1 Corinthians 2
July 28
Reading: 1 Corinthians 2
1 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
6 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. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 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"—
10 These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 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.
12 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 us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
14 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. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 "For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 2, Paul is distancing himself from a certain kind of teacher that was common in the Greco-Roman world. The philosophers and speakers of the day would often present in very polished and entertaining ways. Their goal was to portray themselves as intelligent, insightful, and informed. They were interested in building a reputation, gaining students, and marketing their success.
We discover in these verses that the Apostle Paul is uninterested in performing or in having an opinion about everything. He is not trying to be impressive. He is preaching Christ in the power of the Spirit of God. He is speaking God’s truth that is foolishness to the world. (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)
He writes in 1 Corinthians 7:7, “We speak God’s wisdom in a mystery.” He calls it hidden wisdom. Why?
It is because what he is saying plainly, that Jesus the Jewish Messiah is God who has come as a man and died and risen again, is something that has not been understood or revealed by God until just recently. Verse 9 is an allusion to Isaiah 64:4 and 65:17 demonstrating that this was God’s plan all along. Even now, in Paul’s present, people have a difficult time understanding or believing it because their minds have been trained by lies. For someone to believe and understand the Gospel takes the transformative work of the Spirit of God within them.
In verses 14-16 he makes a distinction between the natural man, the unsaved person who thinks like the rest of the world, and the spiritual man, the saved person who is learning to think like God. The spiritual man sees spiritual truth. Though naturally-minded people in the world do not understand how the spiritual person thinks or why he believes the words of God, the spiritual person understands very well how the natural-minded person thinks. Of course he does. He used to think just that way.