Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen,
    what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
    the things God has prepared for those who love him—
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,
“Who has known the mind of the Lord
    so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.

• 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

Noted Biblical Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Comments

1 Corinthians 2 ‘Paul spreading the Gospel’: ”In this next section of the letter, the apostle Paul provides his own ‘report’ about his ministry efforts in Corinth. It is clear from his words that he did not go there as a sightseer-there is no mention of the acropolis or any of the wonders in the city-but as a disciple maker.
“Today, we recognize that Paul was eminently successful in these efforts for the gospel. What he accomplished with his life can make each of us feel insignificant by comparison. Yet Paul is transparent in revealing that he often came into a new city ‘in weakness, with fear, and in much trembling’ (1 Corinthians 2:3). He admits that he did not preach with wise and persuasive words but only with the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Paul’s words are refreshing. Today, when many ministry leaders stand in front of a group and preach, they can create a false impression of their own calling, ability, and greatness in the minds of their audience. The people who sit in the pews might get the impression the preacher never felt any fear, intimidation, or concern. But Paul reveals this is never the case. He shows that what matters is not the greatness of the preacher but the greatness of God-and how He is using that person to advance the kingdom.”

• David Jeremiah, 1 Corinthians (Jeremiah Bible Study Series)

1 Corinthians 2:2 ‘crucified’: “Though Paul expounded the whole counsel of God to the church (Acts 20:27) and taught the Corinthians the Word of God (Acts 18:11), the focus of his preaching and teaching to unbelievers was Jesus Christ, who paid the penalty for sin on the cross (Acts 20:20; 2 Cor. 4:2; 2 Tim. 4:1, 2). Until someone understands and believes the gospel, there is nothing more to say to them. The preaching of the cross (1:18) was so dominant in the early church that believers were accused of worshiping a dead man.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

1 Corinthians 2:3 ‘weakness … fear … trembling’: “Paul came to Corinth after being beaten and imprisoned in Philippi, run out of Thessalonica and Berea, and scoffed at in Athens (Acts 16:22–24; 17:10, 13, 14 , 32), so he may have been physically weak. But in that weakness, he was most powerful (see vv. 4, 5, 2 Cor. 12:9, 10) There were no theatrics or techniques to manipulate people’s response. His fear and shaking were because of the seriousness of his mission.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

1 Corinthians 2:4 ‘The Dangers of Rhetoric’: “The highest skill taught in ancient education was public address and debate. People were familiar with the distinction between what someone said and how they said it, and from the time of Socrates they were reminded to be suspicious of speakers with exceptional skills in rhetoric (1 Cor. 2:4). Someone clever but unprincipled might use such skill to deceive and mislead.”

• Timothy B. Cargal, et al., The Chronological Study Bible

1 Corinthians 2:6 ‘mature’: “Paul uses this word to refer to genuine believers who have been saved by Christ, as in Heb. 6:1; 10:14. rulers. Those in authority. See notes on 1:19, 20. this age. All periods of human history until the Lord returns.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

1 Corinthians 2:7-10 ‘The Hidden Wisdom of God’: ”’But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden … ‘ (1 Cor. 2:7-10). God’s thoughts are not obvious, not common sense. God does not let himself be simply grasped right where we want to grasp him. Rather, the church speaks of the secret, hidden wisdom of God. God lives in mystery. His being is a mystery to us, a secret from eternity and to eternity. None of the thoughts that we have about God can ever serve to do away with this mystery or to turn God into something generally comprehensible and not mysterious. Rather, all thinking about God must serve to make visible his mystery, which is totally beyond us, to make God’s secret, hidden wisdom visible in its secretiveness and obscurity-not to rob it of this, so that perhaps through this mystery, the homeland from which God comes will become visible. Every dogma of the church is only a reference to the mystery of God. But the world is blind to this mystery. It wants a god that it can take into account and exploit, or it wants no god at all. The mystery of God remains hidden from it. The world doesn’t want it. It makes gods for itself according to its wishes, but the near, mysterious, hidden God it does not know.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You, devotional compiled from several of his writings

1 Corinthians 2:7-10 ‘An Unmistakable Sign’: ”The upper classes of this world live by calculation and exploitation. In this way they become great in the world, but they do not comprehend the mystery, for the mystery is understood only by children. The world bears an unmistakable sign that attests to its blindness to the mystery of God: the cross of Jesus Christ. If they had known it, ‘they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor. 2:8). That, therefore, is the unrecognized mystery of God in this world: Jesus Christ. That this Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter, was himself the Lord of glory: that was the mystery of God. It was a mystery because God became poor, low, lowly, and weak out of love for humankind, because God became a human being like us, so that we would become divine, and because he came to us so that we would come to him. God as the one who becomes low for our sakes, God in Jesus of Nazareth – that is the secret, hidden wisdom … that ‘no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the human heart conceived’ (1 Cor. 2:9). … That it is the one God, the Father and Creator of the world, who in Jesus Christ loved us unto death, who in the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to him, that we love him, that there are not three gods but that God is one, who embraces, creates, and redeems the world from the beginning to the end-that is the ‘depth of the Deity, whom we worship as mystery and comprehend as mystery.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You, devotional compiled from several of his writings

1 Corinthians 2:7-8 ‘The Holy Ghost must open our eyes’: “We don’t know what God is like. If you can think it, it isn’t God. If you can think it, it is an idol of your own imagination. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, read what the Holy Ghost said in 1 Corinthians 2:7-11.
“And you’ll never know what I’m talking about without the illumination of the Holy Ghost. When we crowded the Holy Ghost out of the Church and took in other things instead, we put out our own eyes. The Church is filled with blind men who cannot see because the Holy Ghost has never-opened their eyes.  Lydia could not believe in Christ till the lord had opened her eyes. Those disciples could not believe on Christ there on the Emmaus Road until He had opened their eyes. No one can see God nor believe in God until the Holy Ghost has opened their eyes. When we grieve and quench the Holy Ghost, when we neglect Him, crowd Him out, and substitute other things for Him, we make blind men out of ourselves.
“We must come to God reverently, on our knees. You always see God when you’re on your knees. You never see God when you’re standing boldly on your feet, in full confidence that you’ll amount to something. God is unimaginable, inconceivable; you cannot get into your head what God is like, or visualize God’s being. The rule is, if you can think it, God isn’t like that.
“God is not like anything you know, except the soul of a man. It was old Meister Eckhart, the German saint, -who said that the soul of a man was more like God than anything in the universe. He made man in His own image; you can’t see a man’s soul and therefore you’ve never seen anything that is like God. You’ve never heard or touched anything that is like God, except within your own heart. God lies beyond our thoughts, towers above them, escapes them, and con­ founds them in awful incomprehensible terror and majesty.”

• A. W. Tozer, The Attributes of God II

1 Corinthians 2:9-10 ‘We can perceive by the Spirit of God’: “How frequently verses of Scripture are misquoted! How frequently do we hear believers describing heaven as a place of which we cannot conceive. They quote verse 9, and there they stop, not seeing that the marrow of the whole passage lies in verse 10. The apostle was not talking about heaven at all. He was only saying that the wisdom of this world is not able to discover the things of God, that the merely carnal mind is not able to know the deep spiritual things of our most holy faith, as the following verses make clear. This text teaches that the things of God cannot be perceived by eye, ear, or heart but must be revealed by the Spirit of God, as they are to all true believers.“

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

1 Corinthians 2:9 ‘See What God has Done’: “Have you got God figured out? Have you got God captured on a flowchart and frozen on a flannel board? If so, then listen.  Listen to God’s surprises.
“Hear the rocks meant for the body of the adulterous woman drop to the ground.
“Listen as the Messiah whispers to the Samaritan woman, ‘I am he-I, the one talking to you.’ (John 4:26).
“Listen to the widow from Nain eating dinner with her son who is supposed to be dead … God appearing at the strangest of places. Doing the strangest of things. Stretching smiles where there had hung only frowns. Placing twinkles where there were only tears.“

• Max Lucado, Six Hours One Friday

1 Corinthians 2:12-15 ‘the spirit of the world cannot help’: “The spirit of the world can’t help you, for spiritual truth isn’t taught by human wisdom (2:12-13). Worldly thinking doesn’t have access to the things of God. Using it to discern them is like trying to connect your television to a signal when you don’t have the right equipment. All you get is static. Similarly, a person without the Spirit (an unbeliever) cannot receive what comes from God. It appears to be foolishness to him because it can only be evaluated spiritually (2:14).
“The great news is that this divine insight is freely given to us who believe (2:12). God earnestly wants to personalize his revelation to you through his spiritual illumination. Yet it requires being a spiritual person so that you may evaluate everything from a spiritual perspective (2:15). Though all believers have received the Holy Spirit, not every believer operates as a ‘spiritual person’ because it requires evaluating things in accordance with Scripture and with openness to the Spirit’s illuminating work. Such a person cannot be evaluated by anyone (2:15)-that is, it will be obvious to those who don’t know God that a spiritual person doesn’t approach life like everyone else does.”

• Tony Evans, The Tony Evans Bible Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

1 Corinthians 2:14-15 ‘those without the Spirit of God’: “The apostle Paul knew of only two classes of people. Under the term ‘the person without the Spirit,’ the apostle included all those who are not partakers of the Spirit of God; it does not matter how excellent, how respectable, how intelligent, how instructed they may be. If the Spirit of God has not given to them a new and higher nature than they possess by their natural birth, Paul put them all down at once in the list of those without the Spirit. They are what they are by nature. On the other hand, all into whom the Spirit of God has come, breathing into them a new and divine life, Paul categorized as under the heading of spiritual. They may be as yet but babies in grace; their faith may be weak; their love may be but in its early bud. As yet their spiritual senses may be little exercised, perhaps their faults may be in excess of their virtues, but inasmuch as the root of the matter is in them, and they have passed from death to life, he grouped them in the category of spiritual. And then he went on to affirm concerning those without the Spirit that the truths of God, which are spiritual, they do not and cannot receive. Paul taught that it is utterly impossible that they should ever receive such spiritual truths unless they are lifted out of that class of those without the Spirit and transformed by the Spirit’s work into spiritual persons. This change, however, being effected, they will not only receive the things of the Spirit but embrace them with delight, feed on them with intense satisfaction, and eventually rise into that state of glory that is beyond the state of grace.“

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

1 Corinthians 2:16 ‘God does not need our advice’: “Paul poses a rhetorical question (quoting again from Isaiah): Who has known the Lord’s mind, that he may instruct him? The answer is obvious: no one! God doesn’t need an education; he certainly doesn’t need human counsel. On the other hand, we definitely need his instruction and perspective. That’s why he’s given believers the mind of Christ, the capacity to think Christ’s thoughts after him, so that we will live life as we ought.”

• Tony Evans, The Tony Evans Bible Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

My Thoughts

Dr. David Jeremiah touches on it and then the quote from the Chronological Bible goes into more details.  In roughly the fifth or sixth century BC a group of philosophers broke from the ranks of Plato and Aristotle.  They were essentially the lawyers of their day.  The Greek Empire was a pseudo democracy.  Everyone with a reasonable education had a voice.  This splinter group would take on an argument for money.  They would use whatever emotive language necessary to get a verdict for the people who were paying them.

Plato and Aristotle were against them totally.  They could care less about morality.  They could care less about truth.  Plato and Aristotle argued that they should not be considered philosophers at all.  The fact that they took upon themselves the branch of Sophist philosophy is absurd.  Sophist comes from the Greek Sophia which is wisdom.  Yet, you cannot have wisdom when truth and morality take a backseat if they are inconvenient for the verdict they wanted from the crowd. Protagoras predates the Socratic philosophers, but Gorgias’ life overlapped the life of Plato.  Gorgias’ personal philosophy was that of nihilism, a philosophy where knowledge, morality, and meaning are all denied.  Oddly familiar to Evolutionism today – no purpose in our existence, thus no meaning, and no basis for morality and what is knowledge?

We might read the first five verses of 1 Corinthians 2 and think that Paul was a poor public speaker, but Paul was distancing himself from Sophism. He did not use parlor tricks to play on their emotions, but if they got emotional, there was a different source of that emotion.  This leads to the rest of the chapter where Paul distinctly defines where the power of the Gospel lies.

Paul explains the working of the Holy Spirit.  He quotes Isaiah 64 and Isaiah 40.

In the first quote, the words about no one can conceive of the workings of God is “explained” above by a few of the scholars.  They take opposing views to an extent.  Rev. Tozer says that if we have the slightest notion of who or what God is, we are wrong, but he also speaks of the Holy Spirit guiding us.  Rev. Spurgeon speaks of how we can understand God through the Holy Spirit’s revelation.  And then, Rev. Lucado avoids the basic argument and says to understand God, put yourself in the position of someone who saw the miracles of Jesus firsthand.  Do you try to understand or do you crumble to your knees in awe?

I disagree with Rev. Tozer by posture only.  If I got on my knees, I might have a hard time getting back up.  If I drop something, that is what those grabber things are for.  But I can humble myself sitting down or lying down on the bed.  Rev. Tozer’s point was that if we do not get on our knees, we are not humbling ourselves enough before God, but God knows our heart if we are unable, or it’s very painful, to get on our knees.

The Apostle Paul goes back to his discussion about the wisdom of the world is foolishness in the heavenly realm and Godly wisdom is foolishness when looking at it from the secular worldview.  But back to the Holy Spirit.  He provides the understanding to bridge between the worldviews.

Some Serendipitous Reflections

1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5 Christ the Wisdom and Power of God 1. What pictures come to mind when you think about powerful, successful people? How do those images sometime conflict with following Christ?
“2 How do people today confuse the world’s power with God’s power? How does that affect you?
“3. What situations can you think of where God uses the weak, lowly, an despised to build his kingdom in our day?
1 Corinthians 2:6-16 Wisdom from the Spirit 1. The Corinthians were measuring ‘truth and success’ by how powerful, influential, and articulate someone was. How is that idea communicated today? How does it square with the gospel?”

• Lyman Coleman, et al, The NIV Serendipity Bible for Study Groups

The second set of questions in 1 Corinthians 1 included the first five verses of 1 Corinthians 2.  The rest of 1 Corinthians 2 has one set of questions.

Substitute whatever group for any reference to a small group or ask who could come to your aid.

If you like these Thursday morning Bible studies, but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Thursday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.