The Foolishness of God, Part 2

You don't need to drag into the assembly of the believers the wisdom of men.

All it is a matter of time. But can it be trusted? In stark contrast, there is the Word of God. Take a close look at the trustworthiness of biblical truth as John MacArthur continues his series on grace to you, titled The Foolishness of God.

And now here's John with a lesson. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, clear through the end of chapter 3, deals with this particular subject of contrasting the foolishness of God with the so-called wisdom of the world. Now you'll remember that Paul is dealing with problems in 1 Corinthians.

And the problems that he deals with range all the way from chapter 1 to chapter 16. The first problem that he deals with is the problem of disunity in the church. The reason there was division was two-fold. One, they were identifying with human teachers and they were lining up with men, like verse 12.

Some were saying, I'm of Paul, others I'm of Apollos, others I'm of Peter or Cephas, others I'm of Christ. And so they were creating factions. There was a second cause of division and that was these people had been saved out of a very philosophically oriented society and they had all, prior to their conversion, been adherents to one or another philosophy. And when they became Christians, they maintained this kind of philosophical identity.

And so you still had a group of people over here who belonged to such and such a philosophy and another to another philosophy and et cetera, et cetera. And they were all believers but they couldn't get together in real unity because they were philosophically divided. And so Paul attacks the idea of division over the basis of the world's wisdom from 118 on to the end of the chapter. And he is showing them that they should never have division in the church based upon philosophy. They should never be divided over economics, over social viewpoints, over perspectives that are propounded by men's wisdom because all of this is null and void anyway. They are united around the wisdom of God and that is common to every believer. So there is no reason for philosophical disagreement in the church. And you know, that can happen. You can have people who have a different philosophy arguing with other people who have a different philosophy but in God's Word is the revelation of what is true and what is wise and we need to adhere to that.

And so he attacks the idea of dragging into the church philosophical viewpoints perspective based on human wisdom and thus dividing the fellowship into groups around this human view. Now the addition of human philosophy is unnecessary. What can you add to completion? Nothing. It is finished.

It is done. You do not need human philosophy. Well that is the viewpoint then that Paul is presenting to the Corinthian. You don't need to drag into the assembly of the believers the wisdom of man.

All it will do is corrupt and divide and that is in fact precisely what it had done and incidentally it also had contributed as we will see to most all of the rest of the problems in the Corinthian assembly, worldly philosophy, worldly morality, worldly concepts. The Old Testament has some interesting things to say about this and we don't have time to go into all of it but I would like to draw your attention to Ecclesiastes chapter 1. Ecclesiastes is written by Solomon and it chronicles human wisdom. It says in effect what human wisdom is all about. And it's the most interesting book and the Lord put it here for a very special purpose, to show us the frustrations and the inabilities of human wisdom. Solomon, he was a pretty smart fellow. He says in verse 13 of chapter 1, I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven.

You see, I decided that I would apply wisdom and figure out all the answers. Verse 16, I spoke to mine own heart saying, Lo, I am come to great estate and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem. Yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.

I was so educated there wasn't anybody as educated as I was. And I gave my heart to know wisdom and of course if I would know that, I would know madness and folly as well, which is the opposite. But I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Try that sometime. Chapter 2 verse 1, I said in my heart, Come now, I will test thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure.

Now notice what happens. It says, I looked for wisdom and I found it. When I summed up all my wisdom, I had nothing but a troubled spirit because the more I knew, the sadder I got.

You know why? Because the more of human wisdom you know, if you're honest, the less you really know. And the more you realize that what you really need to know, you can't know. And that's grieving. And so I said, I know what I'll do.

I'll cover up my dilemma by just living it up. Verse 1, So I'll test with mirth and enjoy pleasure and I did. And behold, this also is what? Vanity.

I said of laughter, It is mad of mirth. What good does it do? I know what I'll do. I'll get bombed. Verse 3, I sought in mine heart to give myself to wine. This is a really good insight into the typical modern man.

Well, that didn't do him any good either. I know what I'll do. I made for myself, verse 4, great works. I built houses. I planted vineyards. I made gardens and orchards and trees in them of all kinds of fruits. I made pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees. I got servants and maidens and had servants born in my house.

I had great possessions of the herds and the flocks of all that were in Jerusalem before me. Folks, there you just about have the philosophy of the world. How are you going to cope with the fact that after you've learned everything, you've learned nothing? One, just live it up. Live in pleasure. If that doesn't work, get stoned.

If that doesn't work, go crazy on work and self-promotion and gain and possessions and lose yourself in that. And money. Verse 8, I gathered silver and gold and the treasure of kings and the provinces and then I liked music so I started in on that.

I got men singers and women singers and musical instruments and all that kind of stuff. And boy, don't you kid yourself, isn't music a pacifier for our culture today? You can't go anywhere without hearing music. People can't exist without it. They don't want to live with their own thoughts.

They've got to have somebody putting other thoughts in their mind. And so, verse 9, a modest statement, so I was great. Well, it's true. And I increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem and my wisdom remained with me. Whatever he learned, he remembered. Whatsoever my eyes desired, I kept not from them. I withheld not my heart from any joy. Anything I wanted, I got. Anything I wanted, I got.

You know, some people, that's what they want. They get to the place where they can have anything they want. Anything they want, he had it. And my heart rejoiced in everything I did. This was the portion of all my labor. And I looked on all that my hands had wrought, all the works. And on the labor that I labored to do and behold all was vanity again. And vexation of spirit and was no profit unto the son. And I turned to myself to behold wisdom and madness and folly.

For what can the man do that cometh after the king? I mean, what could I do now? I mean, I'd done it all, right? I looked at myself and I said, well, here you are Solomon. You've done it all. What are you going to do now?

Nothing else to do. Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly. I mean, it's better to be smart than dumb. And the wise men, verse 14, eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And I perceived also that one event happened to them all. I said, you know, wisdom is better than folly, but you know what? They both ended up the same way.

Smart people and dumb people. Then said I in my heart, look at this, verse 15, as it happens to the fool, so it happens even to me. Why am I then more wise?

Is that amazing? The wisest man that ever lived said when it all came to an end, I was a fool. See, that's human wisdom.

A lot of good it does you. But you know, the whole world is busy building itself on human wisdom. Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, he said, you know what a wise man does? He builds his house on a what? On a rock. And who's a rock? God is a rock. And the floods came and the rains came and the floods descended and what happened?

The winds blew and the house that was built on the rock stayed firm. But the foolish man, he built his life on the shifting sands of human wisdom and when it all came down, the house was washed away. It's a clear contrast, people, between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of men. All the wisdom of men ever does is change the truth of God into a lie.

Now this passage, come back now to 1 Corinthians 1.18. This passage compares the wisdom of God with the wisdom of men and it gives us five reasons why God's wisdom is superior to man's wisdom. Five reasons why God's wisdom is superior to man's wisdom.

Number one, we're reviewing its permanence. In verses 19 and 20, Paul says that God's wisdom is superior to man's wisdom because God's wisdom is permanent. And he doesn't make that statement. He doesn't say God's wisdom is permanent. But he shows man's wisdom to be impermanent.

And therein is the contrast. Notice verse 19, for it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. I will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. You see, he says, human wisdom, when all is said and done, will be destroyed.

It will be brought to nothing. And then he flings out a challenge for anybody to contradict that. He says, where is the wise? Verse 20. Where is the scribe?

Where is the disputer of this age? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? And he says, the wise, the scribe, and the disputer.

And he talks about the three areas of human understanding. The wise, that's philosophy. The scribe, that's literature. The disputer, that's rhetoric. Call out your philosophers. Call out your writers. Call out your orators. Let them contradict this. That all of the philosophies of the past have come to nothing. That all of the wisdom of men has resulted in no changes in the world.

The same problems exist in a manifold sense. Where are the wise people? Where are the writers? Where are the people who speak with great oratorical genius?

Where are all of these answer men? God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. And in the sense that God has frustrated it.

That it runs to its limits and still comes up zero. It's foolishness. What do men need? Men need life eternal. Men need the forgiveness of sin.

Men need to know God. Human wisdom can't forgive sin. It can't give life eternal. And it can't bring men to God.

When it's all said and done, it can't do anything. Except as we said last time, make comfortable people who are sinning. God allowed men to follow their own wisdom. He gave them that choice. And in all the pursuits of their own wisdom, they came up with no answers.

Frustration. And God stepped in and made their wisdom foolish by what He did. What did He do? He forgave sin. He granted eternal life. And He ushered men into the knowledge of Himself. He did what men in all their wisdom couldn't do. And He did it by such a foolish thing.

The cross of Jesus Christ. That's not a complex philosophical thing. It's a simple, simple historical fact. And so they're wise only in their own eyes and only for a brief time. God's wisdom is permanent. Second thing.

And this is where we'll go for today. God's wisdom is superior to man's wisdom because not only of its permanence, but its power. Verse 21. It's power. You see, the problem with man's wisdom is it's nice to sit around and talk about it, but it can't do anything.

Have you ever noticed that? People don't get changed lives from it. It doesn't transform people. It doesn't forgive sin. It doesn't make new creatures. It doesn't usher people into the presence of God.

It doesn't do anything like that. It gives people an intellectual satisfaction that they can parrot out a certain thing. I remember sitting down one time on a college campus with a guy and he said to me, I understand your philosophy is the philosophy of Jesus Christ. I said, no, I said, it's not a philosophy, it's the truth. Well, he said, that's debatable.

Well, I said, it might be debatable to you, but it isn't debatable, really. I said, well, what view do you hold? He says, well, I'm convinced that the proper perspective is yin yang. Now, at the time, I wasn't real hip on what yin yang was. I have since become a little more acquainted with yin yang.

Yin yang is the philosophy of opposites. And this is what this student proceeded to say. He said, you see, and he drew in the sand. He drew a circle. And he said, you see this circle, you draw the circle, and then you put a sort of an S in the middle.

It looks like the Safeway sign. You sort of put an S in the middle with a circle. Then you put another circle inside each of those two halves. One half is black with a white circle.

The other half is white with a black circle. He said, you see, that's yin yang. I thought to myself, if any man be in yin yang, he is no, no.

He's not going to make it. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, don't you see it? It's the philosophy of opposites. You see, if there's an up, there has to be a down. If there's an in, there has to be an out. If there's a good, there has to be a bad.

This is the philosophy of opposites. Don't you see? I said, I see, I see. But so what? That was the whole thing.

So well, great. What did that do for you? You know what it did for him? I just gave him a little intellectual game that he could play. And it gave him a little piece of ego that he could use to show somebody what he knew.

That's all. It didn't change his life a bit. He had no power.

It doesn't have any power at all. And the world looks at the gospel and says, how foolish. But verse 21 says, since in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, and we went into that in detail last time, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save.

You see something here, people? What the men of the world couldn't do when all of the composite of their wisdom was put together, God did. He saved men.

From what? From their sins, their meaninglessness, from Satan. He saved them, rescued them, delivered them into His own presence, forgave their sin, gave them life eternal.

That's what He did. And the world by all of its wisdom didn't know God, couldn't know God. But God by the foolishness of preaching, something like the cross, so objective, so simple, so uncomplicated, had the power to generate eternal life, forgive sin, and wisdom of men could never do it. You see, God's wisdom is powerful.

Now notice at the end of verse 21, we have to note this. The foolishness of preaching saves them that believe. There is a human response required and that is faith. You see how that militates against the idea of wisdom? Paul didn't say in Romans 1.16, the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to all those who can figure it out, to all of those who can understand its nuances and complexities. It's the power of God to all those who what? Believe. And one man came to Jesus and said, Lord, I believe.

Help my unbelief. What he was saying was I believe a little bit. Is that good enough?

And it was good enough. It isn't a question of figuring out. When you start trying to figure out the mind of God, that's when you get into trouble. You're trying to figure out all the little nuances of the Gospel and you're going to really be in a lot of trouble.

Believe it and accept it. That's the key. All right, so it's powerful. He reiterates the same thought in the verses that follow verses 22 to 25. He's still talking about power. Look at verse 22.

And notice this. He says here we are in the world and we're preaching this simple message of the cross. God in human flesh comes into the world.

He lives, does miracles, proves himself to be God, dies on a cross, sheds his blood, bears the punishment for our sin, arises from the dead. We keep preaching this message. And we keep telling people this is the apex of history. This is the theme of the universe. This is the salvation of men. This is the wisdom of God, et cetera, et cetera.

And they say, oh, ridiculous, ridiculous stupidities. Now, why did they reject it? Well, he says, verse 22, the Jews require a sign. Now, here was the problem with the Jews. They had to have a supernatural proof for everything. Everything. This is characteristic.

Their constant demand was this. What sign showest thou? What they were really saying was do a trick. Do something really super magic. And if Jesus had done some magical cartwheels and pulled off some real stupendous things, then he would have begun something that he never could have stopped. But he did his miracles really for his disciples because miracles only solidify the faith of people who already believe. People who don't believe will find a way to explain them away. Believe me.

Believe me. You think about the blind man in the Gospel of John. You know, it takes a whole chapter, a whole chapter. And the Pharisees, by the time the whole chapter is done, they've researched the whole thing. They're still convinced the guy wasn't really made to see. In fact, they say, oh, it must be somebody different.

And they finally go to him and say, now, wait a minute. Are you the guy? I'm the guy.

We don't believe you. They find his mother and dad. Is this your son who was born blind? That's the guy. Well, what happened to him?

I don't know what happened to him. And they say to the man, well, who is this person? He can't be somebody from God. And he says to them, you're telling me that? You know that he has opened my eyes and you're asking me whether he's from God?

Pretty obvious, isn't it? The end of it was antagonism and hatred toward Christ. The world does not have the mentality to accept the supernatural to begin with because the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him and he will reason them away. That's why today we don't need miracles all the time to convince people who don't believe. That's an act of God in their lives. Jesus did miracles in front of the disciples to convince them who already believed of his power, which was exhibited then and would be exhibited in their lives.

And in fact, he said, greater things shall you do than I have done. But they always wanted a sign. Matthew 16, the Pharisees and Sadducees came and they said, well, we want a sign. And Jesus said in verse 4, there shall no sign be given this wicked and adulterous generation except the sign of Jonah, which meant Jesus would die three days in the grave and arise. And when he rose from the dead, you know what they did?

They bribed the soldiers to say that they stole his body and that he didn't really rise. That's how blind they were. They didn't want to believe. So the Jews required a sign. Now the Greeks, you see, they were different.

They sought wisdom. Now the Greek wouldn't say, oh, do something supernatural. He would say, now let me figure this out. God becomes like, oh, no, no, no.

That can't be. No, no. Philosophically, you see, that doesn't work.

And then on the cross bearing, no, no, no, no. See, you have two viewpoints. Here you have the supernaturalist and the rationalist, right? The Jews were the supernaturalists and they had pushed that way beyond its norm.

And at the same time the Greeks were the rationalists and they had pushed that way beyond its norm. Now I believe that I'm a supernaturalist. Are you? I believe in God. Secondly, I believe I'm a rationalist. I mean, I haven't thrown my brain away.

But I'm not going to be all supernatural to the place where it's irrational or all rational to the place where it's anti-supernatural. There's a balance. The Greeks were so in love with their own intellects that that's all they cared about. So he says, here we have these two kinds of people. And we come in verse 23, we preach Christ crucified. We preach the fact that the Messiah died on the cross and by the shedding of his blood paid the penalty for sin. The purpose for which man was made is restored as he's ushered into the presence of God. His sin is forgiven. He can dwell with God forever. We say that to the Jews and they go, don't believe it. And they turn over to the Greeks.

They don't believe it either. Why? Verse 23 says, because unto the Jews it is a stumbling block. Is his grace to you, with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. John is chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He's titled his current series, The Foolishness of God. John, you pointed out today that unbelievers not only consider the gospel to be wrong, they regard it as foolish, impossible to understand, and hard to believe. But the truth is, the gospel is easy to understand, but that doesn't mean it's easy to believe.

In fact, you even wrote a book called Hard to Believe. So talk about the tension between the simplicity of the gospel and the difficulty we face in believing it. Yeah, the issue of being hard to believe is not because the message is complicated. It's hard to believe because you have to get past your own human condition. So it's not that the truth of the gospel is complicated.

A child can understand it, and children do understand it. But it's hard to believe in it because in order to believe in it, I mean, let's be honest. Jesus said, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

That's hard. It's hard to deny yourself, hard to admit your sinfulness, hard to be penitent and cry out to God for forgiveness, hard to accept that you're a lost sinner with no capacity to do anything that can please God. In other words, what's hard about it is the cost of believing it.

So the message can be so simple and straightforward that a child can understand it, but for you to actually step into believing that message in a saving way is not humanly possible. And therein lies the great reality of the work of God, where he steps in and gives life to the dead sinner who has no capacity to believe. But what stops the—the unbeliever—what stops the sinner is not the confusion of the message, but the self-denial, the total self-denial. I mean, Jesus said, look, if you're not willing to give up your own life, you can't be my disciple. So it's the idea that you repent of your sin, that you give up everything. It might cost you your father, your mother, your sister, your brother.

Jesus said all of those things. You might have to give up everything you have in this life. It might cost you your life. You know, you might end up on a cross.

You might be persecuted. That's what makes believing so hard. So the book Hard to Believe is available from Grace To You. It's a powerful, powerful tool that—and you'll find that as you read it and share it with others.

That's right. And, friend, it is crucial to know exactly what Christ expects of his followers. This book looks at his demands, and it helps you to see if you're meeting them. Pick up John's book called Hard to Believe when you contact us today. Call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. Pastors, Sunday School teachers, and anyone involved in evangelism—which means every Christian—will benefit from this book's thorough explanation of what it means to follow Christ.

To get a copy of Hard to Believe for yourself or to give it to a friend, call us toll-free at 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. And while you're online, I would encourage you to click on the donate button at the top of the screen. You'll learn how you can stand with us in giving people like you access to verse-by-verse teaching in small towns and big cities around the world. Thanks for supporting us financially as you are led and able. And you can also express your support by mail. Write to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Or call us at 800-55-GRACE or make a tax-deductible donation at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember, you can watch Grace to You television this Sunday. Just check your local listings for Channel and Times, and be here tomorrow when John continues his study called The Foolishness of God, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.