The Repulsive Gospel

I encourage you to take your Bibles and open them to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 as we continue on looking at the Word of God together.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

1 Corinthians chapter 1, beginning in verse 18 this morning.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

I wrestled with how much to cover this morning because verse 18 all the way through verse 31 are really one connected section.

But I I just I couldn't do it all in one week.

We'd be here all afternoon and you'd walk out on me.

So I figured we would just go through verse 25 this morning.

So if you have your Bible, we'll read 1 Corinthians chapter 1, beginning in verse 18 through verse 25.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

The Word of God says, For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing.

But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.

Where is the one who is wise?

Where is the scribe?

Where is the debater of this age?

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

For Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Our Lord God, we bow before you, seeking to know this weakness, seeking to know this foolishness of yours that is far wiser and far stronger than anything that we could come up with.

Make it clear to us, we ask, in your name.

Amen.

I was once challenged by these words.

What would you think if a woman came to work wearing earrings stamped with the image of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bombs dropped over Japan?

Did that sink in?

Or what would you what would you think of a church building adorned with a fresco of the massed graves at Auschwitz?

The writer who wrote those words continues on, both visions are grotesque.

They are not only intrinsically abhorrent, but they are shocking because of powerful cultural associations.

The same sort of shocked horror was associated with the words cross and crucifixion in the first century.

Yet today, crosses adorn our buildings and letterheads.

They shine from lapels and they dangle from our ears, and no one is scandalized.

The author rightly suggests that we cannot fully and accurately grasp the intent of a passage like First Corinthians chapter one until we know how scandalous the cross was and is.

And on that cross hung God Himself.

Emmanuel, God with us.

It's that word of the cross that is being addressed in this passage.

It's intended to be a contrast, if you look back a little bit earlier, to verse 17, to the words of wisdom, the words of eloquent wisdom.

And there's a bit of sad irony there.

The Christians in Corinth had come to faith in Christ through the gospel, specifically through the message of Christ crucified.

That's detailed a little bit more in verse 23 and a little bit later in chapter 2, verse 2.

But after some time, the church in Corinth shifted from emphasizing the word of the cross to instead highlighting words of eloquent wisdom.

They fell prey to their culture.

The culture of that time prized wisdom and knowledge and eloquence and the expression of wisdom in all wonderful and beautiful and logical ways, such that being a master of words and communication could make one a celebrity.

Not just as a wonderful conference speaker for the church, but in the world.

Now, the popular wisdom of the time of Corinth wasn't what we might label wisdom today, at least in Christian circles.

Today we would say that wisdom is a practical skill in living life that is learned under the direction of God and his word.

That's what Proverbs teaches us so well.

But wisdom in the first century wasn't like that, especially what we might call Greek wisdom.

That was closer to what we might label a person's worldview or the expression of a worldview.

Wisdom was having a system, a unified, united system for understanding and explaining everything in the world.

Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Plato would be examples of this.

They sought out ways of thinking and explaining the world that would make sense and that would help them get a grasp of things in the world.

There were even groups of people known as sophists based on the word for wisdom.

See, if they could explain the world, if they would have a system of philosophy that would help them grasp everything, it gave them a sense of control.

Rather than looking at our world and all of the evil and the terribleness in it and having a feeling of out of control.

They were driven by that need for wisdom.

And that pursuit of worldly wisdom crept into the church.

And so those words of wisdom coming into the church pushed out the word of the cross.

The cross was pushed further and further from the central teachings of the church.

And so people sought out popular teachers that mirrored the patterns they heard in the word of wisdom all around them in Corinth.

But as we saw last time in verse 17, in the Apostle Paul's mind, that method emptied the cross of its power.

And there's another irony.

The cross was intended to be a demonstration of the undeniable power and might of Imperial Rome.

It was intended to be a symbol that declared to the world, if you oppose Rome, this is what happens to you.

But what Rome intended as a display of dominance was in reality a display of God's power.

Verses 18 through 25 show us how that is so.

How can it be said that the cross is powerful and that it should become then central to the message of the church?

Well, in his explanation, the Apostle Paul shows us first that we live in a divided world.

Previously in verses 10, 11, 12, and 13, we saw that the Corinthian Christians were divided.

They were drawn to pastors and teachers that interested them, whose speaking ability drew them in.

And so they took a body of believers that God intended to be united and they split them apart.

But that's not the kind of division spoken of here, beginning in verse 18.

The division here is much, much larger than that.

This is international division, interracial division, intergenerational division.

And the dividing line is the cross.

From one side of that line, the cross looks foolish.

From the other side of the line, it appears powerful.

One side is perishing, the other side is being saved.

You can grasp the difference here by imagining two different people standing before a massive, intimidating mountain cliff.

They're standing at the bottom and they're looking up as far as they can see to this what appears to be sheer rock face.

One person feels small and insignificant, maybe even fearful, anxious, and so they start to back away.

The other person, being an experienced mountain climber, sees the cliff as a joyful challenge and immediately begins to ascend the face of the cliff.

Two different people with two different perspectives, so it is with the cross.

There is a dividing line.

One group views it one way, the other group views it another way.

But let's not simply pass that off as a neat theological truth.

It is.

But let's camp here for a second.

In terms of the word of the cross, each one of us here this morning belongs in one of those two groups.

We are either perishing or being saved.

There are no other groups.

In terms of the word of the cross, the crucified God, you are either perishing or being saved.

Don't let that truth slip by you.

Hear the gospel truth, the good news that's given to you, and evaluate your relationship to it.

Paul would later tell the Corinthians, examine yourselves, test yourselves to see whether you are in the faith.

Now, as we consider verse 18 here, we see that a method of testing is by examining our response to the truth of a crucified God.

To those who are perishing, that message is ridiculous.

It's foolish.

Foolish or folly might be too innocent of a translation.

The word can carry the idea of madness or insanity.

One commentator wrote that for many in the first century, the message of the cross was not simply harmless folly, but was viewed as dangerous, almost deranged stupidity.

Ironically, we're kind of returning to that in our world, aren't we?

It is irrational, in other words, to think that God would choose to work powerfully through a crucified man.

It makes no sense.

It's utter foolishness.

Some think that J.R.R.

Tolkien wrote stories to illustrate God's work in this world.

You might know some of them, The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, some of my favorites.

One of the pictures that Tolkien describes in his Lord of the Rings trilogy is where he calls a certain part of his imaginary world the minds of Moria.

You familiar with that, some of you?

I hope.

Those of you who haven't read the books or seen the movies, just stick with me.

We'll try to make this make sense.

The minds of Moria.

Interestingly, Moria is the Greek word folly used here in verse 18.

In his fantasy world, Tolkien imagined a race of beings called dwarves who chased after a rare type of mineral, sort of a type of silver that he termed mithril.

It was like a drug to which they were addicted.

And so they mined mountains, chasing foolishly after this treasure.

And in doing so, they unleashed terrible monsters that destroyed them.

And so Tolkien, in his own way, says they endeavor, their endeavor to mine was actually foolish.

It was Moria.

Don't do that.

Don't go there, he says.

That's foolishness.

But in an ironic twist of the plot, sorry, I'm going to ruin the end of the story for those of you who hadn't read it.

In an ironic twist of the plot, Tolkien had his small group en route to save the world go through those mines of Moria.

They took a shortcut.

Instead of going over the mountains, they went through the mountains.

And to go through the mountains, they had to go through the mines of foolishness.

By all appearances, it was a foolish endeavor.

Sheer madness.

Why in the world would you choose that direction?

But in the end of the story, it became a key part of the success of their mission.

For that small group going through those mines, trusting in what appeared foolish, was an important part of the salvation of their world.

That picture is a small illustration of the real world.

There are two groups of people.

There is real perishing, and there is real salvation.

Those two groups exist, and you either see the cross, the cross of Christ, as madness, as irrational, senseless hope, or you see it as the power of God for salvation.

This is a clear dividing line.

It is a line the church in Corinth began to blur.

It is a line that we must make clear.

We must resist the temptation of our world and our culture to tone down our message, to soften it, to take the cross and to clean off the blood and to sand it down and make it smooth and presentable.

We must resist the temptation to make our message culturally relevant.

Beloved, if the message we proclaim makes sense to a perishing world, then it is a message that is something other than the word of the cross.

See, God intended on purpose to create a division resulting from the truth of Christ crucified.

So ask yourself this question.

Do I find the message of a crucified God repulsive or powerful?

The Roman philosopher Cicero said the very word cross should be far removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, from his eyes, and from his ears.

Does that thought resonate with you?

Or do you see the crucified Christ high and lifted up on a cross as the powerful work of God to pay for your sin and to make you right for God?

Right with God.

We live in a world divided.

Next, we see the apostle comment on a meaningless wisdom.

He starts talking in verse 19 about destroying the wisdom of the wise and thwarting the discernment of the discerning.

This is an appeal to Isaiah 29, 14.

And it's a fascinating connection.

Isaiah wrote in that chapter about the prophets and the seers in ancient Israel who talked a good talk, but whose hearts were not in the right place.

They proclaimed a way of wisdom that really didn't include God.

And so God said in Isaiah 29, Because this people draw near draws near to me with their mouth to honor me, with their lips, and their hearts are far from me, because of that, he goes on to say, the wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.

What God directed initially to Israel is pointed at by the Apostle Paul for the larger work of God in his world.

Whatever wisdom the world's wise claim to have will be destroyed, and their discernment will be thwarted.

We live in an age in which all of the information and knowledge we could want is at our fingertips.

Pull out that mini computer in your pocket.

You don't have to do that.

But if you do, you can do a quick search and boom! Instant wisdom, right?

We even have choices.

We can get the minute rice version.

You know, the Wikipedia, the you can read through it quickly and get the gist.

Or you can get the slow-cooked rice version that will take longer to read, but will give you everything you want to know.

Information at our fingertips has become wisdom.

But by indulging in information, are we becoming just like the prophets and the sages of ancient Israel who talked a lot of the Bible but whose hearts were far from it?

Are we like the sages of our world who look to explain the world and all of its intricacies, make sense of it all without God?

See, the issue isn't simply wisdom, it's the kind of wisdom.

What wisdom are we seeking?

What wisdom are we teaching?

This is important, especially for the Lord's church.

What kind of wisdom are we offering to a broken world?

Because there's only one lasting wisdom.

God will destroy all wisdom, all the creative, artificial, humanistic wisdom that is not centered in and does not point to the cross of Christ.

God will wipe it out.

You can almost picture the Apostle Paul kind of looking around as he's writing this out or transcribing, having somebody transcribe it, and asking, where's the wise guy?

Where is he?

Where's the scribe?

Where's the debater?

Wise here is related to Sophia.

I'm sorry, is Sophia related to Sophos, from which we get philosopher, a lover of wisdom.

The scribe is aimed at the Jewish religious intellectual, the Bible scholar of the day who was stuck in ritualistic Judaism.

The debater refers to someone who entered into dialogue with another person to argue back and forth to prove a point.

Each of these kinds of people was often pointed to by others as the epitome of wisdom.

If only we could get the philosophers and the scribes and the debaters leading and teaching in the church, then we would get the people in.

If only we could have pastors and teachers and leaders that could draw in hundreds and thousands of people with their pithy sayings and sermonettes.

The wise, the scribes, and the debaters sought to make sense out of the world in their own way.

But don't miss this fact.

They aren't found at the foot of the cross.

They aren't found at the foot of the cross because they seek to make sense out of their world without the cross of Christ.

Their pursuit of wisdom is ultimately meaningless.

All the knowledge and the understanding gained that does not lead to Christ will be ultimately destroyed.

Now, maybe it doesn't seem that way now.

But we have to remember that God sits outside of time, right?

And he has a way of making everything work out the way he has planned, and it will happen in our world, in our time, exactly as he has planned it.

Just because we can't see it right now doesn't mean it won't be.

Because this has been God's plan all along.

Notice verse 21, just the first half.

For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom.

Stop there just for a moment.

God, in his magnificent ultimate wisdom, determined that the world would never find him.

Or more specifically, the world would never come to truly know him through the pursuit of its own wisdom.

Think about that for a minute.

God planned that the incessant pursuit of knowledge and wisdom and the making sense of our world by sinful men would never ever lead to him.

I should probably interject here.

That doesn't mean we should avoid study or learning or education.

It doesn't mean that God is opposed to those things.

We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, after all, right?

It's that the pursuing of wisdom merely through human knowledge and understanding and intellectualism leaves you short of God.

Beloved, we do not check our minds at the door of the church.

If you do, go back and get it, please.

Come back.

No, we are thinking people.

It's that we know that the man-centered wisdom that the world offers to us is a fallen wisdom.

It's fractured and undermined by sin, and it's going to fall apart.

To pursue man-centered wisdom all by itself leads to Romans 1, 21 and 22.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise, they became fools.

Why would God not make use of man's pursuit of knowledge and wisdom?

I mean, really, it's not all that bad, is it?

Why would God not choose to do that?

Verse 22 tells us.

Because it pleased God through the folly, the utter madness of what we preach, to save those who believe.

It's as though God chose to save us through the minds of Moria.

God is pleased that the gospel is repulsive because it pleases him to save people through a repulsive gospel.

Pause for a moment and consider this.

Just think about this with me.

I once heard a preacher say it like this, and I'm not going to be able to do it exactly like he did.

But imagine, imagine for a moment that you have shared the gospel thoroughly from beginning to end with someone.

And you've asked them to repeat it to you so that you can make sure that you've communicated appropriately.

So they're repeating back to you.

And so here's what they say.

Let me get this straight.

A virgin gives birth to a guy who is God.

But only part of God.

But still fully God and yet fully man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He lived completely, perfectly, so they killed him.

Yeah, that's about right.

They buried him.

And he came back to life.

And then he floated back into heaven.

Yeah.

And one day, let me get this straight.

One day he's coming back on a white horse.

That's what you believe.

What's our response?

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah, I do.

You want to come?

I'm going to meet him in the air.

That's madness.

And it's repulsive to the sinful mind, regardless of how wise they are.

But it pleases God to save the believing ones through the repulsive madness of the message of Christ and him crucified.

Now, in the first century, the Jewish people wanted signs.

They wanted proof.

They wanted to legitimize something by having tangible proof.

You remember?

They came to Jesus and they challenged him.

Show us a sign.

What did he say?

Yeah.

No.

The only sign that's going to be given to you is the sign of Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of a great fish.

His claim to be the promised Messiah, God the Son, the Lamb of God who would die for the sins of the world, didn't fit any of their categories for wisdom.

Neither did a crucified man fit with the Gentile pagan views of world power and dominion.

A crucified Messiah doesn't work on a system that's built on power and strength and control.

And so returning to his main theme, the Apostle Paul wrote in verse 23, but we preach Christ crucified.

A stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

There is a divided world before the cross, with one group clinging to meaningless wisdom, but the other group on the other side of the cross proclaims and believes a strong weakness.

Do you react to the sound of that?

I hope you do.

It's like hot ice or silent noise.

Strong and weak are opposites.

But in God's wisdom, they are brought together.

The singular defining message of the church is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

That message is at the same time foolish and wise.

It is at the same moment strong and weak.

It both causes to stumble and it lifts others up to set them on dry land to stand firm.

I began working on a ranch as a ranch hand when I was 15 years old.

My boss was of the mindset that anything done right should be accomplished with a shovel and a pitchfork.

It didn't matter if it could be done more quickly and with far less pain with a tractor.

If it could be done with a pitchfork and a shovel, it had to be done well.

With a pitchfork and a shovel.

I don't think I need to tell you that I became quite proficient with a pitchfork and a shovel.

You'd be surprised at how many ways they can be used.

I learned patience because of a pitchfork and a shovel.

I hated the pitchfork and the shovel, but I really enjoyed the job.

But for the life of me, I could never figure out what was wrong with using a tractor.

In my 15-year-old mind, it never made sense to use an inferior piece of equipment when the job could be done better and more efficiently with other equipment that we had access to.

And as you maybe can tell, it still irks me.

It seems like common sense to work efficiently, if one can.

If there's a better way, do it that way, right?

But that mindset hits a roadblock here in 1 Corinthians, doesn't it?

A crucified man doesn't appear to be the best way to save the world.

Surely there is a better way than God sending his son to die on a cursed cross.

If vast numbers of people stumble over this message or find it repulsive or insane, then certainly there has to be a better way, right?

Why not use the strong arm of God's power to banish sin and Satan once for all so that all will trust in him?

Why use the weakness of accursed death?

Why?

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men.

And the weakness of God is stronger than men.

It may seem like God is using a pitchfork and a shovel when he could just as easily use a tractor.

I mean, if the wise men of the world were designing a way for God to save them, then surely they would have chosen the tractor.

But we have to realize, don't we, that God's ways are not our ways.

And what may appear to us as weak is actually strong.

And what appears to us to be strong is actually weak.

When God's strong weakness impacts a person, no matter the nationality, the culture, or racial distinctions, that weakness suddenly becomes the power of God and the wisdom of God.

It is a strong weakness.

This church in ancient Corinth drifted away from the word of the cross.

The proclamation of Christ crucified was overshadowed by relevance and culture and popularity and eloquence.

Pride and show ruled over the message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, let's resist the drift.

Let's resist the softening of the message.

Doesn't mean it can't be done with grace and kindness.

Let's be known in Grand Forks as the church that proclaims Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Let this be our identity, let this be our focus, let this be our theme, let this guide our ministry.

Let the weakness and the insanity of Christ crucified increase.

Of course, that means that we must decrease, doesn't it?

The Christians in Corinth struggled with that part.

I can anticipate that someone might argue.

But Pastor, we need to grow our church.

That doesn't sound like the way to grow our church.

No, beloved, we don't need to grow our church.

As you find at the end of Acts chapter 2, it's the Lord who adds to his church because he is its builder.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

We are simply called to faithfulness, to faithful witness personally and as a fellowship.

We are called to a humble proclamation of a foolish message that will divide the world.

And through that message, God will display the amazing power of the cross of Christ.

And it is through that message that he will build his church.

It must be our prayer that he builds his church through this foolish message.

Now, if if you are not a Christian, you might be sitting here thinking, these people are strange.

Yes.

Yes, we are.

And we would love for you to join us.

Leave behind the meaningless wisdom that the world has to offer you.

And embrace Jesus, the one who is crucified for you.

And once you do, amazing things begin to happen.

As you leave the world behind, you gradually begin to see the reality that the world's way of wisdom is foolish.

And what once appeared as the insanity of God will become to you the wisdom and the power of an Almighty God who is crucified for you.

As all of this now begins to sink into the depths of our being.

Let's respond by singing it together.

Let's sing and can it be?

In this song, Charles Wesley is laying out for us the question of our souls as we approach the foolishness of the cross.

Really?

Really?

Can it be that God would die for me?

Would you stand as we sing?