. They generally didn’t believe in absolute right or wrong but believed in what today we would call situational ethics. Socrates was a Sophist, but he believed that there was an absolute right and wrong. Then there were the teachings of Plato vs. those of Aristotle; Plato believed true meaning came from general ideals whereas Aristotle believed it came from compilation of lots of little facts. Then you had the Epicureans who taught that the goal of life was to be happy, and happiness could be found seeking physical pleasures and steering clear of responsibilities. And you had the Stoics who taught that the pursuit of reason would lead to happiness, that emotions were unreliable – Spock in Star Trek would have mostly agreed, although he wouldn’t have called the goal happiness, but harmony or some such word like that. These are just the broadest brushstrokes; there were hundreds of philosophies running rampant, variations within variations, and the Greeks loved to debate and argue these things as much as people love to talk about sports today. But did the Jews have any real answers with their rules upon rules and hypotheses about motives? No. Did the Greeks have any real answers with all their philosophies and debates? No. It was (and is) all foolishness.
Both the Jews and Greeks created complicated systems, hard to understand, hard to follow, certainly hard to live by. In contrast, the Gospel message is simple to understand; Jesus said we must be like little children to come to Him. I think of the man who was questioned over and over by the Pharisees who said there were lots of things he didn’t know, but one thing he knew: he was blind but now he could see!
I think also of Peter, when he professed that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, and Jesus said (in Matthew 16), “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
This is what God does. He opens our eyes. He opens our hearts. He makes us receptive to the simple truth of the gospel when we come to Him in need and in humility. Those who stand fast in their self-effort and in their pride see nothing, feel nothing, remain closed to God’s truth.
Some of those complaints of Celsus are true. Christianity does, by and large, reject the “wise and good” of the world and instead consorts with the “ignorant” and “sinful.” One of the believers who had a big influence in my life was a man I met in Illinois as a young believer, a formerly homeless man, a former drug user, a person formerly institutionalized for complete mental breaks with reality. But all of this was before Christ changed this man. When I met him, he was a volunteer with a Christian men’s homeless shelter, and we were next to each other in line unloading a semi-truck full of materials for an Urbana Missions conference. While in line he, a man with no education or career, told me, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at one of the best graduate programs in the country, about how Christ had changed his life, how he volunteered or worked for peanuts at a homeless shelter, and how I needed to do that too. He was the teacher, he was the master; I was the novice, the student. He wasn’t perfect, and he certainly wasn’t polished, but the wisdom he had was the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of the world was utterly foolish in comparison.
I have (perhaps thankfully) forgotten the details, but at some point a local newspaper was investigating something about the shelter, and unfortunately they picked, out of all the shelter workers, this person to talk to. He was as bold and blunt as he always was, unaware that because the shelter received some public funding, it would have been more prudent to be much less bold at that moment. The shelter was put in a really difficult situation because of that interview, and the higher leadership decided to let him go. We are all really frustrated and sad at that, but he continued to serve, to love the lowly and hurting there as only he could, nevertheless.
To the world, sharing anything about your faith is a breach of etiquette; it shows that you are low-class, or uneducated, or just unaware of the unwritten rules of our society. It is viewed like the guy who TYPES IN ALL CAPS as he posts on message boards. The world rolls its eyes at us.
But the world is foolish. The emperor hasn’t got any clothes, or any sense. For all their endless talk, the problems of the world only get more intractable, more complex, more difficult. Technology has advanced, but it has not solved the world’s problems. And getting rid of technology won’t solve the world’s problems either.
The world needs Christ. In Him only is there wisdom. In Him only are there real answers. In Him only can the world really change, can people be truly changed from the inside. Someday, at the end of all things, the world will finally run out of ideas and know it has no wisdom, and understand that it never hadwisdom. In that day the world will finally agree with the truth of this passage.
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but 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. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. – I Cor. 1:22-25
If you think back on the gospels and Acts, the Jews did demand signs. They wanted signs even after all the various miracles they had either seen or heard the crowds speak of – healings, feeding thousands, etc. In Mark 8, they came to Jesus and He simply said “no” to them and left. Often their sign seeking was really a hunt for a way to trap Him.
And the Greeks did look for wisdom, in all their philosophies. Recall that Paul tried to reason with “men of Athens.” How did that go? Not so great.
A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) – Acts 17:18-21
That word for “babbler” in Greek is pretty nasty. Its literal meaning is that he is picking up words the way a crow picks up and steals seed from your crop of grain. What do you say to a crow? Shoo, shoo! They were simultaneously calling him a buffoon and a bird-brain. They were saying he was using words without even understanding what the words meant. It was astoundingly rude and dismissive. It sounds like what many Christians experience today (although their put-downs were a lot cleverer back then.)
Going on and on about philosophy was all they would do. We recently joked over the dinner table about what are the top 5 things high school boys and high school girls talk about. For girls we came up with: other girls, boys, social media, clothes, and how dumb school is, in that order. For boys we came up with: movies, video games, sports, girls, and how dumb everything is. But for these Greeks it was philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, and philosophy. I can just hear Paul talking about the historical truth of the resurrection and they are thinking “What kind of philosophy is that?”
But back to I Corinthians:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but 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. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. – I Cor. 1:22-25
The Jews wanted signs and the Greeks wanted wisdom. Neither had either! But we have both. The signs were demonstrations of God’s power. We have that power available to us. The wisdom the Greeks sought were man-made inventions of foolishness, but we have real wisdom, the wisdom of God. The things both groups wanted are available to us, regardless of our pedigree, our education, or intelligence, or anything else. They are available to the meek and lowly. Indeed, as the next verses show, they are especially available to the meek and lowly. And even a little bit of Him is greater than a huge amount of what the world has to offer.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. 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; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him. – I Cor. 1:26-29
The Greek for the “things that are not” is the most contemptible thing a Greek person could call someone – it was to call them a nothing. We don’t really have a good translation that conveys the nastiness of the word. But think back on high school – the ultimate putting-someone-in-their- place was to absolutely ignore someone when they spoke to you. I have experienced that more than once – even as a professor, by a particularly grumpy faculty member – and it is never a good feeling. Or when you talk, people don’t talk back but instead talk to each other about you – and laugh. This is what I believe Paul is getting at. Even if that is you, you are the very kind of person God chooses to shame the world. God will lift you up with wisdom and with power, if you yield yourself in humility to Him, so that in time people will be amazed just as they were by the apostles when they spoke in Acts.
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 the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” – I Cor. 1:30-31
I happened to listen to a TV show – I think it was CNN – this week, while waiting in a restaurant. Thinking about today’s topic, I was really struck that it was all about worldly wisdom. Here are the important news tidbits you need to know – we are going to heavily flavor them with our opinions so you know what to think about them. Here are some helpful tips for how to do this or how to do that – so you too can have a perfect, happy, successful, secular life even though there are no real examples of this except for the made up ideals we show you on TV. Righteousness means caring about the transgender’s – or anyone else’s – right to use whatever bathroom he or she pleases. Holiness means being set apart with your own workout program, your own gadgets that you know how to use in the most clever ways, your own perfectly decorated house or apartment. Redemption means eating healthier, or buying a hybrid automobile, or getting your kid all the educational toys.
Listen, this is all nonsense! It’s far worse than nonsense! We can get totally sucked into this insipid secular mindset if we are not careful. Beware! Choose your inputs wisely. Stay in Him – with quiet times in the word, with prayer, with fellowship with believers, with the conscious decision to share your faith even though you might be ridiculed. Live for Christ, and He will empower you and fill you with the real wisdom. But forsake Him and the roar of the world will be irresistible.
Every once in a while, I’m not sure how it happens, but TV gets something (mostly) right. The following video appeared on the news show CBS Sunday Morning. I don’t think the reporter really gets it, but despite that, you have here a perfect example of how God chooses the lowly to shame the wise…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKE4qeX5EIA
Here is a transcript of the piece:
“It all went down on this block in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Back in ’05, Jamal McGee sat, as he was minding his own business, when a police officer accused him of, and arrested him for, dealing drugs.”
(to Jamal): “You’re saying the officer made it up?”
Jamal: “Yeah, it was all made up.”
“Of course, a lot of accused men make that claim. But not many arresting officers agree.”
(To the former officer): “So you phonied the report?”
Former officer: “I did. I falsified the report.”
“This is former Benton Harbor police officer Andrew Collins.”
(to Andrew): “So were you just trying to chalk up an arrests?”
Andrew: “Basically, the start of that day, I was gonna make sure I had another drug arrest.”
“And in the end you put an innocent guy in jail.”
Andrew: “Correct. Yeah.”
(to Jamal): “You lost everything.”
Jamal: “I lost everything. My only goal was to seek him when I got home and to hurt him.”
“Really?”
Jamal: “That was my goal.”
“Eventually, that crooked cop was caught, served a year and a half for falsifying many police reports, planting drugs, and stealing. At last, Jamal was exonerated. But he first spent four years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Today, both men are back here in Benton Harbor, which is a small town. Maybe a little too small. Last year, by sheer coincidence, they both ended up at Mosaic, a faith-based employment agency, where they now work side by side in the same café. And it was in these same cramped quarters that the bad cop and the wrongfully accused had no choice but to have it out.”
Andrew: “I said, honestly, I have no explanation. All I can do is say ‘I’m sorry.’”
“And Jamal says that was all it took.”
Jamal: “That was pretty much what I needed to hear. Today they’re not only cordial,”
Andrew: “Last Saturday we went to the trampoline park…”
“They’re friends.”
Andrew: “You know, we talk about life…”
“Such close friends, that not long ago Jamal actually told Andrew he loved him.”
Andrew: “And I just started weeping, because he doesn’t owe me that. I don’t deserve that, you know?”
(to Jamal): “Did you forgive for his sake or yours?”
Jamal: “No, for our sake. Not just us, but for [waving hands around] our sake.”
“Jamal went on to tell me about his Christian faith, and his hope for a kinder mankind. He wants to be an example. So now he and Andrew give speeches together about the importance of forgiveness and redemption. And clearly, if these two guys from the coffee shop can set aside their bitter grounds, what’s our excuse?”
"I think that last question is the wrong question. The reporter doesn’t seem to understand how these guys were able to give up their bitterness, their hurt, and go on to love one another in Christ. (Or, he does understand, but he knows that if he shares it, then the producers won’t run his story.) He also got a little too cute there at the end – “two guys from the coffee shop set aside their bitter grounds?” Ha, ha.
The point is that, in Christ, we have power – the power to speak, the power to forgive, the power to love. Everything the world really wants we have in Christ. May we all, in Christ, give it to them.
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