The Deep Things of God

From The Sword & Trowel 2012, issue 1 by Dr Peter Masters

Human wisdom and pride will never understand the deep things of God. Here is the deepest and most profound thing of all.

 
Wonderful things had happened at Corinth, six years prior to Paul writing these words. As their founding pastor, his preaching had resulted in many remarkable conversions; trophies of grace. This enormously wealthy Greek city, proud of its beautiful buildings, its philosophy and teachers, had yielded up a people humbled by the power of the Spirit and brought to see their need of salvation.
   
The Corinthian church was nothing like as bad as it is often portrayed. There is a tendency among expositors to overstate the deficiencies of the church, turning it into a carnal church with fundamental unbelief and great moral sin. But it could not have been as bad as this, because the apostle Paul gives it high commendation. Nevertheless, he is very candid about the problems that had developed.
   
There certainly were immoral people, and the church was greatly at fault for not having exercised discipline as they should have done. But the wicked ones were clearly a small minority, for Paul approves the church overall, and addresses them as dear brethren in the Lord.
   
Here is another of their problems that had to be challenged. There was a trend among the Corinthians to feel embarrassed by the Gospel. The message of the cross had saved them, and they loved it, but when it came to telling their relations, colleagues and friends about it, they thought that it was not sophisticated enough.

The Gospel Not Enough?

   
They forgot how this message in its apparent simplicity had worked powerfully in their own lives. They felt that for their people they needed to somehow contextualise the Gospel. They needed to make it more intelligent, and more Grecian. They needed to accommodate it to the outlook of the proud, proud people of Corinth, who would expect philosophical arguments, and quotations from their own worthies. In fact, they strove to make the message look very much like what people already believed, to make it acceptable to them.
   
The apostle must now show them how outrageous this was, to be tempted to intellectualise, philosophise or accommodate the Gospel to worldly wisdom. They wanted all the embellishments of polished Greek orators, with all their rhetorical devices. Paul must now persuade them of the folly of such thinking, and he does so, first, by showing how ignorant ‘worldly’ learning is when it comes to human need and the way of salvation. Then he reminds them of their own spiritual history, saying, ‘And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency [superiority] of speech or of wisdom.’
  
Paul’s condemnation of the wisdom of this world does not, of course, refer to mathematics or a host of other subjects, but to man’s ideas about the nature of God, of man, and of how man may be reconciled with God. In these most significant areas of knowledge, all human wisdom, declares Paul, is foolishness.