World's wisdom or God's foolishness - pick one

You are reading my open letter to Corinth, part: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Greetings to all of you at Corinth! I'm here with my friend Sosthenes, and I'm sending you this letter in response to Messiah's call on my life. Jesus the Messiah sent me to you, Messiah's followers who have been cleaned up and set apart for God, you folks who call on God's name everywhere you go. Grace and shalom to you from our Father and our common master, the Messiah!

I'm constantly thanking God for the grace he gave to you folks in Corinth, the grace given in the form of the Messiah, Jesus. From what we hear and know about you, God made your lives deeper and richer. From this, we know Messiah is in you. I see all God's gifts evident in you as you wait for Messiah to be revealed once again. This same Messiah will see you through to the end. I'm entirely convinced that when the Day of the Lord comes, you'll be seen spotless and blameless because of God's faithfulness in Messiah Jesus.

Stop fighting amongst yourselves!

I have a serious matter to bring up, however, and I want to call you to action on one thing, my brothers and friends: unity. I've heard some disturbing reports from my friend Chloe that some of you folks have divided yourself into camps: a group that follows my teachings, another group that follows Peter, one that follows Apollos, and finally another that follows only Messiah's teachings.

Don't do that. Listen, Messiah wasn't split between me, Peter, and Apollos. I wasn't crucified for you. You weren't baptized in my name, were you?

After hearing about this nonsense going on, thank God I didn't baptize you all! As far as I can remember, I only baptized Crispus, Gaius, and Stephanas's family. So at least no one can go around saying, "I was baptized into Paul."

God didn't send me to immerse you in water or make a following for myself. He sent me to speak with plain boldness the Good News of Messiah, so that the death of the sacrifice lamb, the Messiah himself, wouldn't be rendered pointless. This powerful, central act God did for us should be the focus.

God has picked the foolish things of this world

That statement about his sacrificial death is foolishness and silliness to the folks dying of ignorance or unbelief, those folks hellbent on doing it their own way. But to us, that statement makes perfect sense; it's the most powerful work God's ever done on our behalf.

You know the world thinks lowly of us. We're the dumb ones, the unintelligent ones who believe foolish rubbish, they'll tell you. It's ironic that this is exactly what God planned - remember when he spoke hundreds of years ago to Israel,

I'll destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will bring to nothing.

God has indeed chosen the foolish things of this world in order to confound and confuse those who think so highly of themselves. It's no wonder it's always the lowly and the broken-hearted folks who turn to God! Rarely do we see those who think themselves intelligent and higher than others turn to God. No, only after God breaks something in the core of their being and brings them to a humble place do we ever see them turn back to God.

In this masterful plan, God's made the wisdom and intelligence of the world into true foolishness, and folded man's supposed foolishness into his plan.

In this so-called enlightened day and age, is there really wisdom? Where is it? Is there really anyone truly intelligent? I considered myself such a man once, having studied under the great Rabbi Gamaliel and learned man's latest doctrines; an intellectual by all means.

Yet God exposed man's intelligence -- even my own! -- as pretentious nonsense. The world in all its wisdom and knowledge remains clueless when it comes to knowing God. God's delighted in choosing what the world considers foolish -- preaching, of all things! -- in order that the high and mighty be laid low, and the low and humble be made righteous and upstanding before God. Thus, the world does not understand God.

As I write this, religious Jews ask for miracles, whereas you gentiles look for understanding and logic. So, when we preach Messiah's sacrificial death, it's a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks! But we preach the power of God through Messiah to both Jews and gentiles anyways, because God's "foolishness" is wiser the world's wisdom and intelligence. God's "weakness" is greater than the world's strength.

I look at you and I don't see many of the "best and brightest", not many influential, not many high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women the culture overlooks and discards, exploits and abuses? God picked such "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies". He picks the ones who are broken, suffering, lowly, humble. In doing this, God shatters the self-importance of the pompous "high and mighty" folks. The first will be last, and the last will be first.

The world will call you weak, unintelligent, and foolish for following God. Don't worry about them. God's picked the foolish things in order to put the world's wisdom to shame. The things the world hates and despises and has contempt for -- these are the things God chooses, as if to laugh in the face of those who think themselves so great.

If there are any who are great, let them be great not for the world, but great for God.

Dayenu!

You are reading my open letter to Rome, part: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][[10][[11]][12][13][14][15][16]

By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us--set us right with him, make us fit for him--we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand--out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary--we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through His Spirit!

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn't, and doesn't, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn't been so weak, we wouldn't have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

No longer at odds with God

Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we're at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!

The death-dealing sin, the life-giving gift

You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we're in--first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin damaged relations with God in everything and everyone, but the extent of the damage was not clear until God spelled it out in detail to Moses. So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn't sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.

God's gift overwhelming conquers death-dealing sin

Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man's sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God's gift poured through one man, Jesus the Messiah, will do! There's no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man's wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?

Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. Getting us out of trouble would have been enough, but no, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn't, and doesn't, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it's sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that's the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life--a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.