The Foolishness of the Cross
Tom Shrader expounds 1 Corinthians 1:17-25, explaining that the message of the cross appears foolish to those who are perishing but is the very power of God to those who are being saved. He traces Paul's contrast between human wisdom—whether the Jewish demand for signs or the Greek pursuit of philosophy—and God's unexpected plan of redemption through a crucified Messiah. Shrader applies the passage both outward, urging believers to share the gospel without relying on clever persuasion, and inward, warning the church against allowing worldly reasoning to erode non-negotiable doctrines such as the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, and the atoning death and resurrection.
“The most natural thing in the world, when somebody thinks your message is ridiculous, is to ridicule you — but we have everything there is right here.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: 1 Corinthians
Recorded: 2000 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 38 min
Themes: the cross, gospel, evangelism, wisdom, foolishness, salvation, sharing your faith, doctrine, new believer, struggling with doubt, sharing faith at work, questioning core beliefs, young adult, church member, feeling inadequate to evangelize, navigating cultural pressure
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 1:10-11, 1 Corinthians 1:17-25, Isaiah 29:14, Isaiah 37:36, John 11
Theological Themes: atonement, substitutionary death, soteriology, being saved, incarnation, deity of christ, resurrection, divine wisdom
Full Transcript
The Purpose of Preaching the Gospel
First Corinthians 1, verse 17 is where we left off. Paul is writing to this church at Corinth. It is a troubled church, troubled in the sense not that they lack anything that God needs to give them. They have been given all the gifts that they need. They have all the talents and abilities they need. They could be like the church at Philippi or at Ephesus, but through their disobedience and immaturity, they have indeed become very ineffective.
Paul is chastising them. He has spoken to them, reminding them that they are saints — that is, they have been set apart, they have been sanctified, and God has a plan and a purpose for them. By the way, the same thing is true of you. If all God wanted to do was get you to heaven, then at the moment of your salvation He would have taken you there. But His desire is to use you.
God is working His plan perfectly in this world, and for some reason, in His divine purpose, He has chosen to use people — and He has chosen to use you. God has a plan for your life. If you are here as a believer, in the midst of what God is doing in your family, your community, or this world, He desires that you be a part of it. The same thing is true of that church at Corinth.
As Paul is speaking to them, he acknowledges some problems, and then he says this in verse 17: "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, that the cross of Christ should be made void." Let me read that verse, 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 17, from the Amplified Bible: "For Christ the Messiah sent me out, not to baptize, but to evangelize, by preaching the glad tidings, the gospel, and that not with verbal eloquence, lest the cross of Christ should be deprived of its force, and empty of its power, and rendered vain, fruitless, void of value, and of no effect."
Paul said he was sent out primarily to preach the gospel, to declare the good news to lost men and women. He went and spoke not in human eloquence, not in clever little pithy phrases that he developed, because in doing so he could easily overshadow the message. Paul says that as he preaches, he does not want to do anything that would distract from the gospel, only add to it.
Sharing Faith Without Cleverness
The same thing is true as you share your faith. Every once in a while I will get a comment, an email, or a card from somebody asking why we don't do altar calls. Usually it is a visiting Baptist who will say, "How come you don't do altar calls? Do you have a problem with altar calls?" No, we don't have a problem with the altar call, but that is not the only way that God saves.
What we try to do at this church is encourage the people — not the staff, the people — to be available to other people. If you were here this morning and you have some questions, our idea would be for you to talk to the person who invited you. Obviously, if you came on your own, we are here to talk with you.
We don't do altar calls because you don't need to come to us. There is nothing magic about coming to us, and there is nothing intrinsically valuable about walking an aisle. There are people in hell who have responded to an altar call — people who were insincere, who for whatever reason moved out of the flesh rather than out of the Spirit. Sometimes an altar call can give a person a false sense of security. What we want to do is encourage those of you who are witnessing to be available to your friends who call and have questions.
In doing that, you don't have to be clever. You don't have to have all the answers. Paul says he did not have all the answers — he came with fear and trembling, and all he did was tell the truth.
The Word of the Cross
Here is what he goes on to say: he was determined to preach in such a way as to not make the cross fruitless, "for the word of the cross to those who are perishing is foolish, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God."
When he talks about the word of the cross, I think the primary focus is the cross itself — that redemptive moment in history — but it encompasses the totality of God's redemptive plan for man. When we talk about the cross, we are talking about the entire gospel, but we are also talking about the redemptive story and the process that God used.
You have to be honest and say that to a natural person, this looks pretty foolish. You just sang "Joy to the World" — "God and sinner reconciled." If you, as a natural man, were going to come up with a way for God and man to be reconciled, I doubt you would have chosen what is now known as the gospel. You would have created a system, and that system would have inevitably been foolishness to God, just as His message is foolishness to those who are perishing.
The passage is clear. Paul is saying there are two groups of people. There are those who are perishing — those who don't know Christ, who are lost — and to them this message is foolishness. To those who are being saved, it is the power of God.
The Four Components of the Early Church's Message
As we look at the message that Peter delivered and the messages of the early church, we see four components. There was the promise that God had indeed come, that somehow God had visited His people. Then there was a survey of Jesus' life, His death, and His resurrection. That is the power that we have.
I think I have mentioned this before. The last ten times I have been invited to hear a testimony — usually from a famous athlete or a successful businessman — nine of the ten times, the man never talked about sin. If that is the case, how are you going to give a testimony about what it means to know Christ and lead a person to a point of understanding the gospel?
The Message of the Cross
If you don't talk about sin, if you don't talk about the cross, you have to talk about that. That's at the core of it. It's very helpful to read Acts 2, 3, and 4 and see what Peter was saying. There is the fulfillment of prophecy, a reference to Jesus as the fulfillment of these Messianic promises, and then always that urgency to respond. There is an invitation that is issued.
That is why we said to you this morning: maybe you are here and you don't know Christ, you are not a Christian. When it comes to communion, we would say to you, no, because communion is for those of us who know Christ. But when it comes to the message, when it comes to the gospel, we say to you: run to Him. Respond to Him. Repent. Turn from your own cleverness and your own efforts to reconcile yourself to God, and embrace His message — the message of the cross.
The message of the cross is very simple: that God and man are separated by man's sin, that man deserves death, and that without a reconciliation, if man dies in that condition, he will be separated from God eternally in a place called hell. But God provided through His Son the only way of salvation. Repentance means turning from your own efforts to satisfy God and embracing the gospel — accepting it, believing it, and embracing what Jesus says, what He did, and the promises He has for life.
The Gospel Is for Believers Too
When we talk about the word of the cross, we typically think of evangelism. Even this morning, as I have made these comments, when we think about the cross or the gospel, we are always thinking about out there — those who have never heard. But let me remind you of the context of the passage we are looking at.
Paul said in verse 10 and 11 of chapter 1 of 1 Corinthians: "Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and there be no divisions among you, but you be made complete in the same mind and the same judgment." Here is what he is saying: he does not want any disagreement between them. He wants them to be free of any division — the idea of tearing apart — to be of the same mind and same judgment, literally saying the same thing, driven to the same purpose, single-minded.
And here is Paul's concern: "For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe's people, that there is quarreling among you." Paul says he has been warned that there are problems brewing in their church. There is not yet a split, but it is starting to fragment. Some are following Paul, some are following Apollos, some are following Peter, and some are following Christ in a self-righteous way.
It is within that context that he talks about the word of the cross. The gospel applies to you as a believer just as much as it does to a person who is lost. It is the power you have to overcome division. Here is this church in Corinth, truly traumatized, starting to fragment — and Paul says he wants to talk to them about the word of the cross. It is the thing that allows you to overcome all that life brings.
Finding Meaning in Christ
If you are a Christian today, the gospel and the power of the cross is what allows you to survive. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control — the fruit of the Spirit. When you go to work tomorrow, the number one asset you have is not your cleverness, it is not your product knowledge, it is not your market knowledge. The number one asset you have in the workplace is a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
If you are a mom staying home with children every day, every hour, your number one asset is your personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If you look to the job to find your meaning, whatever it is, you are always vulnerable. If you are a mom, your child is never going to look up at you during a diaper change and say, "You could have been an astrophysicist, Mom — thank you for staying home with me." It simply never happens. So where do you find meaning in that? You find it not in the task itself, but in your relationship with Him. The task is meaningful because of that relationship. That is where you find it.
So the gospel has just as much meaning to me as a believer as it does to a non-believer. It is just as important, because it is in the gospel that I find my strength to live.
The Cross: A Symbol Transformed
Now, one more thing about the cross before we move into the context of the passage. Jesus takes a horrific sign and transforms it entirely. Some of you are new to the church, so it is important for you to understand this. We look around and see people wearing a cross — and in some cases it has become simply jewelry, though for many it is a statement of identification. But that would have been very foreign two thousand years ago.
If you had walked into a gathering of early Christians wearing a cross around your neck, they would have thought something was wrong with you. It would be the equivalent of walking in today with an electric chair hanging around your neck. The cross was an instrument of torture and death. And it is a beautiful reminder of the transforming power of Christ — that He can take something as horrific as the cross and turn it into the symbol of love. He does the same thing in your life. You were dead, and now —
The Two Responses to the Cross
You're alive. This is what you used to be, but you've been washed. This is how your life once was, but it is different now. Not because you cleaned your act up, but because God transformed you, so that you are no longer conformed to this world, but transformed because He has renewed your mind. The word of the cross — the gospel — generates two different responses, and this covers all of mankind. You are either among those who are dead, and so it looks silly to you, or you have been saved, and in it you find power.
Gordon Fee writes this: "No mere human in his or her right mind would have dreamed up God's scheme for redemption through a crucified Messiah. It's too preposterous, too humiliating for a God." That is why all religion makes so much sense to everybody. There is a reason religion makes sense — because it is man's created, invented best hope at appeasing a God filled with wrath, a God that is angry. I am afraid that in our culture we do not talk a lot about that side of God.
I hope you understand that God is a wrathful God. Is God a God of love? Sure — we all have that figured out. But is God a God who is angry? That is why Christ died on the cross. That is the agony of the cross. When Christ hung there, the agony was not primarily the physical side of it — there is some of that, and many people died more physically agonizing deaths than Christ. The agony was that at that single moment in time, all of God's wrath against His people was hurled onto Christ. That is the agony. That is the wrath.
We would never have created that. It does not make sense. A God born through a virgin who then dies on a cross — man would never invent that. In fact, it sounds foolish. It makes no sense to a lost person.
The Wisdom of the World Set Aside
Paul quotes from the Old Testament in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 19: "For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside." Paul refers back to a time recorded for us in Isaiah — chapter 29 through chapter 37. The nation is being threatened. The Assyrians are coming down from the north, at the border and ready to attack. King Hezekiah is panicked, trying to conjure up any way to form a treaty with Egypt — anything military or diplomatic, any humanly engineered way to appease the Assyrians who are attacking.
The Assyrians are at the gates and mocking them, running down the litany of all the armies they have defeated, saying in effect, "You are next." And God speaks. From Isaiah chapter 29, verse 14: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." God says, do not worry about it. You do not need a treaty. I will take care of it.
What happens is that in the night — the night before the apparent engagement of forces — an angel is sent and 185,000 Assyrians are killed. In fact, the King James translation of Isaiah 37:36 says this: "When they woke up" — meaning the Israelites — "behold, they were all dead."
Trusting God Instead of Engineering Solutions
I hope you are reminded by this that God will do exactly what He said in your life. You do not have to get clever. You have something you are dealing with — I do not know what it is — and you are trying to take all these pieces and wedge them together and make them work. Work hard, work diligently, yes — but God will figure it out.
Someone said to me the other day, "I know we are going to build this building. When will we do the fundraising program?" I said, "We have to go in full swing." He said, "Well, I haven't heard anything about it." I said, "That's the point. That is where we are. God is going to figure that out." That has always been our approach to money at this church — here is the need, God will figure it out. If you are here for the first time, you have probably never been to a church that talks less about money, except when it is in the text and we have to address it. God is going to take care of it. We do not sit around in meetings panicked. It is going to happen.
The same principle applies in your life. Worrying about things that have never happened, things that may take place — what are you doing worrying about it? Worry is a sin. When you worry, you are saying to God, "I do not believe You are going to do what You said You were going to do." That is what He is reminding these people.
Where Are the Wise?
Now Paul speaks almost sarcastically — and I find a certain attraction to that. He says, "Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where are the debaters of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" Where are all these wise men? Where are the Egyptians who had all this insight? Where are the scribes — probably meaning the troops who traveled with the Assyrian army and recorded the plunder? God has made fools of them all. Where are the debaters of the age? He is speaking to the Greeks, the men who wanted to talk about philosophy endlessly.
God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. "For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believed." What he is saying is that the world tried to figure out who God was but could not get it done. The world tried to work out all these different ideas about God — and Winston Churchill wrote this decades ago —
The Limits of Human Knowledge and Wisdom
It is certain that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. Under sufficient stress — starvation, care, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy — the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up. What this is saying, and we need to make sure we understand it, is that man has made huge improvements in terms of knowledge and technology. Man has made great strides in medicine and what can be done to improve quality of life and prolong it. But man cannot stop the inevitability of death.
They make a great bed, but they cannot give you sleep. They can build a fine house, but they cannot make it a home. They can give you a great ability to communicate — the ability to receive calls any time, any place, wherever you might be. And there have been great strides and genuine improvements in that area. When I first came to Phoenix, I worked for Motorola and sold phones. Now they were nothing like the phones you have now. They were cutting edge, but they were mounted in your car. A mobile phone in 1976 cost $3,300. You could not take it out of the car, there was about a two-year waiting list to get one, and as I remember it, the first minute was $2 and every minute after was about a dollar and a half.
Today you can go right down the street and they will probably give you the phone, give you a number, five cents a minute, and you can talk all the way around the world on video. How many times as a kid did you miss a show you wanted to see, or want to watch a movie again, and you had to go out to find it? Now you just sit there and dial it up in your house. We have all this ability to communicate, and we even have techniques for it. Go to a bookstore and there are racks of books on how to speak, on how men and women relate, all these resources. We have all this technique and all this information. We have really learned how to communicate, but we have not done anything for understanding.
"What I heard you say was..." — that phrase and the practice of repeating things back so the other person knows you heard them. And then you say, "Well, this," and they say, "No, that," and it goes on. That is exactly what Paul is addressing: man is dealing with all these surface issues. You are scratching the scab while dying of cancer. You are looking at some surface cause of the problem when the root problem is sin. That is the issue. That is what is wrong with man, and as long as we look at the problems we face and call them intellectual, educational, sociological, or political, we will keep looking for solutions in those same places.
I was listening to the radio the other day, and they said there is now — though someone will correct me after the service as they do every service — about ten times more information on the World Wide Web than in the Library of Congress. That informational knowledge is doubling roughly every four to five years, and it is coming at us fast. But what Paul is talking about here is not knowledge. He is talking about wisdom. Knowledge is the accumulation of fact, the understanding of truth. Wisdom is knowing what to do with it.
Knowledge Without Wisdom
Years ago a man by the name of Vance Packer wrote a book speaking directly to this issue of how you shape people. He said: "A person can be high in learning ability and memory, and still remain a fool. The two do not add up to either brilliance or wisdom in thinking. Until someone comes along with a pill for wisdom, we might better aspire to become a more humane society rather than a more brainy one." We have not done well at either one. There is no pill for wisdom. What there is, though, is the transforming relationship with Jesus Christ — and through that, you have wisdom. That is exactly Paul's whole point.
His point is not that these people are not bright. He knows they are some of the greatest minds of his time — Paul himself is one of them. He knows these are brilliant people. That is not the issue. The problem is that they do not have wisdom, and wisdom begins with a fear of the Lord. They do not know who God is, and so they are confused about all of life. There are brilliant astrophysicists who can have no human relationship. They can build you a car but have no idea where they put the keys. They lack wisdom — the ability simply to live.
Two Responses to the Gospel
Now here is what Paul addresses. He says: "For indeed the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks search for wisdom." Remember he said at the beginning that there are two responses to the word of Christ — those who are perishing think it is foolish, and those who are being saved see power in it. When you talk to people — and perhaps you are here today and are not yet a Christian — there are two groups among those outside the faith. One says, "Show me a sign. What have you got? Show me something." The other says, "Reason with me. Prove it to me logically." The Jews wanted signs, and the Greeks wanted wisdom.
In fact, at the very time Paul was writing this letter, there was a prophet in Jerusalem claiming to be the Messiah. It is estimated that almost 30,000 people followed him out to the Mount of Olives, simply on the basis of this man promising to do the miraculous — to speak and have walls fall down. Jesus did give signs, though He did not give many. My favorite is in John 11. When He gets word that Lazarus is sick, He allows time to pass so that Lazarus dies. He then goes back to the tomb, where Mary and Martha meet Him and say that if He had been there, He could have —
The Limits of Human Wisdom
They said, "Where is he buried?" He said, "He's buried there." They rolled away the stone and said, "Surely he stinketh." And then Jesus said, "Lazarus, come forth." Out Lazarus came. And the next verse says, "And many believed." How can it not say *all*? What do you need to see? Many of them — not all of them, some of them. They said, show me some more. You have friends like that.
Then there were the Greeks. The Greeks were saying, well, we are a very intellectual people. John MacArthur writes: "The ancient Greeks were in love with philosophy, around which their culture was built. They had perhaps as many as fifty identifiable philosophical parties or movements that vied for acceptance and influence. Each had its view of man's origin, significance, destiny, and relationship to God, of which they had many. Some of the philosophies had detailed schemes for religious, political, social, economic, or educational order in their society." The Greeks were in love with human wisdom. They believed that philosophy was all-important — that philosophy would provide a view, invented by man, of the meaning of life, values, relationships, purpose, and destiny.
The World's Thinking Invades the Church
Now let me make a very important point, because time is getting away from me. We need to turn our attention back to those of us in the church. It is one thing to say the world out there doesn't accept Scripture, the world out there doesn't really accept the virgin birth, the world out there doesn't accept the deity of Christ — they ridicule it. But what is happening, men and women, is that within denominations and within many churches, we are starting to see the thought pattern of the world invade those churches.
Now you can go into churches, mainline denominations, or worse yet, seminaries, and they say, "This is not infallible. You're not coming in here thinking this is infallible, are you?" There are people who attend churches — mainline denominational churches and others — who do not believe the Bible is the Word of God and do not believe in the virgin birth.
I remember when I was in college, one evening we were at the student union, and in town was a Dutch theologian — a worldwide renowned Dutch theologian. We were all sitting around contemplating the meaning of life. These people smoked. They just smoked like mad, and all these students were smoking. I cannot stand cigarette smoke — it just makes me gag — but I do love cigar smoke, so I had a cigar. And this theologian was holding court, and we were these little minds of mush just listening. Somebody asked him about the virgin birth, and he said, "The virgin birth — that's not important. What's important is the product of the birth." And I thought, man, that's good. That gets me focused on Jesus.
As a non-believer at the time, that made a lot of sense. But as a Christian, we know that if you don't accept the virgin birth, then Jesus Christ is just another man like you or me, and we might as well die on the cross for each other. The virgin birth is absolutely essential — non-negotiable. Yet there are churches all around us that dismiss the virgin birth entirely.
Clinging to the Non-Negotiables
I was at a lecture the other night on the atonement, and the speaker was discussing a new book being published by InterVarsity in which the authors build a case that the atonement was inefficient, that it didn't really matter, that it was non-essential. We have to cling to these truths. We are a very accommodating church — we have poinsettias, lights, microphones, and everything else — but there are a few things we cannot move on.
We cannot move on the non-negotiables: the infallibility of Scripture, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the atoning death — that when Christ died on the cross, He paid the price for the sin of His people — and that He rose again from the dead. We are not going to try to reason our way around these things.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones offers this insight: "The whole drift toward modernism that has blighted the church of God and nearly destroyed its living gospel may be traced to an hour when men began to turn from revelation to philosophy." By revelation, he does not mean the book of Revelation — he means the truth of God's Word. It is the moment when we say, "Yes, that's really good, but now let me tell you what I think. I was just listening to something on PBS. Here is a new insight. There is a new speaker with a new tape series you really ought to try."
Christ Crucified: Foolishness to the World
Paul said: here is what I want you to understand. You have people looking to science, people trying to reason their way through under their own power — but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. The Jews could not get past the suffering Messiah. In fact, when Jesus died on the cross, they said, "There you go — now we know He is not the Messiah, because the Messiah would never have died." And the Gentiles said, "This is foolishness." To them, God was a distant God; spiritual things were good and physical things were bad. There was no way that God —
Christ: The Power and Wisdom of God
But to both who are called, both Jew and Greek, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Those of us who are called look at this and say, "That's it right there. That's what I want more than anything else in my life." I want that personal relationship with Christ more than anything else. I'm tired, I don't want to figure out my own way anymore — I'm done.
Here is the reason why, in verse 25: "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." God is wiser than man. There are some very bright people in this world. I'm going to be at ASU this Tuesday afternoon, and I understand there will be faculty there. You've got all these people, their degrees stacked up, gathered in a room — really smart people, far smarter than me. And I'm always intimidated by that whole process.
But here is what I've discovered: sometimes they say the stupidest things. We call them professors, but God calls many of them fools. We need to know that. We don't have to be pulled away from what we have, because we've got everything right here.
The Message Sounds Foolish — Until God Opens Your Eyes
The most natural thing in the world, when somebody thinks your message is ridiculous, is to ridicule you. That's why they do it. Stop for a moment and ask yourself: doesn't this message, brought to a lost and dying person, sound pretty silly? It does — unless they are called.
Why did it make so much sense to you once? Because God opened your eyes. We begin by being spiritually bent toward it. "Blessed are the poor in spirit." When I get to that point — when I am poor in spirit — God says, "Now I will give you riches." Not material riches, but spiritual riches. He takes His Word and opens it up so that you can see it, hear it, and understand it.
Next week, he begins to drive this point home by saying, "Look around the church. What kind of people do you see?" Because that only proves the point. We'll go there next week.
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Father, help us see the truth of this and apply it to our lives. God, thank You for Your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank You for His life, His death, and His resurrection. Father, thank You that You love us so much that You sent Him to die so that we would have life. God, we thank You this morning for this wonderful gift. Amen.