The Foolishness of Wisdom

The Foolishness of Wisdom

Pastor Allen Snapp 1/25/15

We are going through the book of 1 Corinthians and last week we began to look at how there were divisions in the Corinthian church who followed which leader. But in verse 17 Paul begins to get to the deeper root of the division, which is a type of pride that was growing in the church. We’re going to work our way into chapter two but let’s begin simply by reading verse 17.

1 Cor. 1:17 

This week I came across a post where John Piper talks about twitter and in passing he vents about something he calls the “humble brag”. A humble brag is when you try to cloak a brag about yourself in the guise of saying something humble about yourself. The example Piper gave is when someone tweets something like: Really humbled by getting an invitation by [then the tweet names a really important person] to this [then the tweet names some really exclusive event that only important people are invited to]. This person is tweeting a brag about how important they are (because an important person is inviting them to an important event) but it’s ok because they are “really humbled” by it. 

I had never heard of that term before but looking into it I found a site that rated humblebraggers and here’s an actual humble brag from a famous person (I won’t mention any names): I hate my lambo (that’s short for Lamborghini)! Police is always pulling me over just cuz it’s a lambo so they always think I’m speeding but I’m not!! Sounds like a humble complaint about how her car keeps getting her pulled over. Stupid car. It’s such a bother. Pay no attention to the fact that that stupid car costs about $200K. 

The bottom line is some things just aren’t meant to go together. Humble and brag are two of those things that just don’t mix well. You can’t add humility to bragging without losing the humility. What Paul is saying in verse 17 is that you can’t add worldly wisdom to the gospel of Christ without losing the gospel. The Corinthian church is obsessed with philosophies and debates and eloquence – all the things that sound so wise in the marketplace of ideas – and they want to combine this kind of lofty wisdom with the gospel and what Paul is warning them in verse 17 is that putting these two things together will empty the cross of its power. 

Wisdom brag

If Twitter has perfected the humble-brag, the Corinthians perfected the wisdom-brag. They loved being known as the smartest church in the room, they loved to boast about how wise they were. And they wanted to be associated with speakers who were eloquent. This is why there is a growing group who were attracted to Apollos (who was very eloquent) and were embarrassed by Paul (who wasn’t). The root of this division and boasting was, of course, pride. They took great pride in their wisdom.

But before we’re too hard on them, we need to remember that seeking wisdom was the atmosphere they breathed. Corinth was, after all, a Greek city and if there’s anything that ancient Greece is famous for, it’s a love of wisdom. It was Greece that produced such philosophers as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. In fact the word philosophy comes from two Greek words: philo (love) and sophia (wisdom) meaning love of wisdom. That was the atmosphere that the Corinthian believers lived in and so we can understand why they wanted to inject their Christianity with lofty words of wisdom. 

The problem is, the wisdom they were pursuing isn’t the kind of wisdom that the Bible says begins with the fear of the Lord and is more valuable than gold. Instead it was the kind of wisdom that highlights man’s resourcefulness and abilities, rather than God’s resources and abilities, and plays well to the crowds. And what was happening was that the Corinthians were getting puffed up. That’s what pride does – it puffs us up so we start thinking we are bigger and better than we are. They were turning everything into a boast about themselves – they boasted about who they followed, they boasted about their great knowledge, they boasted about their spiritual maturity, they boasted about the spiritual gifts they had, and they boasted about their wisdom. And as they elevated their resources and cleverness, the power of the gospel was at stake. That’s what Paul is warning them about. You can’t nail worldly wisdom onto the cross without emptying the cross of its power. 

ILL: several years ago when my daughter Jennifer was attending CCC, they had an event that promised to discuss differing views on Christianity featuring two pastors. I went to it, and was really disappointed to discover that the “differing views” they promised was really just two pastors who, as far as I could tell, agreed with each other on most things, knew each other well, and preached in each other’s churches. And neither of them believed that God’s word was authoritative or literal when it spoke of anything miraculous. They had these academically sophisticated explanations of what the myth of the resurrection stood for, what the allegories of healings and miracles meant to teach us, and insisted that the fables in the Bible didn’t need to be believed literally for them to be inspirational.  

At one point there was an opportunity for questions and comments and I raised my hand. I told them how I had come to faith in Christ as a 15 year old, and that it was the power of a living God who did miracles then and still does them today that stirred my heart and drew me into a living relationship with Jesus Christ. The idea that these are just fables for religious academia to discuss and debate and find arbitrary inspiration from would have had no attraction for me then, and has no attraction for me now. 

I knew that as I expressed my deep conviction in the true and literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and the other miracles in the Bible, I could feel that, in their eyes (and they were polite and gracious), I probably sounded like an uneducated country bumpkin preacher who handles rattlesnakes in my spare time. They had outgrown the literal understandings of the Bible (which have never played well to a skeptical world) and had embraced a sophisticated, clever, philosophical brand of Christianity that really poses no threat or offense to a sophisticated and unbelieving world. But it also has no power to save a soul…and that’s what Paul is warning the Corinthians about. And then he goes on to explain why God has chosen to save us through foolishness rather than wisdom. He does it in three points, outlined in three paragraphs. Let’s look at each paragraph one by one.

I.  God purposely chose a foolish message (vv. 18-25)

God has designed a message that will sound like utter foolishness to those who are perishing. It will be babble, nonsense, silly. But to those of us who are being saved, Paul doesn’t say it’s the wisdom of God, but the power of God. God doesn’t want to engage us on the level of our wisdom, but on the level of power to save us from our sins. Now that may sound like it’s required for us to be babbling idiots in order to believe, but that’s not what Paul is saying, there is actually a deep wisdom in the gospel (as Paul will explain in chapter 2) – it’s just not a wisdom that looks like wisdom by worldly standards.  

Worldly wisdom is a wisdom that is hopelessly tainted by our pride. Just as humble gets negated by brag, wisdom gets negated by pride. So God has determined that we will never, ever reach Him through our own wisdom. Our reason and logic is as fallen as every other part of us, which helps explain why many of the philosophical geniuses in history have lived shattered and broken lives. I don’t mean this in a condescending or arrogant way; it’s just a matter of record that great intelligence and great education doesn’t always translate to great living. No matter how smart we are, that intelligence is bent through and filtered by humanistic pride that hopelessly distorts our reasoning so that we confidently reach the wrong conclusions about God and truth. In other words, this kind of wisdom is often very foolish. 

That’s exactly what Romans 1:22 says, claiming to be wise, they became fools…The wiser they became in their own eyes, the more foolish they became in God’s eyes (which is the only true measure of reality). So God decided to save us through a plan that would do an end around our proud wisdom – as Isaiah predicted destroying the wisdom of the wise and leaving the wise, the religious scribe, and the philosopher (debater) unable to know or reach God through their wisdom.

God chose a message that sounds like pure nonsense as the only means by which we can be saved. We need to believe in a man who was scorned and beaten and rejected and mocked and whipped and hung on a cross to die in order to be saved. That sounds ridiculous! To the wise, that is a message to be mocked: he couldn’t even save himself…he’s going to save me? Which is what the wise religious leaders mockingly said as Jesus hung on the cross. 

To the Greek, who admired eloquent and wise-sounding discussions such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had modeled, it sounded like foolish babble. To the Jews, it was worse than nonsense, it was offensive. Messiah meant splendor and power and triumph. Crucifixion meant weakness and humiliation, and defeat. A Messiah crucified is like saying fried ice, or dry water. So it was a stumbling block to the Jew.

The message of the cross is utter foolishness to the worldly wise. The message of the cross isn’t really foolish, of course, it only sounds foolish to those who long for worldly sounding wisdom. At the cross God outsmarted human wisdom and overpowered His enemies by lavish grace and undeserved forgiveness. Paul actually gets pretty eloquent as he declares that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. God chose a message that sounds foolish to men.

II.  God purposely chose to save the foolish (vv. 26-31)

Then Paul goes from the seemingly foolishness of the message to the foolishness of who God calls to believe in that foolish message. Look around you, Paul says, not too many of you were influential or powerful or wise in the eyes of the world. The Corinthians were starting to get puffed up in their pride so in what must been the original deflategate Paul lets the air out of their balloon as he writes:

God chose what is foolish in the world (you)  to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world (you) to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not (you), to bring to nothing things that are…(vv. 27-28)

Remember what you were when God chose you. You were losers! No, worse than that –God chose things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are. You guys were the things that are not – you were a bunch of zeros. No doubt this was rough on their self esteem, but there is a beautiful point in this. God isn’t against the wealthy or influential or wise or powerful, He’s against the pride that these things can prop up. He’s against the illusion that we are somebodies, that we are big enough or strong enough or important enough to be enough to save ourselves. The pride that says we don’t need God.

Occasionally I’ll get an invitation to have my name included in the Who’s Who in America book. Now I know that sounds like a humble brag. Or maybe just a brag. The only requirement was that I needed to purchase a copy of the book (which is pretty reasonable- of course I’d want a copy since my name is going to be in it). But I looked into it. There is a legitimate Who’s Who book, but they don’t charge you to have your name in it because if they ask to put your name in it, then you really are a who’s who. The Who’s Who book that I’ve been invited to be a part of is about is selling an illusion that you’ve become somebody, that you are important, that you’re part of the list. But it’s just an illusion because it’s basically just a telephone book that you pay to be in.

There’s an innate desire in all of us to be a who’s who. Somebody. A mover and shaker – at least on some scale and in some arena. But we can’t come to Jesus as “somebody”, we need to come to Jesus as nobodies. We can’t pay to have our name listed in the Lamb’s book of life, we can’t get into heaven by greasing the palms of St. Peter at the pearly gates. But here’s the great reversal: when we come to Jesus as nobodies who don’t deserve his grace, but desperately need it, he then wraps his arms around us and welcomes us and puts his robes of righteousness on us and calls us his brothers and God calls us His sons and daughters. And our name is written in the Lamb’s book of life not because we paid for our names to be in there, but because Jesus paid for our names to be in there. None of it is because of us – it’s all of Christ.

And all of this has a very wise purpose: it’s to strip us of all our pride and self-reliance in saving ourselves. As we stand at the foot of the cross, we find that all social, educational, racial, and economic differences melt away and we are all equal: not equally great, but equal in our total, desperate need of being saved by a merciful God. The ground is level at the cross. So those who come to Christ don’t make Christianity another thing to humble brag about. We humble ourselves and find in Christ all that we need: he is our wisdom from God, he is our righteousness from God, he is our sanctification and redemption. As we humble ourselves, we find something really glorious to brag about and that is Jesus Christ! How great He is! How awesome He is! What an amazing and glorious Savior he is! That’s a true humble brag! Verse 31 quotes Jeremiah who says, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

God chooses to save the weak, poor, lowly, and undeserving…because that’s all any of us are. The question is whether we will humble ourselves, recognize it, and come to the cross asking for mercy.

III.  God purposely chose a foolish messenger (2:1-5)

After letting the air out of the Corinthian’s self image, he lets the air out of his own self image. He reminds the Corinthians that when he was with them, he wasn’t an impressive orator. He didn’t rely on soaring rhetoric and a powerful delivery to provide the power to his message. To the contrary, he resolved to preach only Christ and Christ crucified, and apparently he was struggling with physical weakness and debilitating fear. Something about Corinth got inside Paul’s head – it’s the only city that the Lord had to actually speak to Paul and encourage him to keep going because apparently he was about to give up from fear and discouragement. 

So as a speaker, Paul really wasn’t that impressive. But his messages were accompanied by power – power such as they had never witnessed before. As he preached Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God empowered that message and the results were that many, many people in the pagan city of Corinth believed and were saved. Paul is urging them: don’t abandon the power of the gospel for the power of lofty rhetoric and a great delivery. One can inspire and impress, and the other can save the soul.

Paul was a very learned man. We see in his writings that he is a deep thinker and a theologically brilliant man. And he actually uses rhetoric and eloquence quite effectively. What he’s saying here is that he didn’t allow the message of Christ to be highjacked by a desire to be impressive as a speaker.

Now when Paul says Christ and Christ crucified he is not saying that he focuses on Christ on the cross and stops there. When Paul speaks of the cross it is shorthand for all that Jesus accomplished, including the resurrection. The cross without the resurrection would have no power to save us. All of Jesus’ life, but especially the crucifixion and the resurrection, is the gospel message that we are to faithfully preach. But the cross in particular highlights the foolishness and weakness of God’s method of saving mankind. Rising from the dead is pretty cool to any culture. But dying on a cross, not so much. 

The church will always face cultural pressures to give the gospel a PR makeover to make it more marketable. Pressures to just adjust our emphasis so that Jesus becomes the ultimate philanthropist who teaches us to care for the poor and live our life for a bigger mission than ourselves. Or to present Jesus as a cool hipster who calls his followers to be as cutting edge as he was. Or as a counter-cultural revolutionist who calls us to rebel against the system for the sake of the Cause. 

We will be tempted to tailor our message to socially acceptable and relevant subjects, and inspiring homilies, so that the church becomes another resource for people who want to improve their lives. We must never be moved from the potentially offensive and foolish sounding message of Christ dying for our sins on the cross. Taking the punishment that our sins deserved so that we, by trusting in Christ, might be forgiven of our sins, restored to relationship with God, and given eternal life. The potential to offend is an inseparable part of the gospel message, but only the gospel has the power to save souls to the uttermost. And so we must be faithful to preach and proclaim and witness to Christ crucified and risen from the dead. That is our message, church, and we must never lose our grip on the gospel or we will lose God’s power to save, we will empty our message of the power of Christ to save the lost. 

Conclusion

As we close, maybe you have never given your life to Christ. Never trusted in him as your Lord and Savior. I want to invite you to do that this morning. You, like me, are a sinner separated from God by your sin. God is holy and cannot allow sin to go unpunished – someone must pay in full for our sin. Jesus paid the price on the cross for all who will receive him as their Savior. Will you pray and ask Jesus to be the Lord of your life, and the Savior of your soul this morning? I’m going to lead us in a prayer, and if this is the cry of your heart I’m going to ask you to pray silently with me.