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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain 1 Corinthians 1:22:
I Corinthians 1:19-25
Excerpted from: What Do We Have to be Proud Of? (Part One)Let us consider here that he brings out that the Greeks pursue wisdom, and even so, even after saying that they are looking for the wise way to live, these uncalled philosophers pronounced the message of the cross to be foolishness. They cannot see wisdom in it, which clues us in that their wisdom is different, very different. They cannot see the wisdom of God. They are blinded to it.
Now, the elect consider the gospel to be the power of God to salvation, but their carnal counterparts view preaching Christ crucified as illogical or even silly. It is foolish. And these are completely contrary beliefs—the world's belief versus the church's belief. It is a direct clash of worldviews.
And in addition to this, he says that the Jews, who you would have thought would know the wisdom of God, or at least had been exposed to it, well, they desire salvation to involve great signs and astonishing miracles. They are out there for the entertainment, almost. They want to see something neat happen, like something Moses would have done in the wilderness. That is their idea of salvation, God coming down and doing all these wonderful, spectacular miracles.
On the other hand, the Greeks, well, they are not into fireworks and all the kind of miracles. The Greeks would prefer a well-developed, well-reasoned, logical argument. They would like to sit around the agora and discuss this rationally, and talk about salvation and how this could occur through reason and through ascension, as it later got to. By the time you get to Neoplatonism, you know, they are trying to do all these strange things and make a logical system out of it where you could ascend into godhood. Paul saw it in the mid first century. They were going in that direction already.
So these representatives in this world, the Jews, the Greeks, neither desire the truth of the gospel, neither desire the wisdom of God, neither desire the power of God to salvation. They want to do it their own way, and pat themselves on the back for being so wise and smart.
Now, here the apostle is laying a foundation for his argument. And what he is saying between the lines here is that godly wisdom is beyond men, whether they are carnal Israelites, like the Jews, God's chosen people who have had the revelation of God at their fingertips for centuries, or whether they are carnal Greeks, the renowned masters of human philosophy and reason and so-called wisdom. Both are wrong. You cannot go to the world and find wisdom to salvation. It is not there.
Neither of these groups, the Jews or the Greeks, have any grounds for rejecting the gospel, because they are unqualified to judge it. They cannot comprehend it. Their thinking processes, their mental and spiritual capacities, are not even close to providing them with true understanding. They have gone off on these tangents, and the tangents are not going to lead them to the Kingdom of God and salvation.
And so what is the takeaway that Paul wants the Corinthians to understand here? You cannot trust worldly wisdom, whether it comes from the Jews or whether it comes from the Greeks! They do not know. They cannot understand. They have a worldly prudence and wisdom in ways of understanding the physical matter of this earth and the things that we deal with here as human beings, but when it comes to the spiritual step up to the way and wisdom of God, they have got nothing. They are clueless.
This should help you decide, or at least evaluate, how much you take from other things, like commentaries and Bible helps, but also browsing the Internet and seeing a spiritual article by some Internet minister, or (I was going to say flipping the channels on your TV set, showing my age here) TV ministers. You know, a blind squirrel every once in a while finds that nut, and it is true. But you need to be very careful about the wisdom you take from worldly sources about spiritual things. Truly, the capacity for understanding what God is doing is not there.
. . .
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