The Cross and Divine Wisdom, Part 3 | Christ, His Cross, His Church

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 2, Paul writes this: “And I, when I came to you, brothers, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear, and in much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would have not crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.’

“These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. But the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. And we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God, and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

“The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, and he is himself to be judged by no one. For who, who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him. But we have the mind of Christ.” Paul says in verse 9, “But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him. These things,” verse 10, “God has revealed to us through the Spirit.”

He’s taken that language from Isaiah, Isaiah 64:4, 65:17; and it’s not only to show the infinite superiority of divine wisdom. It’s to let the Corinthians know the nature of what he and his apostolic associates, what he is imparting to them, to know that this is beautiful, this is priceless, this is infinite, this is eternal. It’s majestic, it’s glorious. Paul says, “We’re speaking. We are imparting to you. Don’t, don’t dismiss it. Don’t despise it by preferring human wisdom. Don’t disregard this. We’re speaking, imparting what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard.”

The eye, the ear, what are they? The senses by which we learn from external sources. Teaching, books, traditions, all comes in through the eye and ear, what we can investigate by empirical observation. So science, philosophy, mathematics, none of that came up with God’s redemption plan. None of it. What can be known by human intuition or imagination, the heart of man never conceived of God’s redemption plan. It’s impossible to even think this: that God would use a crucified Messiah to save the world, this deplorable symbol, the dreaded reality of the cross.

But for those whose eyes are being opened, they look at the cross. You know what they see? Hope. Sinners see the cross, and they say, “That’s what God did. That’s what God did. That’s what he thinks about my sin, that he would place my sin on that man and crucify him instead of me. Could it be that that is my salvation? Could it be that there’s hope for me?” And they put their faith in the penal substitutionary atonement represented in the cross of Jesus Christ. That only comes if the lights go on.

What? He will forgive iniquity, transgression, and sin, but he won’t clear the guilty? How can both things be true? How can God forgive iniquity when he will by no means clear the guilty? Isn’t that a clear contradiction? I mean, if God is inexorably just, and he is, which means he must punish all sins, every sin, be sure to not leave one sin unpunished. And if he leaves one sin unpunished, one sin that offends his eternal character, if he leaves one sin unpunished, you know what he denies? Justice. And if he denies justice, he has no right to judge anybody. He has ceased being God, and if he ceased being God, boom, we all go out of existence.

He must punish all sins. He can’t leave one sin unpunished, and therefore how could he ever forgive? We read this in Proverbs 17:15, “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” Will the Lord justify the ungodly, thereby becoming an abomination to himself? Is God caught in the horns of a dilemma, bound in his own character? Do his own attributes war with one another, bind him to be impotent and powerless and unable to fulfill his promise?

Well, the solution to this puzzle is the very wisdom of God, is it not? The solving of this mystery is in Jesus dying on the cross. How? He died on the cross as a substitute for your sins and mine and all who have faith in him. God made him who knew no sin, who’s that? Only one qualifies, right: Jesus Christ. “God made him who knew no sin,” 2 Corinthians 5:21, “to be sin on our behalf.”

How is that? He had our sin imputed to him, reckoned to him, accounted to him, accounted against him, the perfect, righteous, spotless Lamb of God, sinless in every way, nothing but merit in his bank account, all of a sudden has the merit overlooked, and he’s got accounted now to him all of my sins, all of your sins, all the sins of anybody who would ever believe. He had our sin imputed to him “in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” That is to say, all of his merit, all of his righteousness, all of his perfect satisfaction of the law of God, every obedience in thought, word and deed, doing whatever God command, not doing whatever God forbade; that’s imputed to me and you and anybody who believes. It’s credited to our account that we have nothing.

In Romans 3:26, God’s wisdom is on full display as his righteousness shines forth. His character is true and steadfast. His own attributes don’t war against him; they’re in perfect harmony, always have been. He is just. Every single sin gets its due punishment. And if you’re in Christ, all those sins are accounted to him, and every single sin placed upon him gets its due reward as God poured his holy wrath on Christ on the cross.

And all those who are not in Christ, they will carry their own sin before the judgment seat of God and pay their own penalty. And that is a, that is a horrible, horrible end. It’s, it’s too terrible to even imagine. He’s just. Every sin gets its due reward, its due punishment, its due retribution. And he is at the same time, Romans 3:26, he is the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus Christ. He’s the one who declares that sinner righteous.

This is the wisdom that God kept hidden, tucked away for the right time, the revelation of the cross of Christ. And he did that in order to confound the wisdom of the wise, so that every wise man who looked at that cross said, “Folly!” He wanted to show that their wisdom would not get them there. That way, no one could boast before him. He did that in order to accomplish our redemption. He did that in order to draw his true people to himself and reveal his marvelous wisdom, astounding wisdom, to all those and only those who believe in him, who love the Lord Jesus Christ.

By contrast, the wisdom of this age, which is for us the stock and trade of the marketers and all the church-growth gurus, all the social media influencers and the political pundits, honestly, I mean frankly, it’s boring. It is mind-numbingly boring. It’s the same old trope over and over and over again, and there’s nothing astounding about it at all. In fact, the longer you listen, the more mundane it gets, the more discouragement it brings, the more hopelessness you feel. It darkens the soul. It hollows you out. It dulls the mind. It distracts you.

We’ve got to get back to the wisdom of God because it’s so glorious. It’s so marvelous. And that is in the cross of our Lord. And that is truly wonderful, awe-inspiring, majestic and holy. It shuts every mouth. It stops every argument. It silences every pretension of man.

And this brings us to the final point: the ministry of divine wisdom, a ministry to his people. It’s unleash God’s power by preaching the cross; unveil God’s wisdom, explain the mysteries of the cross; and then also third, unite God’s wisdom to the people of the cross. Unite God’s wisdom to the people of the cross.

Job asked in Job 28:20, this is from dating from primeval times. By the way, write down Job 28 and just read that on your own tonight, tomorrow, whenever. It’s a glorious chapter on wisdom. Job goes through that chapter talking about where is wisdom found? Under the earth by miners? They can’t find it. Out on the sea? You can go anywhere in the world, you can’t, can’t find wisdom. And he says in verse 20, Job 28, “From where, then, does wisdom come? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living. It’s concealed from the birds of the air. Oh, but God understands the way to it. He knows its place.”

Why is that? Because all wisdom is located in and only in God. God is intimately acquainted with himself. 1 Corinthians 2:10-11: “For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God,” the bathos of God, the, the deep, hidden places of God. The Spirit goes there. “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him?” This is always my frustration in, in doing counseling, pastoral counseling. I have no idea what the person in front of me, what they’re telling me. I take, I have to take him at face value, and I can ask questions and everything, but there’s stuff hidden in the murky, dark depths of their hearts. I have no idea. And they come thinking, “Ah, you, man of all wisdom, you will be able to unpack everything because you see everything.”

No, I don’t. Only God sees. Man looks on the external appearance, right? That’s just a fact. It’s not a condemnation. Man looks on the external appearance, but God looks on the heart. Only God can see the heart. “Who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him. So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

In fact, comprehending the thoughts of God, to comprehend means to get your arms around the entirety of, of God’s thoughts. And what are God’s thoughts? Infinite. He is omniscient. There is no end to what he knows. His knowledge, it’s infinite. That’s why God is fundamentally to us creatures incomprehensible, but not to the Spirit. He is comprehensible, comprehended by the Spirit, because the Spirit is God. The thoughts of God in the limitless depths of God from the infinitude of his divine mind, those are the places the Spirit of God goes searching to bring forth from those depths divine wisdom, verse 10, and to make it known to his Apostles.

You might think Google is the world’s most powerful search engine, but it can’t search the depths of God. Actually, Google itself can’t search anything, really, at least not in this sense. Google retrieves information. Google is like a, a dog retrieving a ball, going and fetching something, but it doesn’t really search anything in a sense of intelligence, in a sense of, of understanding. Google has no understanding, which is very unlike the Spirit of the living God. The Spirit, the verb “searches,” also means “to fully examine, to investigate,” and it indicates and necessitates intelligence, not artificial intelligence, by the way, programmed by the limitations of men. This is divine intelligence: infinite, limitless.

And it’s the Apostles and the New Testament prophets as well. They are the “we” and the “us” in this passage. We, don’t read yourself into this verse itself; we are not the “we.” We are not the “us.” We’re not joined with Paul here. This is talking about those who have revelatory gifts, those to whom God gives revelatory knowledge. Paul has explained the nature of the wisdom he’s preached, the wisdom that he has administered in his apostolic ministry. It’s been taught to him by the eternal Spirit of God, and it’s using precise language given to him by this God, the Spirit.

And by the way, the we, the us, I just had, I just said this, but it doesn’t refer to all Christians. It refers to Apostles and prophets only here as recipients of New Testament revelation. It becomes clear in verses 12 and 13: “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given to us by God.”

Why did he need to have these things immediately revealed to him in the apostolic age? Because the Apostles and the prophets are the, are the foundation of the church set against the cornerstone, Jesus Christ, Ephesians 2:20. They laid down a foundation of truth, a foundation of understanding. This is their gift. Paul said the same thing in verse 10: “These things God has revealed to us,” speaking of himself as an Apostle and of the New Testament prophets, “revealed to us through the Spirit.” “Revealed,” aorist tense, aorist tense, meaning something done, fully completed in the past. Same thing, here, “We’ve received.” Again, “received” is the aorist tense, referring to the revelatory work of the Spirit for the Apostles, for the prophets of the New Testament apostolic era. It’s not continuing with us.

Paul understands these things, freely-given things. Then he teaches them to the Corinthians, verse 13. “We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.” Now this is the verse I’ve been driving at this whole message, but you couldn’t understand this verse or appreciate it until we went through this whole message. So you’re welcome.

This verse is the verse I’ve been driving at because this is the key verse of all true Christian ministry, the verse that marks the difference between the Sophist and Paul. The difference that marks the difference between false shepherds and true, the difference that marks the difference between fake, wannabe pastors and true pastors, true elders is this verse. Because, following Paul’s example, true shepherds, true pastors, true elders, they take the words that they’ve learned from the Apostles that are written down here in the New Testament, words taught to the Apostles by the Spirit, they take those same words, those same patterns of speech, those same examples of communication, and they join those spiritual words to those who are spiritual, to those who are saved, those for whom the lights are on.

Spiritual words will only adhere to its, to spiritual people, that is, to true Christians. They will not adhere to natural people, unspiritual people, aka non-Christians. Verse 14: “The natural person doesn’t accept the things of the Spirit of God. They’re folly to him. He’s not able to understand them.” Not it, not, not just not willing; he’s not able to. He doesn’t have the ability. Why? “Because they’re spiritually discerned. But “the spiritual person, he judges all things. He himself is judged by no one. For who has known or understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

How do we have the mind of Christ? The mind of Christ taught to Paul, taught to the Apostles, the New Testament prophets by the Spirit of God, the mind of Christ revealed and taught by the Spirit, has been written down in the New Testament, superintended by the Spirit of God himself. These are the very words of God by divine inspiration, 2 Timothy 3:16, “breathed out by God.” Theopneustos. “Men spoke from God and wrote from God,” 2 Peter 1:21, “and they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

They received spiritual words from the Spirit, and they did it, then they turned around and united them, joined them to spiritual people. That’s ministry. That is, that is what we do, not just as pastors, but it’s what you do as Christians. You’re hunting for those people for whom the lights have gone on. You don’t know them. They don’t have a mark on their head. The light bulb doesn’t go on when they’re starting to get it. But you know what you do, the clearer you are with the truth, the clearer you are about the message of the cross? Those people come a-running to you. Other people, they go away.

What is the point of all this? And what are Don and I so exercised about in this conference? What are we trying to convey to you? We want to make the point clear and unmistakable that the pulpit is for preaching this wisdom. It’s for preaching a divine wisdom, never a worldly wisdom, never a worldly pattern of speaking, never human wisdom. We want to make the case of the nature of Christian ministries, to take the wisdom of God revealed in spiritual words and join that wisdom, glue it together. This is the word. Fasten it, weld it together to spiritual people.

Should pastors follow the example of human teachers, modern-day Sophists, sophisticated in matters of cultures and politics, flattering their audiences, chasing all the fads, hitting all the, all the hot-button topics, all the subjects, giving people what they want? Is that what we should do? If we do that, we condemn them to hell.

Or should pastors, and should you, follow the example of the Apostle Paul? Should we take the words that Paul received from the Spirit, those which are spiritually appraised, spiritually evaluated, words that are spiritually appreciated, words that are loved by spiritual people, rejoiced in by the people of the Cross?

Paul took those words he received from the Spirit, words that the Spirit himself joined to Paul, he’s turned around and joined them to other spiritual people, and we implore you to do the same. Follow Paul’s example. We’re calling on all shepherds, pastors, elders to abandon and reject worldly wisdom, all worldly forms of communication. Ignore the surveys. Stop going to the marketing gurus. Stop clicking on the ads that come into your inbox that say, “Come, we’ll show you how to build a church.” Stop it.

We implore pastors and all Christians, all of you: Preach the word of the cross. The word of the cross is divine power to accomplish the impossible, to save desperate, hopelessly lost sinners, who are at an infinite distance from God, a holy God, because of their sins, and now they’re brought near by the blood of Christ. The word of the cross is divine wisdom. It’s true knowledge. Applied righteously, it accomplishes God’s good purposes. And that is this: effective, effectual in saving sinners in the demonstration of the Spirit and the demonstration of his power.

And so when we resolve, like Paul, to know nothing else, to speak nothing else in the world, but to count our lives as just being an invisible vehicle of, of nothing but truth, cross-truth, we know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. We don’t proclaim the wisdom of the world anymore, that which is powerless and empty. We proclaim the wisdom of God, things that eye has never seen, that ear has never heard, that’s never entered into the heart of man, never even imagined, not in their wildest dreams. But this is all that God has prepared for those who love him. That’s our birthright as Christians. It’s our everlasting joy. Let’s pray.

Our Father, we count it such a privilege to be jars of clay in whom you have placed the treasure of this Gospel, and that when we are broken open, that Gospel shines forth. It makes its own case. We pray, Father, that you would make us invisible as speakers, that you would draw your people to the clear message of the cross that we preach. We pray that you would please help us to preach it well, be faithful to take these passages that we’ve learned over the past couple days and what we’re going to learn tomorrow, and just turn around and repeat those things to people. Help us to study to show ourselves approved, a workman of God who does not need to be ashamed, but instead, let us boast forever in the cross of Jesus Christ. We thank you in Jesus’ name. Amen.