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Now let us read once more from the first epistle to the Corinthians and chapter one. First Corinthians, chapter one. Verse seventeen: For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made void. For the word of the cross is to them that are perishing foolishness, but unto us which are being saved, it is the power of God.
For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent will I reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom knew not God, it was God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe, seeing that the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek after wisdom.
But we preach Christ crucified, unto Jews a stumbling block and unto Gentiles foolishness. But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For behold, your calling, brethren, how that not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God chose the foolish things of the world that he might put to shame them that are wise.
And God chose the weak things of the world that he might put to shame the things that are strong. And the base things of the world and the things that are despised, did God choose, yea, and the things that are not, that he might bring to naught the things that are, that no flesh should glory before God. But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who has made unto us wisdom from God and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. That according as it is written, he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.
And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the mystery of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Chapter three, please, and verse 3. For you are yet carnal.
For whereis- whereas there is among you jealousy and strife, are you not carnal and walk after the manner of men? For when one saith, I am of Paul, and another of Apo- I am of Apollos, are you not men? I ask you to notice that correct translation. Are you not... men? And God give us good understanding of his word. And if you have been bottling up your coughs and ticklings in the throat, such as I have, well, please now feel free just for a moment to set them going without embarrassment.
We return this week to the problem with which we were dealing last week. Listening into Paul as he deals with the church of Corinth, who had fallen, some of them, into the profound mistake of beginning to call themselves after the names of certain leading Christians. Calling themselves one, I am of Paul, and another, I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, calling themselves after other names in party spirit, save only that name common to all believers, the holy and blessed name of the Lord Jesus.
Last week we began to see how Paul dealt with this problem. And notice, first of all, how in the opening verses of chapter one he brings before them in a glorious and majestic cavalcade, time and time again, the majestic name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That the glory of the name of Christ might eclipse all other names and show how poverty-stricken is every other name compared with that of the Lord Jesus Christ. But now this week we continue to notice his next move in dealing with this problem.
That is to remind them that when the Lord Jesus died for our sins and for our redemption, it was not by just any death that he died. It was the death of the cross. You see, we frequently refer to that holy event by different names: the death of Christ, his offering of himself, the sacrifice of Christ, or the cross of Christ, or the blood of Christ.
And speaking generally, we mean more or less the same thing, and there is no reason why we shouldn't. But of course, in the strict language of the New Testament, there is a different concept lying behind each one of those expressions, so that if we would speak with exactitude and intelligence, we must distinguish between the blood of Christ and the death of Christ and the sacrifice of Christ and the cross of Christ. You are not saying exactly the same thing if in one breath you talk of the death of Christ, and in another breath you talk of the cross of Christ.
There is a difference. Listen to Holy Scripture itself that tells us that our Lord became obedient unto death. That is tremendous. There's something more, not just to death. Even the death of the cross. For death comes in many forms. Some deaths can be glorious. You think, for instance, of a major of his troops, perceiving that the only way for victory is a dash of supreme courage, going out in front of his men and bringing them behind him, right in face of the enemy's cannon.
And as you see him going across no man's land, straight into the fire of the enemy, your heart is ablaze with a man's courage. What a glorious thing. But oh, how different the death of the cross. No one could begin to think of it as anything glorious. The ancient world considered it one of the most shameful deaths a man could possibly die. And it is to the cross of the Lord Jesus that Paul now calls our attention.
And I wish I had his powers to do what he frequently did for his fellow believers. As he reminds us in his letter to the Galatians, that when he went among them, Jesus Christ, he says, was evidently set forth, crucified. He uses a word that means he was placarded. Paul made no secret of it, but with vivid powers of description, he set forth the whole shameful business. The sight of a man crucified.
What a ghastly and a shameful sight it is. My powers of description are not equal to it, but at least I can call attention to two elements in the shame of the cross. And the one is its fearful weakness. You can take the strongest man there is, but spike him by his hands and feet to a cross and leave him there to die.
The grimness of it is that death doesn't supervene immediately. It may take hours and sometimes days, as the man is there helpless. The contortions of his body as the victim tries to raise himself to get enough power to breathe, but then the pain in arms and legs is so terrible that he sinks back. The natural response of the body trying to free itself, but all it can manage to do is to increase its own suffering. The horror of that awful weakness, the frustration of strength, the man powerless.
And along with that frustration of human strength, that weakness, comes the mockery of the man's wisdom. Let him think now of a way for getting himself down. But all his schemes and all his cleverness have come simply to this. It was this that startled the disciples when they first heard our Lord mention it. You may remember in particular how when our Lord had just done a miracle after coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, and the crowds were amazed at the majesty and the power of God, that our Lord immediately began to teach them that the Son of Man shall be handed over into the hands of men, as though completely powerless.
And I bid you this morning visualize God incarnate, now Nail powerless to a tree. And not only powerless, consider the torment. When they crucified him, they crucified him at a place called Calvary, which means the place of a skull. I suppose the holes in the rock look like the empty sockets, the empty nostrils of a skull.
How a grim thing a skull is, isn't it? Why in life the human face, if not handsome, can be noble, as it reflects something of the character of the person encapsulated in the brain within. The skull, that eyeless, brainless, sightless, mindless, grinning skull. How it attests our human powerlessness, and in the end, the ineffectualness of our wisdom.
They crucified Jesus at the place of the skull, and they mocked him. He said this, he said that, he had his schemes, how wise he was, and it's come to this. And to emphasize the point, they planted a crown of thorns, and they put it on his head. That's where all his wisdom and his wise schemes have come to, they said.
Human weakness. Human. You say to me, Mr. Preacher, be careful. The cross doesn't really show us the weakness of Jesus Christ, and certainly not his folly. He had none. He was the all powerful Son of God. You say what it really shows us is the folly of the men that crucified him and their weakness. How I see your heart beats loyalty to the, loyally to the Lord Jesus then, after all. You won't hear anything said against him and his name, will you?
You are true. That's what the cross of Christ shows, doesn't it? The abject folly of this world. Be it its military governor and the mighty power of Rome. Be it its intellectuals and their Greek language. Be it the religious people with their Hebrew. The Latin and the Greek and the Hebrew above his cross. Expressive of this world's power and its intellect and its religion, you say the cross of Christ shows the bankruptcy of it all.
Who shall measure the ignoramus, as they were? Who crucified the Lord of glory. If only they had known. I didn't know. What folly. To be presented with the Lord of glory, God incarnate, and not to recognize him. And then to decide that the best wisdom was to crucify him.
Does it not declare man's bankruptcy? The bankruptcy of his wisdom, the height of his folly? We'll say yes, and it shows the weakness of man too. Look at those, those men with their robes on, strutting by that cross. And now in their little pride, they're saying, come down, but you can't kill. You see, they feared what he taught. And so they used their little power, their religious power, their political maneuverings, and to stop his teaching, they nailed him to a cross. That's all they could do, and thus proclaimed how frightened they were of the truth he taught.
Declared to all and sundry that they daren't face what he taught, and therefore, in their weakness, to refute his arguments, they crucified him. Tell me, why did God allow his son thus to suffer at the hands of men? You say, ah, ah, that's another story too. He he did it for my salvation. Oh, All calm.
come. You weren't that bad, were you? I mean... Yes, you needed to be saved, of course you did. But pray did God have to go to that length. To save you. How you say that, that's how it is. For now I forget the weakness of this world and the folly of this world.
You say that perfectly true. The weakness of that crucified Christ. Oh, how it shows how weak I was. While we were weak, Christ died for me. Not the labors of my hands could fulfill my law's demand. We'll say that's perfectly true. And the cross of Christ is but a vivid declaration, you say, of God's assessment of me.
That is God's judgment of me, placarded before the world. That's what God thinks of me. My hands too weak, criminally weak. And as for my wisdom, hadn't you got some good schemes for saving yourself? Hadn't you got some good ideas? You say I've learned that my wisdom was but folly. The cross of Christ is the placarding by God of God's judgment on me.
Weak. Foolish. Sinfully so. And you say, I take those emblems this morning, and I tell everybody that that cross, pray don't think that Jesus Christ deserved to suffer there. It was I who deserved thus to be crucified.
I have been crucified with Christ. And now it's no longer I who live. I've been crossed out. It is Christ who liveth. I get the point. May I ask a question? Yes, you've been talking about yourself, I understand that. But you know that Paul. What Paul, you say? Well, the Paul you're calling yourself after, you know, saying, I am a Paul.
Menno, if you like, or Haas, or Darby, if you care. Yes, what about him? Well, he wasn't so bad as that, was he? Because... He was a very wise man and a very powerful preacher. Oh, he didn't deserve to be crucified. Oh yes, you say did. Yes.
Yes, he was just as sinfully weak, as sinfully foolish as any one of us. And you call yourself after him. Ah, but you say that isn't the point, you see. He was like us before he got converted, but when he got saved, then he had such excellent wisdom to tell us how to, uh, carry on our affairs in the church. Oh, I'm pleased to hear that too. Ha. Pray, but where did he get the wisdom from? Was it his wisdom?
No, well, no, not strictly speaking, you say, well, you see, it was a wisdom that God gave him. Oh, I see. You mean he had none of his own? Tell me something. Here you are, Mr. Knowing Tom, and you're a scientist, Mr. Knowing Tom, sir. And you've been working at the causes of cancer, and at last you found them. And having found the cause of cancer, you know now what the cure is. And being a sort of a sensitive and retiring scientist, you get hold of me and say, gooding, I want you to do now, I found, I found the secret, I found the wisdom to cure this terrible scourge.
I want you to go and tell all the world, and particularly the medics, and convince them how wrong they are, and give to the world the great wisdom, the great secret that shall banish this scourge of cancer. And so I go, and I preach it with all the eloquence I can muster, and I get myself on every TV program there is, and convince even the medics, most of them. And presently I set up my own establishment, and over the front of it I put Gooding's cure for cancer. Well, I preached it anyway. Mr.
Noyington, sir, how would you feel? Gooding's cure for cancer? Come, come, wouldn't even be honest, would it? It was you who discovered it. And for me to allow my name to take the credit. I wouldn't even be honest. You can't help the world confusing things, can you? Listen to Paul. Don't you begin to attribute to me, says he, that wisdom by which you are saved.
Don't you dare call yourself after me. I like you. in my religious folly and weakness, deserved only to be crucified and crossed out. The name of Christ is the only name. Let us then see just three things which we may do swiftly, by which Paul now hammers home the point he has so graphically made through the cross of Christ.
First, God's deliberate use of the message of the cross of Christ, verses eighteen to twenty five. That the gospel message is the message of a cross, of a crucified man, seems to the world to be utter folly. The Jews seek after signs, and sometimes we follow them, don't we? We love to preach marvelous miracles. Miracles have their usage. They can be evidentially valuable. They point to the person of the Lord Jesus. But even in the gospels, you will notice that the miracles he did were also sermons. And in the end, it is not a miracle, a miracle of a as a sign that saves us.
The message that saves us is not that Jesus did miracles, but that Jesus died. The cross of Christ. Ah, if you could get outside Atchley Hall and do a half a dozen miracles, you'd get all the street following you, like the children and the rats follow the pied piper of Hamelin. I don't know that will convert them. The message that converts people to God is a message of a cross that condemns me and brings me to repentance, to love the God whose law condemns me, to agree with God that I am sinful, and in that moment to find a God who died for me, that I might be forgiven.
Philosophy has its uses. I teach it myself. One of its uses is not to save people. When it comes to our salvation, neither miracle nor philosophy can help. And God has deliberately chosen to save us by the preaching of the cross. It is the only medicine that will heal us. Man cancelled out.
Secondly, well, just look at yourselves. Well, perhaps not you. I better not start there. Let's start with the Corinthians. Consider your calling, my brethren, he said. Consider the people that God has chosen. And I can speak freely now, for they're all in heaven, and they won't mind my saying it. But not many of them were. There weren't many blue blood among them, and not many were powerful. There weren't many politicians among them or economic magnates, and there weren't many wise. There weren't many philosophers, not many eggheads. And you say, yet they were saved? Yes, God chose them. Well, why was that? Why didn't he choose a better bunch?
Well, to make it abundantly clear that it wasn't their power, nor their blue bloodedness, nor their wisdom that brought them to see that the gospel was true. You know, if I weren't careful, I could think it was my intelligence, wasn't it? The other chap over there, he isn't saved. Well, he hasn't got the intelligence, poor chap. I am saved because I had the intelligence to see it was true. Well, if you think that, you're not saved yet. Not my intelligence, nor my good breeding, nor my political or economic clout are the reason why I happen to be saved this morning.
I owe it solely to God and to the Savior who died for me. And finally, I would just say, what really brought me to salvation now is the technique of the gospel preacher. Oh. You say, yes, he'd studied up all the recent, uh, ideas on how to sell things, you see, how to sell marmalade, how to sell anything, carpets, tin text, you see, and the psychological approach. Oh, he was a wonder at putting it across. Ha.
And I'd heard the gospel many times, but this fellow was tremendous. It was the way he put it across, you know, and uh, I see. And that's what, uh, is responsible for your being in Christ, isn't it? The cleverness of the preacher. I'd be sorry for you for this reason, that you'd only need a cleverer man to come across. They'd take you out of Christ, wouldn't they? Man who studied psychology a little bit more. If my being in Christ depended on the cleverness of the preacher, where should I be?
But it isn't so. Of God are you in Christ Jesus. It was not my clever preaching, says Paul, that put you in Christ. It's God that put you in Christ, not me. It wasn't my method. It was the power of God. And I, brethren, when I came to you, I came with lowly speech, lest your faith should be in the wisdom and technique of the preacher, rather than in the power of God. We survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.
We perceive it's no accident. This is a deliberate thing upon God's part, that it might get home to our hearts, that in all our salvation there is nothing of man, neither his strength nor his imagined weakness, and all is of God in Jesus Christ. What's wrong then in calling yourself after the name of a man, I of Paul, and I of Cephas, and I of James, or anybody else. What's wrong in it? Well, when you do that, says Paul, are you not, are you not...
men? So what you mean, am I not men? Men, of course we're men, aren't we? Yes, say, well, yes, yes, you are men. But men, not crossed out. Men, still trusting man. Men will not come to see the significance of that man, Jesus Christ, crucified upon a cross, and still are prepared to parade your name or somebody else's name alongside of the lovely name of Christ.
God give us again to see that figure upon the cross. And no, it wasn't just a death, but deliberately, as the only way for our salvation, he became obedient unto death. And that? The death of the cross. And God give us the grace to say, yes, that being so, I have been crucified with Christ. I've been crossed out, and I own only the name of the Lord Jesus.
God bless his word.
