EPISODE 110 1 CORINTHIANS CHAPTER 2 "The message of the Cross"

Welcome to Share the Word. Paul continues to remind the church how destructive boasting can be, and that he comes to them not because of superior speaking skills or experience, but he came with the Spirit of God inside of him. We all need reminding that we should always keep the faith in God's power, not human understanding. First Corinthians chapter 2, The Message of the Cross. Have you ever thought about what people in the first century world did for entertainment, just to occupy their free time? I mean, what do you think you would do for entertainment in a world without internet or without Facebook and Netflix, without the NFL, without a TV in every room or a car to hop in and go wherever you wanted?

What a different world that was then. You know, sometimes it seems like a completely different world now than even when I was a kid a generation ago. We didn't have a TV in my house most of the time I was growing up. My parents, I guess, thought it wasn't really great for our hearts and minds. And this was in the days of rabbit-ear antennas, three channels and shows like Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy. Of course, the internet didn't exist then either, so I remember spending a lot of time outdoors playing with neighborhood kids if they were around or making up my own entertainment, you know, like we boomers did with sticks and mud.

But how about rolling time back a lot further during the era we're studying in the first century? What do you imagine people did then to entertain themselves? Realize many people had slaves in the cities to do their work for them, so they really had a lot of free time on their hands. What did they do to occupy their days? One popular pastime was games and sports. I'm sure you're familiar with the Olympic Games.

We just had them this summer. Those date clear back to the time Paul is writing from, and they happened right in southern Greece where we're studying now. Even closer to home, another series of athletic events that were very popular then were called the Isthmian Games, and those were held right at Corinth. That big city had an amphitheater where athletic events and shows like theater were hosted. But all of these things, as important as they were to that society, were sporadic. How did people entertain themselves on the daily?

Remember when Luke described Paul's visit to Athens, a city in Greece not far from Corinth, about 40 miles away? This was Acts chapter 17, and we did a podcast on it. One line I remember is, All the Athenians and even the foreigners who lived in that city spent their time doing little else but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. In the first century, the Corinthian believers Paul was writing to lived in a culture where professional debaters and orators were celebrities, admired for their entertaining and persuasive speaking styles. These well-trained public speakers gained personal followings. Who was the most clever, the most skilled in argumentation?

Like a high school or college debate team, it was about the ability to win an argument, to orally or mentally outmaneuver your opponents. Keep in mind, this was the old stomping grounds in prior centuries of men like Socrates and Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, and many others, thinkers and rhetoricians who had dominated Greek culture for centuries. So the citizens of Corinth were very much into being entertained by debates, listening to the back and forth of persuasive public speakers advocating for their ideas. So into this kind of environment came the apostle Paul around 51 A.D. Paul, remember, was also a very educated and very intelligent man. You'd think he'd be a natural at this.

What ministry approach did he take in Corinth? I wonder if it was because he didn't make that much headway in Athens trying to reason with the debaters and philosophers at the Areopagus. So far as we know, no church was planted in Athens as a result of Paul's time there. So maybe that's what caused him to take a very different approach when he came to Corinth. As Paul describes his ministry there, it sounds like he decided to deliberately swim against this current. He says at the beginning of chapter 2, When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with superiority of word or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the witness of God.

I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. My word and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and power, so that your faith would not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Paul was not interested in gaining a following for himself in Corinth from those who thought he was smart or clever. At Corinth, his approach can be summed up as, The gospel message itself is powerful, so I'm just going to proclaim it as clearly as I can. The people in Corinth who became believers didn't accept the message because Paul out-debated opponents. If they believed the message, it was because God persuaded them it was true, as Paul plainly told them the story of Jesus.

Eloquent public speaking may reach people's minds, but not necessarily people's hearts. But the straightforward gospel message, the message of the cross, as Paul called it, is infused with God's own power. It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes it, he wrote in Romans 1:16. The word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between your soul and spirit, another writer says in the New Testament. Honestly, the gospel message is such a strange one that if people are struck in their hearts that it's the truth, it has to be because the Holy Spirit of God has convinced them it's the truth. It's not that the message of the cross is deep.

The wisdom of God's plan for our salvation isn't undiscoverable except to the really deep thinkers. Actually, just the opposite. Paul writes at chapter 1, verse 26 and following, Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you who are wise in the world's eyes or powerful or wealthy, when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. God chose those things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose those things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important.

Fortunately, Paul doesn't say that not any of the wise or powerful or wealthy will respond to the call of God through the message of the cross, but rather not many will. Few will. It seems to be much more difficult for the elite, those who consider themselves very intelligent or educated, those who are powerful and wealthy. To humble themselves and admit they need a Savior. They're more drawn to the wisdom of man, or as Paul calls it, the wisdom of the world, whatever that is in their generation and society. And it's always changing.

Men are ever learning, but never coming to the knowledge of the truth. All the collective wisdom of the Greek philosophers revered in Athens and Corinth in Paul's time never discovered the truth about God or about salvation or about eternal life. They all had their own theories about life's big questions, but they did not discover God's wisdom. And it's no different now. People looked up to and followed in our society as brilliant are not usually the ones discovering God's wisdom, or usually even looking for it. It's not that it's deep.

It's that it's so unlikely. It's simple, but so unimaginable. A story about a God who made us and everything in the universe, loving the people of the world so much He came out of heaven Himself, lived righteously as a human being for 33 years, then willingly laid down His life as an atonement for the world's sin, and in the worst imaginable way, a shameful, horrific death by crucifixion. The gospel message Paul preached answered the same questions the great minds had always wrestled with and still do, but with simple yet very unexpected answers. How did we get on this planet? Well, the one true God created us and put us here.

What's wrong in the world and inside of us? It's sin, our rebellion against the God who created us and the things that He has revealed as good and right for us. Can anything be done about this? Yes, sin was atoned for and a way was made for it to be forgiven at the cross of Christ. So how can we be restored and reconciled to our Creator then? By believing into the Savior He sent for us and turning our lives toward following Him.

What then is the ultimate purpose in this life while we're here? To know and love God, the One who created us with all our hearts and others around us as much as we love ourselves. Sounds simple enough, familiar enough to those of us who are believers, right? We've heard that message so many times, many of us can forget just how crazy it actually sounds at first to someone who hasn't. I mean, try to imagine bringing that message to the Jews and pagan Greeks in first-century Corinth. Listen to what Paul writes about his effort to do that.

He said, For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is God's power to us who are being saved. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; I will set aside the understanding of the experts. Where is the philosopher? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn't God made the world's wisdom foolish?

For since, in God's wisdom, the world did not come to know Him through its wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe Him through the foolishness of the message preached. The Jews seek for signs, and Greeks seek for wisdom, but we, Paul said, preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. It's actually impossible to overstate this. When Paul went into those first-century Jewish synagogues in places like Corinth and straightforwardly presented the gospel message, that is, that the Jewish Messiah had come, that He was rejected and crucified, but that it is through that, somehow, that God's plan to save all those who would believe into Him is possible. That sounded like utter foolishness to most of them. That's what Paul means by a stumbling block to the Jews.

The Messiah, in their view and expectations, was a conquering king who God would empower to restore Israel's fortunes and bring peace to the whole world. And you're telling us, Paul, that this Jesus, who ended up on a cross dying a criminal's death, was our Messiah? Even the idea of the Messiah on a cross would seem utterly contradictory and absurd to them, even angering to them. This is exactly why Paul was run out of one synagogue and city after another by influential Jews who completely rejected his message of the cross. This message seemed no less foolish to the pagan Greeks and Romans Paul spoke to in places like Corinth. So let us get this straight.

You're claiming ultimate wisdom and ultimate salvation and ultimate reunion with the Creator of the universe. All of this depends on believing in a Jewish man who died the disgraceful death of crucifixion. Ha! Crucifixion! Man, crucifixion was such a barbaric and abhorrent thing that decent people in that culture didn't even talk about it in polite society. They pretended like it didn't exist.

They turned a blind eye to it, like so many decent people did to the death camps and crematoriums in 1940s Germany. The Roman philosopher Cicero said in a well-known speech, The word cross itself, let it be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens, but even from their thoughts, from their eyes, from their ears. To see just how absurd the message of the cross struck many in that first-century world. Google the terms Alexamenos graffito. I'll spell it for you because I'd like you to do that. A-L-E-X-E-M-E-N-O-S, G-R-A-F-F-I-T-O.

This refers to an ancient example of graffiti that was scratched into a plastered wall in Rome, which was uncovered by archaeologists in a building on the Palatine Hill. During the late first and second centuries, that building was used as a boarding school for young men associated with the Roman imperial court. That crude drawing carved into one plastered wall depicts a man worshiping a donkey-headed figure on a cross. The words beneath it read, Alexamenos worships his God. It was obviously drawn by someone mocking an early Christian named Alexamenos, likely another student in his school. He was ridiculing the foolishness, as he saw it, of worshiping an ass who ended up on a cross.

The word Paul uses translated foolishness here, as in the preaching of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, is a Greek word from which we get our term moron or moronic. He's saying to those who rejected the gospel in that world, the message of the Christian God dying on a cross to somehow save us seemed moronic. Yet, yet he says, to those of us who are being saved, it is the very power of God. We know and have experienced that it's true, that it's powerful, that it's life-changing, that it's destiny-changing. We declare God's wisdom. No man would have ever come up with that.

The story of the cross, a mystery, he says, that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory. God made a way of salvation absolutely nothing like any wise men of this world would have ever imagined. The smartest of them could have never guessed at it, given a thousand tries. The plan God devised is all based on, as Paul puts it, Jesus Christ, who became God-given wisdom for us, our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, in order that, as it is written, the one who boasts must boast only in the Lord. So that is why Paul determined at Corinth to not try and compete with the orators or debate with the philosophers or try and persuade anyone with lofty-sounding speeches.

He just plainly declared the story of Christ and Him crucified. As he says at 1:17, he preached the gospel not with human wisdom or eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. I find that line striking. How can our preaching be emptied of its power? Just avoid the reproach of the message of the cross. Just leave out the foolish-sounding parts about a blood atonement being necessary for the forgiveness of sins.

Just don't talk about the God-man publicly suffering and dying the disgraceful death of crucifixion. I heard a story once about a grand and beautiful stone church that was built in a northeastern American city. This was in the 1800s after the Second Great Awakening in America, when Christianity was at its peak of influence in this country. And over the large wooden double entry doors, a bronze plaque was placed that boldly stated, We preach Christ crucified. The church was filled each Sunday. People were regularly responding to the gospel message, and the power of God was obviously at work changing many lives there.

But as years passed, Ivy grew up the stone walls and started covering much of the building. It actually grew over part of that plaque as well, so that what was easy to see then said only, We preach Christ. Pastors had come and gone. Times were changing. Seminaries were turning out men more worldly wise than committed to the Scripture. Those who came to worship there still heard about Jesus, but rarely about the cross or the blood atonement that happened there, and why it's our only hope.

More years passed. The ivy covering the building more and more, and all that could be seen in those days were the words, We preach. Services were still held, but the auditorium was rarely more than a quarter full except on Easter or Christmas. You didn't hear about conversions. Sermons were mostly about social issues and the importance of loving your neighbor. Nowadays, if you pass by that once beautiful church building, the plaque is completely covered, or maybe it's been removed and not there anymore at all because you can't see it, and the building has become a community center for the town.

On weekends, there's a farmer's market in the parking lot. No one any longer is there preaching the message of the cross. Sadly, that's the story of so many churches in so many American cities and towns that once preached the gospel. The preaching of the cross has given way to human wisdom that finds the message of Christ crucified, the message that men can only be saved by the blood of the crucified One, foolish and outdated. But I wonder, as you listen to all this, how you respond to the message of the cross when you hear the story about God the Son stepping out of heaven to become one of us. When you hear from me or someone else that claims the apostle Paul was making in the great cities of the Roman Empire long ago, that the God-man willingly came here to lay down his life, suffering a bloody death on a cross.

That he did that because it was the only way God could find to remain just while offering justification to sinners. That is, that his Son had to pay our sin debt on that cross because his blood was the only thing powerful enough and valuable enough to make the necessary atonement for us. How does that message strike you? Does it seem foolish or even offensive to suggest that you somehow need that? Or do you hear in it the wisdom, and do you feel in it the power of God? Our response to the message of the cross is absolutely telltale.

What Paul plainly declared in Corinth then is exactly what we're still doing our best to plainly declare now. Because the message of the cross, the plan of God that he enacted to deal with our sins and reconcile with us, is the good news. The good news that he promises to save anybody who will believe into Jesus. And if that message makes sense to you, if it rings true to you, and you never have before, then I hope today is the day you will reach out in faith and put your trust in Christ to forgive your sins and reconcile you to your Creator. He will see your faith. He will do what he's promised.

And if you make that important decision, I hope you will let us know here at Share the Word. Email us at paul@sharetheword.org. I'd love to hear from you so that we can encourage you as you grow in your understanding of what it means to follow Jesus and live according to God's wisdom. This is Paul for Share the Word. If you've said that prayer with Paul and accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior for the first time, we would love to hear about it. Please take a moment and email us at info@sharetheword.org and let us know so that we may all celebrate and pray for you.

As the Great Commission Project, all of us at Share the Word take sharing the gospel to heart, and we appreciate all of you coming back week after week. Thank you for letting us know that you're there. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.