1 Corinthians 1:18-31

1 Corinthians 1:18 to 1 Corinthians 2:5. The Cross, Folly to the World, is the Power and Wisdom of God. Paul now explains and justifies 1 Corinthians 1:17 b, which to Greek readers must have sounded strange, almost a defiant paradox. The story of the Cross is folly to those who are in the way of ruin, but it attests itself in our experience to us, who are in the way of salvation, as the power of God. And this is in harmony with Scripture. For God's wise purpose ordained that the world's wisdom should be unable to know Him. There is an effective contrast between Divine and human wisdom. The world seeks through its wisdom to know God, but God's wisdom checkmates the world's wisdom and thwarts its aspirations, since He has planned that man shall know Him through the Gospel, which seems arrant folly to human wisdom. It is here precisely as with the quest for righteousness. God shut up all unto disobedience that through the Cross He might have mercy on all (Romans 11:32). He shut up all to ignorance that through the Cross He might illuminate all. The intellectual was as signal as the moral defeat, God's sovereign grace rescues man's bankrupt wisdom (Findlay). For it is a characteristic of Jews to seek after signs, of Greeks to seek after wisdom. Our preaching of Christ crucified, Paul says, is to Jews a stumbling-block for the Law pronounces a curse on him who is hanged (Deuteronomy 21:23), and thus the mode of death negatives for the Jew the claim of Jesus to Messiahship, while to Greeks it is just mad. But we know them to be wrong, we who are called of God; for our experience proves that this message embodies both the power and the wisdom of God. Folly and weakness, yes; but that folly of God which is wiser, that weakness of His which is stronger than men. Among the called are his readers, who form an excellent illustration, an illustration all the more welcome to Paul that it serves to abate their unwholesome conceit. They number very few wise according to the world's estimate, or people with civic standing, or high birth. The folly of the Gospel is clear from this that God proclaimed it to fools, people of no account, belonging to the lower orders, such as most of themselves. He deliberately chose the foolish, the weak, the base, the contemptible, the things that count for nothing, to bring to nought the world's substantial realities, so that no flesh should boast before Him. But from Him they derive their being in Christ, who became in His Incarnation Divine Wisdom for us, manifesting itself as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, so that He alone deserves the glory. And when he came to Corinth Paul acted on the same principle. It was with no eloquence or philosophy that he unfolded the mystery of redemption. He had decided not to know anything beyond Jesus Christ, and Him as crucified. And corresponding to the folly of the matter was the weakness of the manner, ineffective, timid, anxious, without persuasive power or philosophical presentation. Yet his preaching was endowed with convincing force, because God imparted His Divine Spirit and energy to it, with the intent that their faith should repose not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

1 Corinthians 1:19. The quotation is from Isaiah 29:14, where the politicians who are planning an Egyptian alliance are denounced; reject is substituted for conceal under the influence of Psalms 32:10.

1 Corinthians 1:20. From Isaiah 33:18 and perhaps Isaiah 19:12.

1 Corinthians 1:23. Probably no doctrine of a suffering Messiah had been developed in Judaism so early as Paul's day; the doctrine of a crucified Messiah could not possibly have been. That such a doctrine was formulated, and such a fact as the crucifixion asserted, is a decisive proof of the historical existence and crucifixion of Jesus (p. 814.).

1 Corinthians 1:30. Read mg.

1 Corinthians 2:1. mystery: i.e. God's eternal counsel of redemption, long concealed but now revealed. Many prefer mg. testimony, which is better attested, especially as mystery may have been suggested by 1 Corinthians 2:7. It is, however, neither clear nor very satisfactory in sense, and may have been suggested by 1 Corinthians 1:6.