Thursday, March 14

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For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.   - 1 Corinthians 1:21-24

In this passage, Paul gives us the three basic responses to the message of the cross in his day, and they are the same responses that people have even today; some people stumble over the cross, some laugh at the cross, and yet some believe in the cross.

Many people stumble over the cross. 
The Jews “stumbled” over the cross because most of them were looking for signs of power.  They wanted God to prove Himself to them. In a sense, they required God to submit to them, or to their ideas about Him, before they would consider submitting to Him. Jewish history is filled with miraculous events, from the Exodus out of Egypt to the days of Elijah and Elisha. When Jesus was ministering on earth, the Jewish leaders repeatedly asked Him to perform a sign from heaven, but He refused. They were looking for a political leader who would deliver them from the heel of the Roman Empire. They simply could not imagine a crucified Messiah.

It is difficult for us to understand what crucifixion meant to the Jews. We’ve sanitized the cross and domesticated it. We gold-plate it and wear it around our necks. We put it on earrings and on our stationery. We hang ornate crosses in our sanctuaries and on our steeples. We build churches in the shape of the cross. All of this would have been unthinkable in the first century.  So terrible was crucifixion that the word was not even spoken in polite company. If we want a modern counterpart, we should hang a picture of a gas chamber at Auschwitz in front of our sanctuary.  Or an electric chair with a man dying in agony—his face covered, smoke coming from his head. The very thought sickens us.  But that’s what the cross meant for Jesus.  And that is why the Jews were scandalized by the cross.

Because the Jews were looking for power and great glory, they stumbled at the weakness of the cross. How could anybody put faith in an unemployed carpenter from Nazareth who died the shameful death of a common criminal? They looked for a Messiah who would come like a mighty conqueror and defeat all their enemies. He would then set up His kingdom and return the glory to Israel. This was the attitude of the Jews, because their emphasis is on miraculous signs and the cross appears to be weakness.

There are many people today who are looking for some kind of miraculous sign from God.  they may not be looking for a Messiah, but they are looking for God to somehow prove Himself to them on their terms before they will believe.

Many people laugh at the cross. 

Paul identifies with the Greek quest for wisdom. People think that they might submit to God as soon as they can “figure Him out.”  They want God to fit into their minds or into their worldview before they will let Him fit into their lives. This was the response of the Greeks. The Greeks weren’t looking for a deliverer or a physical Messiah, so they didn’t have the problems that the Jews did.  They looked to philosophy as the answer to the deepest problems of life.  The notion of a man hanging on a cross to save the world was utter nonsense to them, it was silly, foolishness.  

The Greeks emphasized wisdom and we still study the profound writings of the Greek philosophers today.  But they saw no wisdom in the cross, for they looked at the cross from a human point of view.  Had they seen it from God’s viewpoint, they would have discerned the wisdom of God’s great plan of salvation.

Many people laugh at the message of the cross today.  They scoff at those ridiculous Christians who are so foolish that they would believe in a God-man who supposedly died and rose from the grave 2,000 years ago.  Perhaps you have felt this way, or you have felt the laughter of our culture over what you claim to believe.

Some believe and experience the power and the wisdom of the cross. 

Paul says that those who are “called” experience the message of the cross as the very wisdom and power of God.  He is echoing his own words in Romans 1:16 - “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

Part of being called is being able to hear God’s call, and being open to it. Those who respond by God’s grace are granted His wisdom and power. I think it is worth noting that Paul did not alter his message when he turned from a Jewish audience to a Greek one; he preached Christ crucified, that’s it!  the message of the cross calls us out of our need to have God prove Himself to us, because He has already done that on the cross and at the resurrection.  The message of the cross calls us out of all of the foolish philosophies and ideas that present themselves as wisdom in our culture because they cannot comprehend the simple beauty of the grace of God.

Lord Jesus - the ideas that this world holds dear and mighty will be destroyed and laid bare as the foolishness that they are. Your plan of salvation reaching out to mankind is so beyond our thinking we tend to brush it off as nonsense. But You reach out to one heart at a time, refocusing the heart and the mind to see more clearly. Give us the insight to understand your Word, and the courage and the to share it, to show the world something they desperately want that only You have - Amen.

Jeff Frazier