I Corinthians 2:6-8

He just gives them a blatant example of how unwise the upper crust of humanity is, or was, at the time. They were so dumb, so unwise, that they killed their own God—the Creator of all things. Is that wise? He is saying, Corinthians, why are you trusting these people who killed Christ? Where is the wisdom in that? He said the real wisdom is hidden. It is a mystery. It is not something that is just out there for people to pluck off a tree or take from this or that or the other thing. No, it is something that God has to give. That is what he is getting at here.

Mankind does not know. They have not guessed. They have not figured out the way that God is gifting men to prepare them for salvation, and ultimately for the Kingdom of God. But he says human beings on their own have not figured this out. They have not figured out the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. We often use this in a prophetic sense, but it is also in a theological sense, a doctrinal sense, a wisdom sense, a gifting sense. God has prepared all of these things from long ago, about how He is going to bring men to salvation. And one of the biggest things is how He is going to instill these people with His wisdom.

That is the game changer. That is the thing that no one in this world has, unless God the Father specifically gives it to him through Jesus Christ.

Access to that Spirit gives those who love Him the ability to search out everything about God, even to the deepest things. Now, that does not mean that God will reveal all those deep things to us. He has kept some things to Himself, but we have access to His mind. That is certainly a deep thing, and He has only withheld those things that we cannot understand now, we cannot process now, we have no way of understanding now. That is for the next step.

So he acknowledges here that man does have a spirit, he has a spirit nature that is in him, but it is a human spirit, it is not God's Spirit. This human spirit, which gives intellect and all of those things that come with it, all those faculties of mind, let us say, like language or reason or those sorts of things, they can deal with human things, physical things. So we have just tremendously intelligent people and tremendously creative people, people who understand things that most of us do not, who work with numbers, who work with engineering principles, who work with all kinds of different things, and they can build and do wonderful works on this earth, and we think of them as the great, the wise, the intelligent of this world, and they are. I do not want to take any of that away from them. But they have no idea about spiritual things, only what they can glean from the rest of the world.

So only those with, actually, two spirits can know the things of man and the things of God. There has to be an additional Spirit given by God so that we can understand spiritual things, the things of God.

So the additional spirit was not the human spirit, the additional spirit was God's Spirit, and it has given us the chance to know all the gifts and things that God has done for us, and why they should be used, and where they are headed, in all the little details that we can glean from Scripture about that journey.

It works a little differently with God's Spirit. Humans learn through words, through language, through being taught, and we learn in the church that way too. It is not like God shuts that off. But he says, when you have the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit teaches you something different. It is a spirit and it deals in spiritual things all the time, and it helps us to compare spiritual things with other spiritual things. It helps us to evaluate them. It helps us to inculcate them into our lives. It gives us not only intellect and wisdom beyond human intellect and wisdom, because it opens another part of human intellect that we can understand, that is, godly intellect, once we have the Spirit. But it also guides us and gives us strength as … . . .

I Corinthians 2:6-8

If mankind had seen Christ, if they had clearly identified with Him, the history of the world would be exceedingly different. But they did not see because, as Paul writes here, they were not mature. Mature, in this context, means converted. It does not always mean exactly that, but in this context it does. There is a contrast between those who are able to see and those who are not able to see. And, those who are able to see are, in this context, those who are mature.

Even though Christ quoted - and lived - the scriptures that many in His audience were clearly familiar with, they did not see God working through Him. This is the way that it has always been with God's servants. Christ was not the only one. Christ Himself testified that those people killed the prophets. Now, I think that they would not have killed the prophets if they clearly saw them as being messengers from God. If they clearly believed in God and were fearful of His authority over His creation, His governance of it, they would not have dared to have done that! That is the way it has always been - there are those who see and there are those who do not see.

Paul testifies here that people are looking into a mystery. This mystery is not a puzzle that is difficult to solve, but a secret impossible to penetrate. So the world, as a result, is not all there upstairs. So it accepts its own and rejects the truths of God.

I Corinthians 2:6-10

Is not that plain? What we have—he is talking about the gospel here—is a revelation. Now this—the subject of verse 10, that God has revealed—has to be tied to the word mystery, to the word wisdom.

But let us consider mystery in verse 7. Mystery in English does not mean exactly the same thing as mystery in Greek does. Mystery in English means a puzzle that is difficult to solve. But in Greek, it means a secret that is impossible to penetrate. So, the word of God, His purpose and plan, is a mystery. It is a secret that is impossible to penetrate. He is saying that man would never find out what it is, but God gave it to us. He revealed it to us.

What we have in this way is in no way earned. What we have, we have because it pleased God to give it to us. He has withheld it from others, but He has given it to you and me. God is in no way beholden to us as if He owed us something. He does not owe us anything. We could dig in His word our entire lifetime and we would never come to what He freely gave to us for His purposes, for His own reasons.