We must be wise and carefully consider our words.  Let’s remember that no one comes to Christ as Savior through human wisdom or potent rhetoric.  There were those coming out of Corinth into the church who remained deeply attached to their own wisdom, their own words.  They thought of church as a place where they could set their wisdom and words alongside—together with—God’s Word: like a partnership, a happy amalgam.  Together we’re better, right?  Paul had sufficient familiarity with that as a Pharisee, as a Jew: heir to a long, turbulent relationship with a God who would have His own leave aside the wisdom and words of men.

Those in the Church were called to stake their lives on God’s Word, God’s wisdom only.  That’s called faith.  That wasn’t so easy, as those Christ-followers in Corinth were finding out.  Strange, how that’s always a new discovery.  Strange, that we must always each of us make that discovery.  Whatever wisdom we thought we had before Christ claimed us, whatever powers of persuasion we think we bring with us into the church—these don’t get us very far in the Church.  We bring no wisdom.  God alone has wisdom; graciously, He gives it.

Paul’s method, he tells the believers in Corinth, was to precipitate these discoveries.  “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God” (2:1).  The foundation of the Gospel is not human wisdom—definitely not that.  Neither is the foundation of our salvation our happy ability to talk ourselves out of sticky situations.  All that is self-salvation, or luck.  God and luck have nothing to do with one another.  “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2).  All Jesus said and did point to one place: the cross.  Paul was going to keep his words, choices, and actions focused on Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ was crucified.  That’s the way God makes for us.  To take that way, we must be crucified with Christ.  Any takers?

The way Paul describes himself when he came to teach the believers doesn’t exactly fire the imagination: “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words” (2:3-4).  If that’s how it was, how’d you like to listen to him preach?  It sounds like one of those painfully awkward occasions, when the person with no gifts for public speaking has been lassoed up to the podium.  You start feeling sorry for the poor guy.  You sort of hope he won’t have an accident up there, or pass out.

There was a purpose to Paul’s approach, though.  For those enamored of human wisdom and clever speech—the suave, urbane, cosmopolitan set—Paul brought what such listeners could only regard as the foolishness and weakness of Christ.  Paul goes on to say that his preaching was done “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (2:4-5).  A demonstration of the Spirit’s power: we might take that to mean that he spoke in tongues, or described visions, or did miraculous works of healing: you know, Spirit power!  I don’t think that’s what he means.

Jesus wanted people to receive him on the foundation of what he was saying, the truth of the message, rather than jaw-dropping, eye-bugging, skull-cracking acts of power.  I believe Paul is of the same mind.  When he says he preached “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,” I take him to mean the conviction-creating, faith-creating power of the Spirit at work in those listening.  The Spirit demonstrates his power by creating faith and conviction in those listening: where there was nothing, something!  Paul wants the faith of the believers—and faith is righteousness, and faith is salvation, and faith is life—to be grounded upon the Spirit’s power, rather than any strange, amazing things Paul might do in front of them for shock and awe, though he can do those things, too.

If any believe a message that, at a first listening, sounds so foolish and looks so weak as ours, that belief can only be by the Spirit.  That’s the point.  That’s the revelation.  That’s grace, saving another one.  The smart, smug set scoffs while the weak, worthless ones are saved.

The foundation of faith, then, is God’s election of us through faith.  We don’t choose God.  God chooses us.  We don’t first love God.  God loves us first.  We don’t go to Christ first.  Jesus comes to us.  The point in all this is to get believers to see that they bring nothing with them; well, nothing that is, except human wisdom and love for clever speech.  We bring nothing with us.  That’s not really very flattering.  Is it true, though?  We talk about coming to Christ, as though that begins with us, as though you or I were the motive force behind our decision.  When I came to Jesus.  When I chose Christ.  As a preliminary shorthand, that’s fine.  As we grow and mature in the faith, we’ll begin to perceive that it was God, all along.  The decisive factor in our decision is and always has been, and always will be, God.  Rather than producing resentment, that recognition produces awe: God, who is everything, has everything, and needs nothing, freely chose you, and me, wanted to offer me and you a place in His life, with Him forever, as dear friends and beloved children.  Why?  Why?

The wisdom of this world has a few thoughts on that: because you deserved it—you’re so wonderful!  Because God just knew that, deep down, you really loved God all along, too.  Because God just couldn’t bear the thought of not having you in His life, you amazing, beautiful person, you!  Playing hard to get really paid off.

How such thinking, such wisdom, robs God of His glory, His grace, and His love.  Paul is clear also about all such wisdom, “the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing” (2:6).  Paul has been hammering away at this because Christianity brings with it a new, changed perspective, the perspective of truth, reality, the wisdom of God.  The church in Corinth had the beginnings of that changed perspective, but the old perspective, the Corinthian perspective—where the big, Happy Blending was the way and Aphrodite ruled supreme—that old perspective was also still there, still at work, always chipping away at the foundation, undermining the Word.  Unless the young believers remained vigilant, they would not stand, they could not withstand the world’s onslaught.  And Christ was with them, now.  The Spirit had caught them up, now.  They had seen it, but did not yet understand what it meant, what it asked of them, now.

To follow the wisdom of the authorities, powers, the self-proclaimed or institutionally-approved wise ones of this world in this age is to put yourself on the road to disaster.  The wisdom of this age is coming to nothing.  Nihilism is a philosophical school that has had its impact on postmodernism, which is probably the prevailing attitude in the West at this time.  Nihilism argued that nothing had absolute, inherent value, that nothing was absolutely true: eternally, unalterably true.  What that meant was that there was no standard of meaning, nothing outside the game to referee it.  What that means is that people just pretty much made up the rules as they went along, changed them as they liked, when they liked, for whatever reason they liked.  Arbitrary.  Absurd.  Meaningless.  Man the measure of all things.

This is how people can genuinely believe, on whatever stretch of the spectrum they may fall, that bald-faced lies and blatant power plays are nothing of the kind, are actually principled stands for truth, compassion, and decency.  Some may suspect otherwise, but they find they have no vocabulary to enable them to speak of it, no perspective to frame it, until they receive God’s Word, until God calls them out and claims them for Himself.

There is absolute, unalterable truth because there is God, who is sovereign.  Logic can lead us to this recognition, but only faith can give us conviction.  Paul reminds the little church in the big world that the Word proclaimed in the church, the radiant life of the church, is “God’s wisdom, a mystery 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 not have crucified the Lord of glory” (2:7-8).  A mystery is just what human wisdom cannot reach, cannot open up.  Oh, human wisdom might be able to sense the mystery, know there is a mystery, but there is no key, no map, from our side.  God’s Word does not come from us, it comes to us.  Jesus does not come from us, he comes among us from God, from “the deep things of God” (2:10).  Does he ever!  Jesus comes in foolishness and weakness, in wisdom and power; he ends up on a cross.

Over these five years, I’ve gotten to know you and you’ve gotten to know me.  We are not strangers to one another.  This also I can say for certain: there are things, many things, I do not know about you, just as there are things you do not know about me.  I never can and never will know you through and through—heart, mind, and soul.  Each of us communes with ourselves, and imperfectly even so.  Have you ever found yourself wondering, why did I do that?  Why did I say that?  Where did that thought come from?  Strangers to ourselves.

Paul is telling the Corinthians that the only one who can bring and give to us the message of glory, wisdom, power, and grace is God, because only God could possibly have conceived it.  How deep, the plans of God!  How profound, His thoughts!  How vast, powerful, demolishing, and creating, God’s love, for us!  “What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us” (2:12).  If you get Jesus, if you even only sense that maybe you’re starting to, that’s not the result of your personal, innate acumen or intelligence, compassion or empathy, let alone merit: it’s God, the Spirit of God, reaching into your life through every barrier, pitfall, and fortification.  The unconquerable God is conquering what seemed unconquerable in your life.  God demands no prerequisite from any of us—he has no property requirement, no citizenship requirement, no education requirement, no party affiliation requirement.  He holds out salvation and says, “Take it; it’s for you.  I want you to have it.”  We here today, we weak fools, have accepted what God offers, thanks be to God!  Accept, here, what God is always offering: the wisdom and strength of God, for you.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.