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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain 1 Corinthians 2:7:
I Corinthians 2:6-8
Excerpted from: What Do We Have to be Proud Of? (Part One)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 2:7-8
Excerpted from: Satan (Part 3)He is setting the stage for something here. He is going to make a comparison between one group of people and another group of people—those who are mature and those who are not, those who are converted and those who are not converted.
They did not realize He was the God of creation. They did not realize He was the Savior. They could not discern the things that He was saying and doing. They did not put them in the right context. They did not understand what He was doing and saying from the right perspective.
The word "mystery" is not the same as our English usage of the word mystery. (Remember this was written in the Greek.) Mystery to the Greek meant not a puzzle that was difficult to solve, but a secret impossible to penetrate. Mystery to them was something that was hidden; it was unintelligible to those who were not initiated, as into a secret society or as into a religion.
Most of you have heard of the mystery religions. What they did was unintelligible to those who were on the outside, but to those who were on the inside, it made clear sense to them—what was being said or enacted in their ritual or whatever it was they were doing.
That is what we are dealing with here. It was a secret impossible to penetrate, not a puzzle that was difficult to solve. What is crystal clear to those who were on the inside was unintelligible to those who were on the outside.
In like manner, to those who have received the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit has joined with the spirit in man and it has added a dimension to man's life that he previously did not have. So then, things that are crystal clear to him are unintelligible to those who do not have this added dimension. We find that it (meaning the things of the Spirit) have been revealed by God.
I Corinthians 2:6-8
Excerpted from: Do You See God?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
Excerpted from: Grace Upon GraceIs 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.
I Corinthians 2:7-10
Excerpted from: What Is Prayer?This world is so deceived by Satan that they do not even know what to look for. God has to be revealed. Then we can seek! Let us carry this forward one more step to I Corinthians 2:7-10.
Mystery (to an English-speaking person) means, "a puzzle that is difficult to solve." But in the Bible it does not mean "a puzzle difficult to solve," but it means "a secret impossible to penetrate." That is why it has to be revealed!
Let us put these two scriptures together—the one in Romans and the one here in I Corinthians 2. Not only must God be revealed, but God's purpose must also be revealed. And it is as a gift from God. It is a part of His grace.
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