1 Corinthians 1:18

For the preaching of the cross - Greek, “the word (ὁ λόγος ho logos) of the cross;” that is, the doctrine of the cross; or the doctrine which proclaims salvation only through the atonement which the Lord Jesus Christ made on the cross, This cannot mean that the statement that Christ died “as a martyr” on a cross, appears to be foolishness to people; because, if that was all, there would be nothing that would appear contemptible, or that would excite their opposition more than in the death of any other martyr. The statement that Polycarp, and Ignatius, and Paul, and Cranmer died as martyrs, does not appear to people to be foolishness, for it is a statement of an historical truth, and their death excites the high admiration of all people. And if, in the death of Jesus on the cross, there had been nothing more than a mere martyr’s death, it would have been equally the object of admiration to all people. But; the “preaching of the cross” must denote more than that; and must mean:

(1) That Christ died as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of people, and that; it was this which gave its speciality to his sufferings on the cross.

(2) That people can be reconciled to God, pardoned, and saved only by the merits and influence of this atoning sacrifice.

To them that perish - τοις μεν απολλυμενοις tois men apollumenois. To those who are about to perish, or to those who have a character fitting them for destruction; that is, to the wicked. The expression stands in contrast with those who are “saved,” that is, those who have seen the beauty of the cross of Christ, and who have fled to it for salvation.

Foolishness - Folly. That is, it appears to them to be contemptible and foolish, or unworthy of belief. To the great mass of the Jews, and to the pagan philosophers, and indeed, to the majority of the people of this world, it has ever appeared foolishness, for the following reasons:

(1) The humble origin of the Lord Jesus. They despise him that lived in Nazareth; that was poor; that had no home, and few friends, and no wealth, and little honor among his own countrymen.

(2) They despise him who was put to death, as an impostor, at the instigation of his own countrymen, in an ignominious manner on the cross - the usual punishment of slaves.

(3) They see not why there should be any particular efficacy in his death. They deem it incredible that he who could not save himself should be able to save them; and that glory should come from the ignominy of the cross.

(4) They are blind to the true beauty of his personal character; to the true dignity of his nature; to his power over the sick, the lame, the dying, and the dead; they see not the bearing of the work of atonement on the law and government of God; they believe not in his resurrection, and his present state of exalted glory. The world looks only at the fact, that the despised man of Nazareth was put to death on a cross, and smiles at the idea that such a death could have any important influence on the salvation of man - It is worthy of remark, also, that to the ancient philosophers this doctrine would appear still more contemptible than it does to the people of these times. Everything that came from Judea, they looked upon with contempt and scorn; and they would spurn above all things else the doctrine that they were to expect salvation only by the crucifixion of a Jew. Besides, the account of the crucifixion has now lost to us no small part of its reputation of ignominy. Even around the cross there is conceived to be no small amount of honor and glory. There is now a sacredness about it from religious associations; and a reverence which people in Christian lands can scarcely help feeling when they think of it. But to the ancients it was connected with every idea of ignominy. It was the punishment of slaves, impostors, and vagabonds; and had even a greater degree of disgrace attached to it than the gallows has with us. With them, therefore, the death on the cross was associated with the idea of all that is shameful and dishonorable; and to speak of salvation only by the sufferings and death of a crucified man, was suited to excite in their bosoms only unmingled scorn.

But unto us which are saved - This stands opposed to “them that perish.” It refers, doubtless, to Christians, as being saved from the power and condemnation of sin; and as having a prospect of eternal salvation in the world to come.

It is the power of God - See the note at Rom 1:16. This may either mean that the gospel is called “the power of God,” because it is the medium through which God exerts his power in the salvation of sinners; or, the gospel is adapted to the condition of man, and is efficacious in renewing him and sanctifying him. It is not an inert, inactive letter, but is so suited to the understanding, the heart, the hopes, the fears of people, and all their great constitutional principles of action, that it actually overcomes their sin, and diffuses peace through the soul. This efficacy is not unfrequently attributed to the gospel. Joh 17:17; Heb 4:12; Jam 1:18; 1Pe 1:22-23. When the gospel, however, or the preaching of the cross, is spoken of as effectual or powerful, it must be understood of all the agencies which are connected with it; and does not refer to simple, abstract propositions, but to the truth as it comes attended with the influences which God sends down to accompany it.

It includes, therefore, the promised agency of the Holy Spirit, without which it would not be effectual. But the agency of the Spirit is designed to give efficacy to that which is “really adapted” to produce the effects, and not to act in an arbitrary manner. All the effects of the gospel on the soul - in regeneration, repentance, faith, sanctification - in hope, love, joy, peace, patience, temperance, purity, and devotedness to God, are only such “as the gospel is suited to produce.” It has a set of truths and promises just adapted to each of these effects; just suited to the soul by him who knows it; and adapted to produce just these results. The Holy Spirit secures their influence on the mind: and is the grand living agent of accomplishing just what the truth of God is “suited originally” to produce. Thus, the preaching of the cross is “the power of God;” and every minister may present it with the assurance that he is presenting, not “a cunningly devised fable,” but a system “really suited” to save people; and yet, that its reception by the human mind depends on the promised presence of the Holy Spirit.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

1Co_1:18

For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

The preaching of the Cross

I. Its character.

1. Simple in its facts.

2. Humiliating in its doctrines.

3. Startling in its announcements.

II. The result.

1. Foolishness to them that perish.

2. The power of God unto them that are saved. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

The word of the Cross

In 1Co_1:17 Paul had renounced the wisdom of words. It is clear, therefore, that there is an eloquence which would deprive the gospel of its due effect. This wisdom of words--

1. Veils the truth which ought to be set forth in the clearest possible manner.

2. Explains the gospel away. It is possible to refine a doctrine till the very soul of it is gone. Under pretence of winning the cultured intellects of the age, it has gradually landed us in a denial of those first principles for which the martyrs died.

3. Is frequently used with the intent of making the gospel appear more beautiful. They would paint the rose and enamel the lily, add whiteness to the snow and brightness to the sun. With their wretched candles they would help us to see the stars. To adorn the Cross is to dishonour it, One of the old masters found that certain vases which he had depicted upon the sacramental table attracted more notice than the Lord Himself, and therefore he struck them out at once: let us do the same whenever anything of ours withdraws the mind from Jesus.

4. Is employed to augment the power of the gospel. Paul says it makes it of none effect (see 1Co_2:4-5). Having cleared our way of the wisdom of words, we now come to the word of wisdom.

I. The word of the cross (R. V.).

This is exactly what the gospel is. From which I gather that the Cross--

1. Has one uniform teaching. There are not two gospels any more than there are two Gods: there are not two atonements any more than there are two Saviours (1Co_3:11; Gal_1:8-9).

2. Is one word in contradistinction from many other words which are constantly being uttered. Christs voice from the Cross is, Look unto Me and be ye saved; but another voice cries aloud, This do and thou shalt live. The doctrine of salvation by works, or feelings, is not the word of the Cross. Much less is the word of ceremonialism and priestcraft.

3. Should be allowed to speak for itself. It cries, let us hear this word of the Cross, for in effect my text says, Let the Cross speak for itself.

(1) God must be just. The Cross thunders more terribly than Sinai against sin. If God smites the perfect One who bears our sin, how will He smite the guilty one who rejects His love?

(2) God loves men, and delights in mercy. God commendeth His love to us, &c.

(3) The one sacrifice is accepted and the atonement is complete. God was in Christ, &c.

(4) Come and welcome! Whosoever will, &c.

II. The word of its despisers.

1. They call the doctrine of the atonement foolishness.

(1) Because, say they, see how the common people take it up. Why, the very children are able to believe it. But are the well-known facts of nature foolishness because they are open to all? Is it quite certain that all the wisdom in the world dwells with the superfine gentlemen who sneer at everything and take in a Review? I wish that their culture had taught them modesty.

(2) Because this doctrine of the Cross is not the offspring of reason, but the gift of revelation. All the thinkers of the ages continued to think, but they never invented a plan of salvation. As a thought it originated with the Infinite Mind, and could have originated nowhere else. It is God telling men something which they could not else have known, and this suits not the profound thinkers, who must needs excogitare everything.

(3) Because anything which proves a man to be a fool will at once strike men as being very foolish. Our conscience is dull, and therefore we retaliate upon those who tell us unpleasant truth.

(4) Because it treats on subjects for which we have no care. If I were able to show how to make unlimited profit, all the world would listen; but when the sermon is only about the Word of God, and eternity, and the soul, and the blood of Jesus--most people turn on their heel. They call the gospel foolishness because they look after the main chance, and care more for the body than for the soul.

(5) Because they regard all the truths with which it deals as insignificant trifles.

2. These gentlemen--

(1) Are not qualified to form a judgment upon the subject. A blind man is no judge of colours, a deaf man of sound, and a man who has never been quickened into spiritual life of spiritual things.

(2) Are proofs of their own folly and of the sad results of unbelief. Paul says that such men are perishing. What a calamity! Men who are not living to God are missing the end of their being, and like deserted houses are falling into ruin. Yonder is a tree: around its trunk the ivy has twisted itself, grasping it like a huge python, and crushing it in its folds. Multitudes have about them sins and errors that are eating out their life--they are perishing. Those that believe not in Jesus are drifting towards an immortality of misery; and yet while they perish, they condemn the means of rescue. Fancy drowning mariners mocking at the life boat! Imagine a diseased man ridiculing the only remedy!

III. The word of those who believe. What do they say of the Cross? They call it power, the power of God.

1. The phenomenon of conversion is a fact. Men and women are totally changed, and the whole manner of their life is altered. The word of the Cross has delivered us from--

(1) The love of sin: no sin is now our master. We fall into sin, but we mourn over it, and hate the sin, and hate ourselves for committing it.

(2) From the dread which once held us in bondage, and made us tremble before our Father and our Friend. But now we love Him and delight in Him.

(3) From the power of Satan.

(4) From self and from the world, and from all things that would enthral us. We are saved. We feel that heaven is born within us--born by the word of the Cross through the Spirit.

2. The power with which God created and sustains the world is no greater than the power with which He made us new men in Christ, and by which He sustains His people under trial; and even the raising of the dead will be no greater display of it than the raising of dead souls out of their spiritual graves. Conclusion: Believe in the power of the Cross for the conversion of those around you. Do not say of any man that he cannot be saved. The blood of Jesus is omnipotent. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Two classes of gospel hearers

I. The one is perishing, the other is being saved. The perishing and the saving are gradual.

1. There is a class gradually losing sensibility--contracting fresh guilt, &c. They are not damned at once.

2. There is a class gradually being saved. Salvation in its fullest extent is not an instantaneous thing, as some suppose.

II. To the one class the gospel is foolishness, to the other the power of God.

1. It is foolishness to them that are perishing, because it has no meaning, no reality.

2. It is a Divine power to them that are being saved. Enlightening, renovating, purifying, ennobling. The power of God stands in contrust with mere human philosophy and eloquence. (D. Thomas, D. D.)

The dispensation of the gospel and its effects

I. Its theme--the Cross.

II. Its dispensation by preaching.

III. Its reception--

1. To them that believe not, both the subject and the means are foolishness, because they humble human pride, discountenance merit, oppose the wisdom of this world.

2. To them that believe it is the power of God in the conscience, the heart, the life.

IV. The issue--those perish--these are saved. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

The gospel the power of God

I. By the preaching of the Cross we understand the preaching of the gospel. There are two circumstances which may have led to the use of this name.

1. The apostle did not so preach the gospel as to conceal the Cross. This has sometimes been done. The Roman Catholic missionaries that went out to the East held back the fact that the great Saviour had died in ignominy upon the Cross, and told their hearers only of those facts concerning Him which had a glorious appearance, such as His resurrection and ascension. And the first disciples may have sympathised in such a feeling. The Cross tended to attach dishonour to Christ and to His gospel. But the apostles did not do so; they told the whole story.

2. The crucifixion supplied, and was the whole origin of, the great topics which their preaching of the gospel contained. It would have been nothing for Paul to have preached the resurrection, &c., if he had not preached His death. These facts have no evangelical glory or meaning if you separate them from the Cross. Take away the Cross, and you take away the very life and soul of the gospel itself.

II. This gospel is perverted.

1. By those who say that it derives its power not so much from the death of Christ, but mainly from His life. Now I do not mean to depreciate the life of Christ, which was superlatively grand and striking in all respects. But the presenting to the world of a life of virtue will not in any degree be influential in its regeneration, and as for presenting an aspect of the benignity of God this is infinitely exceeded in the death of Christ. What Paul preached was not Christs life, but Christs death.

2. By those who say that the death of Christ has an influence, but that it is not an atonement. What is it then? It is a way of speaking! To this I would say--

(1) If God tells us about an atonement, and there really is none, that is not truth.

(2) Unless the Atonement be a fact it cannot be a power.

III. The gospel is a power in that it presents a set of topics and considerations intended to work upon mens hearts and consciences. If the atoning death of Christ be a fact--

1. What a fact must sin itself be! He is God making a vast provision by the humiliating death of His own Son for the expiation of the sin of the world. What a proof it is of the lost state of man!

2. What a fact is Gods justice! The sinner says, Well, I have sinned, but God is merciful. Well, now, come again with me to the Cross. See a dying Saviour; there is Gods vengeance against mans representative.

3. How great the love of God to a rebellious world. See to what an expense He has gone to save you.

4. What a fact is the foundation of a sinners hope. None need despair; whosoever believeth in Him shall be saved.

5. What a fact is a believers obligation to devotedness and love. If we have been bought at such a price, we are no more our own, but our Purchasers.

6. What a fact is the guarantee of a believers faith! He that spared not His own Son, &c.

Conclusion:

1. How wonderful it is that God should be pleased thus to deal with men!

2. What a thought it is for ungodly men that there is a Divine power in the gospel, and that in it God puts forth all His powers of persuasion.

3. And it is for us to remember that the gospel is a power for all the exigencies of the Christian life. (J. H. Hinton, M. A.)

Salvation and destruction continuous processes

A slight variation of rendering, which will be found in the Revised Version, brings out the true meaning of these words. Instead of reading them that perish and us which are saved, we ought to read them that are perishing, and us which are being saved. That is to say, the apostle represents the two contrasted conditions, not so much as fixed states, either present or future, but rather as processes which are going on, and are manifestly, in the present, incomplete. That opens some very solemn and practical considerations. Then I may further note that this antithesis includes the whole of the persons to whom the gospel is preached. In one or other of these two classes they all stand. Further, we have to observe that the consideration which determines the class to which men belong is the attitude which they respectively take to the preaching of the Cross.

I. I desire, first, to look at the two contrasted conditions, perishing and being saved. We shall best understand the force of the darker of these two terms if we first ask what is the force of the brighter and more radiant. If we understand what the apostle means by saving and salvation, we shall understand, also, what he means by perishing. If, then, we turn for a moment to Scripture analogy and teaching, we find that well-worn word salvation starts from a double metaphorical meaning. It is used for both being healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in the gospel narratives of our Lords miracles. It involves the metaphor of a sick man and his cure; in the other it involves the metaphor of a man in peril and his deliverance and security. The sickness of soul and the perils that threaten life flow from the central fact of sin. And salvation consists, negatively, in the sweeping away of all these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities or the perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is healed, and the man in peril is set in safety. But, besides that, there is a great deal more. The cure is incomplete till the full tide of health follows convalescence. When God saves He does not only bar up the iron gate through which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He flings wide the golden gate through which the glad troops of blessings and of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys and with all beauties. So the positive side of salvation is the investiture of the saved man with throbbing health through all his veins, and the strength that comes from a Divine life. It is the bestowal upon the delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for duty. This, then, being the one side, what about the other? If salvation be the cure of the sickness, perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into fragments.

II. Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the alternative. All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of continuance. Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two conditions become more and more confirmed and complete. Salvation is a progressive thing. In the New Testament we have that great idea looked at from three points of view. Sometimes it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past in the case of every believing soul--Ye have been saved is said more than once. Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in the present--Ye are saved is said more than once. And sometimes it is relegated to the future--Now is your salvation nearer than when ye believed, and the like. But there are a number of New Testament passages which coincide with this text in regarding salvation as, not the work of any one moment, but as a continuous operation running through life. As, for instance, The Lord added to the Church daily those that were being saved. By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified. So the process of being saved is going on as long as a Christian man lives in this world. Ah I that notion of a progressive salvation, at work in all true Christians, has all but faded away out of the beliefs, as it has all but disappeared from the experience, of hosts of you that call yourselves Christs followers, and are not a bit further on than you were ten years ago; are no more healed of your corruptions (perhaps less, for relapses are dangerous) than you were then. Growing Christians--may I venture to say?--are not the majority of professing Christians. And, on the other side, as certainly, there is progressive deterioration and approximation to disintegration and ruin. I am sure that there are people in this place this morning who were far better, and far happier, when they were poor and young, and could still thrill with generous emotion and tremble at the Word of God, than they are to-day. Now, notice, the apostle treats these two classes as covering the whole ground of the hearers of the Word, and as alternatives. If not in the one class, we are in the other. If you are not more saved, you arc less saved. Further, note what a light such considerations as these, that salvation and perishing are vital processes--going on all the time--throw upon the future. Clearly the two processes are incomplete here. You get the direction of the line, but not its natural termination. And thus a heaven and a hell are demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of growing badness which we see round about us.

III. And now, lastly, notice the determining attitude to the Cross which settles the class to which we belong. So there are two thoughts suggested which sound as if they were illogically combined, but which yet are both true. It is true that men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to them respectively foolishness, or the power of God. And the other thing is true, that the Cross is to them foolishness, or the power of God, because respectively they are perishing or being saved. That is not putting the cart before the horse, but both aspects of the truth are true. If you see nothing in Jesus Christ, and His death for us all, except foolishness, something unfit to do you any good, and unnecessary to be taken into account in your lives, that is the condemnation of your eyes, and not of the thing you look at. It a man, gazing on the sun at twelve oclock on a June day, says to me, It is not bright, the only thing I have to say to him is, Friend, you had better go to an oculist. And if to us the Cross is foolishness, it is because already a process of perishing has gone so far that it has attacked our capacity of recognising the wisdom and love of God when we see it. But, on the other hand, if we clasp that Cross in simple trust, we find that it is the power which saves us out of all sins, sorrows, and dangers, and shall save us, at last, into His heavenly kingdom. That message leaves no man exactly as it found him. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The gospel not a wisdom

This the apostle demonstrates--

1. By the irrational character of the central fact of the gospel (1Co_1:18-25).

2. By the mode of gaining members to, and the composition of the Church (1Co_1:26-31).

3. By the attitude taken in the midst of them by the preacher of the gospel. (Prof. Godet, D. D.)

The triumph of the gospel over the wisdom of this world

Look at--

I. The means--the simple preaching of the Cross--which--

1. Is foolishness to the wise.

2. Yet triumphs over human wisdom.

3. Effects what the wisdom of this world has failed to do.

4. And in spite of the opposition of the Jew and the philosophy of the Greek demonstrates Christ the wisdom and the power of God.

II. The agents--not many wise, not many noble are called.

1. God has chosen the most unlikely instrumentalities.

2. And made them successful through Christ.

3. That no flesh might glory in His presence. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

The divinity of the gospel is demonstrated--

I. In them that perish--they deem it foolish--yet it confounds their wisdom--succeeds where it has failed.

II. In them that are saved--because it conquers their opposition--and becomes in them the power of God and the wisdom of God. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co 1:18-21. The preaching of the cross — The doctrine of the crucifixion of the Son of God, to expiate the sins of mankind, and procure salvation for such as should believe in him; is to them that perish — By obstinately rejecting the only name whereby they can be saved; foolishness — Accounted an absurd, ridiculous, and impossible thing, and what no men of sense will believe; but unto us who are saved — That is, believe in order to salvation; it is the power of God — The great instrument whereby his power regenerates, sanctifies, and finally saves us. For, &c. — As if he had said, It appears that this is the only means of salvation, because all other ways of man’s own invention are ineffectual; it is written — And the words are remarkably applicable to this great event, (see the note on Isa 29:14,) I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, &c. — That carnal and worldly wisdom, which they so much confide in and boast of, as to despise the doctrine of the gospel, shall be of no advantage to them for their salvation. Where is the wise, &c. — The deliverance of Judea from Sennacherib is what Isaiah refers to in these words, (see note on Isa 33:18;) in a bold and beautiful allusion to which, the apostle, in the clause that follows, triumphs over all the opposition of human wisdom, to the victorious gospel of Christ. What could the wise men of the Gentiles do against this? Or the Jewish scribes? Or the disputers of this world? — Those among both, who, proud of their acuteness, were fond of controversy, and thought they could confute all opponents. Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world — That is, shown it to be very foolishness? For after that — Since it came to pass, that in the wisdom of God — According to his wise disposals, leaving them to make the trial; the world — Whether Jewish or Gentile, by all its boasted wisdom knew not God — Though the whole creation declared its Creator, and though he declared himself by his servants the prophets, the heathen were not brought to the true saving knowledge of God, and the generality of the Jews did not attain that spiritual, experimental, and practical knowledge of him, which entitles to, and prepares for eternal life. It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching — By a way which those who perish count mere foolishness; to save them that believe — From the guilt and power of sin here, and from its consequences hereafter.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CRITICAL NOTES

1Co_1:19-20.—Isa_29:14 (nearly as LXX.), and a free imitation of Isa_30:18. For.—Sustains the general drift of 1Co_1:17-18, not any particular clause. “The cessation of Rabbinical wisdom was to be one of the signs of Messiah’s coming; and that this was foretold in Isa_33:18 was believed among the Rabbis. (So Stanley.) Also, “The heathen oracles are dumb,” silenced since Christ came. Remark, “age” and “world” used together here (in the Greek).

1Co_1:21.—Difficult; but probably, “In God’s wise ordering of the history of the world and of human thought, the result of all their experiment and inquiry is this: ‘An unknown God.’ ” Paul came fresh from his address at Athens (Act_17:23) to Corinth. Still, worth considering this reading: “By means of and from the wisdom of God displayed in ‘the things that are made’ (Rom_1:20) the world did not arrive at knowledge of Him; He now therefore will propose what the world thinks the folly of His Gospel of the Cross. Will they know Him through that? They who believe will, and do, and the knowledge is salvation.”

1Co_1:22.—Notice, “Jews,” “Greeks,” q.d. men of the Jew-type of mind and heart, and of the Greek-type. There are such in all races, religions, ages. Signs (from heaven) suit the Oriental, the childlike, emotional type; wisdom the Western, harder, manlike, logical type. The Jew wanted to see the finger of God; the Greek wanted to explain all by philosophic theory.

1Co_1:24—Power for the Roman; wisdom for the Greek. Power and wisdom, meeting the moral weakness and moral darkness of the fallen humanity. The age-long experiment of the Jew ended in the knowledge of man’s moral helplessness; that of the Greek race, his moral ignorance.

1Co_1:26. Your calling.—Choose between, (a) “they who called you,” and (b) “those who are called.” Probably the latter. But both are true, and both are included, as particular embodiments of it, in the great fundamental rule which God has followed “in His manner of calling you,” viz. “not many,” etc. Not many.—Always a few, as Crispus. Can almost count, however, the exceptions in the New Testament on one’s fingers, and hardly any of them counting for much in the world’s estimation.

1Co_1:28. Base.—Of no special honour of birth. Are not … are.—“Nonentities,” “entities” (Evans).

1Co_1:30. Are ye.—Q.d. “Now were, and still are, nothing and nobody, in the eyes of the world. But before God, and in Christ, you are indeed something and somebody, with a life of important, eternal reality.” (See Homily).

1Co_1:31.—Jer_9:23.

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.—1Co_1:18-31

Grouping the topics of the paragraph around 1Co_1:29, we have:—

I. A great principle of God’s government consistently carried out. God alone must be exalted.—

1. In threefold reiteration here. “That no flesh should glory,—or literally, “that all flesh should not glory,”—“in His presence” (“before God,” better reading, 1Co_1:29); “He that glorieth … in the Lord” (1Co_1:31); and the triumphant laugh in the face of the world’s wisest ones, “Where is the wise?” etc. (1Co_1:20). Paul stands by the cross of “the Lord of Glory,” and casts his exultant glance around. The Cross of Christ has been planted, like God’s Royal Standard, in the midst of the battle-field. Now the field is clear. Beaten, discomfited, discredited, by God’s “foolish” method, the competing “wisdoms of the world” have vanished, or are vanishing, leaving the cross of Christ in possession! [So in the Day of Questions, the last day of the Lord’s public ministry, every typical world’s-wise-man assailed Him. But He held His own, and one after another slunk away beaten, until at last He Himself completed the rout by turning questioner, and finally silencing every opponent with His problem about David’s Lord and David’s Son (Matthew , 22).]

2. The Old Testament origin of Paul’s quotation, here and in 2Co_10:17 (from Jer_9:23-24), carries back the principle into the earlier dispensation, and shows that the Spirit guided him with a sure and right instinct to lay his hand upon a great and perennially valid principle of all God’s rule and administration of His government; one that must obtain wherever there are creatures capable of knowing Him. In no world can it be conceived that this great law should not be in force. He is the One and Only Being who can make Himself the centre and object of all intention and activity, and who can claim that all other life than His own should converge upon Him as its Object and End and Goal. In us such self-centering is of the very essence of Sin; it is our root-rebellion against our God. It is a prime and simple necessity of His position and character and very Being. To ask less, to permit less, to man or to any other creature, were to abdicate His position as God. The Bible sets Him forth abundantly full, full to the overflow, of love; His mercy is eagerly ready and “forward” to bless; the first advance to union between Himself and sinners has always come from His side. His ear is always open to the cry of the feeblest, bowing Himself to the man of contrite and trembling heart; indeed, loving to “dwell with” such a man (Isa_57:15; Isa_66:2). Yet the condescension is never exhibited at the expense of the majesty. “He is God and none else. His honour will He not give to another.” To compare great and small, and with all reverence: men hear from time to time of our Queen performing acts of kindly condescension and of simple womanly kindness, to the sick and poor and aged. But if any presumed upon this to exercise undue familiarity as to an equal, she would be the first to draw back. To allow another on some state occasion to occupy the throne in her presence, would not be condescension, but abdication. The Creator and the creature can never with His consent even seem to change places. The world’s “wisdom” is rooted in the pride of human nature in itself and its powers of discovery. No field can be supposed beyond its exploration; no height, or depth, or vastest extension of truth, but it can take in all. If God hide Himself, then there is no God; this wisdom can find none. If His ways pass its systematisation, or do not commend themselves to the world’s judgment or “moral sense,” they are evil or folly. Over all that pride of intellect He must win a victory. To men the perpetually attractive temptation is, “Ye shall be as God, knowing.…” Human intellect must lower its high-borne pennon in the presence of the Royal Standard of God’s wisdom. The proud intellect which will acknowledge neither limitation nor error, the proud heart which will own no weakness or sin, must alike bow in the presence of God. It is true of the whole arrangements for the spread of the Gospel; it is true of the provisions in the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner.

II. Seen in the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel.—

1. Hardly necessary to point out the once current, customary misconception of Paul’s words, “the foolishness of preaching.” Even an English reader of the R.V., with its margin, may now see that the “folly” lay in the matter of the preacher’s message, and not at all in that particular method of delivering it (1Co_1:21). Vivâ voce instruction and appeal is one of the aptest methods of winning attention and securing conviction. For appeal, whose aim is to secure immediate results, whether of conviction or action, the living voice of the man speaking face to face with his fellow has better prospect than the writer, whose written or printed page lies cold and silent before, perhaps, a listless eye. Every true preacher is, first of all, a public speaker; the natural basis upon which is superinduced his special grace, is the same as that of the speaker upon any secular theme, the lecturer, the parliamentary orator, the very demagogue. He will cultivate it, as part of its consecration, and will learn his very art in order that he may the better win the ear of his listeners, and thus find for his Master a way to their hearts. God has often glorified Himself by using “very poor speakers” to deliver His message. Wisdom of “words,” if made by preacher or hearers a thing aimed at for its own sake, or for the applause it may bring and the pleasure it may give, may “make the Cross of none effect” (1Co_1:17). Yet foolish preaching is no thing to praise or value, or (as it were) to cultivate. The speaker will seek to be at his best, for God. But all this is quite away from any thought of Paul here. Any supposed “poor preaching” is not, in itself, one of the illustrations of God’s method which he adduces.

2. The message itself seemed foolish.—“Jews” and “Greeks” (1Co_1:22) are not only historical names, but generic and typical. There are always “Jews” and “Greeks” amongst the men to whom any Paul addresses himself, in every age, in any country. They are two variants of the natural mind, under the influence of the natural heart. And we “who are called” (1Co_1:24), and have made the “call” a reality [see the tense, as compared with that in 1Co_1:2], both from our memory of the old days in our own life, and from the very nature of the case, can see how “foolish” the “preaching of the Cross” must seem to such. Here is proposed for man’s acceptance a system of “truth” whose Teacher is a man hanged publicly on a gibbet, on a thing whose whole associations were those of our gallows, but aggravated in their painfulness and shame. “We are being saved” by it (1Co_1:18), and know its “wisdom” and its “power.” To us they are worthy of God; they carry their own credentials. But “to those who are perishing” such a story may well seem “foolishness.” Apart from the power of the Holy Ghost in it (1Co_2:4), it would be a message with which to send men only on a fool’s errand. To tell the Roman masters that the hope of the world was in a Jew, rejected by His own people, hanged publicly on a gallows by a Roman quaternion and their centurion, at the instigation of Jewish religious authorities,—Gallio well reflected the temper with which the best of them would receive such a tale. He cared nothing indeed for the rioting; he could afford to ignore a petty Jewish squabble, though under his very eyes. But the same lofty, “gentlemanly,” if not supercilious, contempt would have been his answer—a Roman answer—if the “preaching of the Cross” had been fairly submitted to him for his judgment. The Jew was stung to the quick when Pilate’s “title” seemed to offer to the nation a crucified peasant of Galilee as its King and Messiah. The “Jew” of all ages who wants “signs,” who demands, in order to belief, unmistakeable self-disclosures of the Unseen, Supernatural, Order, who wants to see his God, will hardly bear to be pointed to Jesus of Nazareth crucified. “Such foolishness!” The “Greek,” looking for his Ideal Man, feeling after God, requiring of everything proposed to him for acceptance that it shall fit into some beautifully ordered, symmetrical, closely articulated scheme of philosophic thought, was hardly to be won to attention by this story of a Divine Man dying on a gallows. That the supreme revelation of God? That the supreme form of the Beautiful, the True, the Good? On Mars’ Hill attention ended in an explosion of mocking laughter (Act_17:32). “Foolishness!” Sensible men, not to say philosophers, to give serious attention to such a story! Not even the learning of Paul, or the eloquence of an Apollos, could make such a story anything else but a “folly” and a stumbling-block. If it kept the field, then, and drove out all competitors, there must be something in it not of man. The most successful preacher “may not glory in His presence.” “This is the finger of God.”

3. Look at the men who bore it.—(For they are fairly included in the unfinished sentence of 1Co_1:26. R.V. margin is not too broadly comprehensive. What was true of the first converts was true also of the first preachers.) They were not reclaimed reprobates, indeed; nor by any means wanting in native common sense or shrewdness. Their “baseness” (1Co_1:25) only means that they had no advantage from what with men gives prestige. Yet manifestly they were not the men whom human wisdom would have chosen to confront the “scribe” of the Jew, or the “disputer” of the Greek market-place (Act_17:18). Men would not have chosen the equivalent of a little company of Whitby or Peterhead fishermen, with a farm labourer or two, and a subordinate collector of Customs, even though joined afterwards by a graduate of the theological school of a small and uninfluential sect, to be the men to clear away religions deeply rooted in the popular life, or consecrated by hoar antiquity. Paul was the best educated of them all, yet his strictly “Hebrew” home (Php_3:5), though in the Greek city of Tarsus, would not permit to him much acquaintance with any ordinary secular literary knowledge, and his learning was mainly in that Rabbinic lore which seems to us, as it would to his Gentile contemporaries, so largely trivial, and indeed often contemptible. Humanly speaking, he was by no means the man to put forward as the best representative of the new faith, to discuss it on Mars’ Hill, or in the Agora of Athens, with the heirs of the philosophy of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. From the standpoint of human prudence, it would have seemed to be the very best method of handicapping the message and lessening its chances of reception, to commit it to such men as its apostles and promulgators. Precisely. But God’s foolishness was God’s way. Such “weak” and “base things” put the world’s wisdom and strength and prestige to shame. The success justified the method, and justified the use of such messengers of the cross. And the method obviously secured this end, that “no flesh”—certainly not the successful messengers themselves—“should glory before God.”

4. Look at the first converts.—In Corinth even the “chief ruler of the synagogue,” the Crispus whom Paul had the joy of receiving as a Christian, soon after he had transferred his labours to the house of Titus Justus, was a man of no account except amongst the Jewish community. The Gentile mob dragged before Gallio his successor in office, Sosthenes, with very scant respect. A few converts may have been won from the descendants of the Roman colonists with whom the city had been repeopled. But, as usual, the artisan and the slave, the small trader and the sailor, would form the bulk of the Corinthian Church. It is just one of the touches of “foolishness” in God’s plan that, though the “noble, the mighty, the wise after the flesh” need the Gospel of the Cross as much as do the “foolish, and weak, and base,” its reception has seemed to be made distinctly more difficult for them than for others. The exceptions in the New Testament to Paul’s statement are few. In Philippi the first to be won for Christ were a purple-seller and a gaoler, not the magistrates. Jerome boasted in after years (on Gal_3:3), “Ecclesia Christi non de Academia, et Lycæo, sed de vili plebecula congregata est” (Farrar L. of Chr., i. 197). But it was long a standing matter of scorn that the adherents of the new faith were almost exclusively from lower grades of society. Not that the Gospel has any republican prejudice against, or dislike for, the rich or the aristocratic. [“Not many,” but always some. “How I thank God,” Lady Huntingdon used to say, “for the letter m! If it had been ‘not any’!”] The exceptions to Paul’s statement in the New Testament can almost be counted upon one’s ten fingers. But the exceptions are there. [And possibly the percentage of the “wise and noble” has been as great as that of the far more numerous lower classes.] The Gospel met the case of Nicodemus; of Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus; of Dionysius, a judge of the sacred court on Areopagus; of Erastus, the city-treasurer of Corinth itself (Rom_16:23); and these were but the precursors of a noble few, who are nobler because position or wealth or learning were consecrated to the service of the Gospel of a crucified Jesus. But these were not saved because of their social standing; as it was no prejudice to them, so it gave no advantage; and they joined a company of people, humble and often rude, who could impart no social consideration, and in company with whom they lost that which they already had.

5. And yet these arrangements of God’s plan have been crowned with success.—The foolishness of God is wiser than men; the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Here is plain matter of historical fact. Such preachers, bearing such a message, winning mainly such converts, “have turned the world upside down.” Such messengers have evidently no ground to glory in their success, as if it arose out of their own qualifications or abilities. To win such converts brought no glory in the eye of the world. The converts themselves could not suppose that anything in themselves drew out any special mercy of God towards them. To join the “sect everywhere spoken against” brought no credit. Looked at on any side, the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel were such as to debar all pretence of “flesh” glorying in the presence of God.

5. All this not only historically, but generally, true.—All Christian workers—and by no means preachers alone—need to remember that God proceeds on the same lines still. The “wise” and the “scribe” are not extinct. Their judgment is that of the natural heart always. They would say: “Convert the men of influence among the Roman masters of Corinth. Catch Gallio, and the whole city will go with him.” [It was a bad day for the world when, not of Christ, but of Constantine, it could be said: “The world is gone after him!” (They who said this so bitterly of Christ, knew not of the glorious fulfilment of their words symbolised in the very next verse, when “the Greeks”—the first “ears” of the harvest of the Gentiles—came to “see Jesus,” Joh_12:19-20).] “Convert a philosopher or two, or a rhetorician, amongst the Greeks; these will carry their disciples with them.” The critic will dishearten the Christian Church as he points out that, in the mission-fields of the world, or, indeed, in the Churches at home, the bulk of the converts and membership belong to the middle or the working and lower classes. The divorce between Culture and Christianity is distressing, but it is not novel. It is nothing new or surprising if a Church reaps a more abundant harvest amongst the pariahs or the aborigines of India than amongst the Brahmins. God always has lighted His fire from the bottom, [and first ignites the slight material!] He began with the fisherman, and the fallen woman, and the publican, and the slave. Often does He begin with the servant maid or the child to-day, when He saves a family. “The poor have the Gospel preached to them,” whilst it does reach and save culture and birth and wealth. These need “to become fools that they may be wise” (1Co_3:18). “That no flesh should glory.”

6. No man may be a successful winner of souls who disregards this rule of God’s procedure.—If God have “given the tongue of the learned,” that he may know how to speak “a word in season to him that is weary” (Isa_50:4); if to natural gifts have been added opportunities of culture; if the ready tongue and warm heart are used to win many to the story of the Cross; if the Spirit of God make his gifts nobly auxiliary to the work of pulling down strongholds, and bringing hearts to the obedience of Christ; then he needs to remember that these are gifts, and that he is only an instrument. The axe may not complacently dwell upon its temper or edge, nor count up proudly the stout trees it has been used to fell. Every victory must be laid simply at the feet of the Lord of the battle. In the day that God’s labourers begin to “glory in His presence,” in that day will they be laid aside. “Things that are not,” they will revert to their original nothingness.

7. The humble may hear hereof and be glad.—The “weak” and the “foolish” are the very instruments God can best employ. He will have no joint saviours of “them that are perishing.” He wants men and women who will be content to offer themselves, and all the glory of any success, to Him.

8. So also the message must not be tampered with. The Gospel is significantly summarised as “the preaching (the word) of the Cross” (1Co_1:18).—To conciliate the pride of unsanctified intellect, the Sufferer on the cross must not be hidden behind the Babe in the manger, and still less behind the gentle, tender Healer of disease, and of the Teacher who—account for it, and for Him, as we can—spake as never man spake. [Calvary, and not even Bethlehem, is the true Kiblah of the Mecca of the pilgrimage of a sinful world, in search of rest to heart and conscience. Even on Christmas morning, the Christian preacher will also say, “Let us go even unto Calvary.”] The message must be characteristically, whatever else it includes, the word of “Christ, and Him,” too, “(as) crucified.” As a simple matter of often verified experiment, “foolishness” though this be, it has satisfied the needs of human hearts better than any “other Gospel” (Gal_1:9). All great revivals of the life and vigour and progress of the kingdom of God in the world, have been in the closest association with this specific type of teaching; they have demanded it, and have produced it. It may be “a stumbling-block” (also in Gal_5:11); but it may not be dispensed with. As matter of experiment it has been the foundation stone, of “God’s own power and wisdom,” on which effectual teaching and practical holiness of life have age after age been securely built. Try anything else, whether upon the world’s “wisdom,” or upon its sin and misery; the result will only be another verification of 1Co_1:20; if the Church will confront the world’s wisdom with the like worldly wisdom, God will make even His own people’s effort to end in manifest “foolishness” The “argument of the Cross” [so Evans, bringing into close connection with the same word in 1Co_1:17] best secures that “no flesh should glory before God,” and it therefore best succeeds.]

III. Seen in the provisions of the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner (1Co_1:30-31).—(See also Separate Homily.)

1. For the overthrow and shaming of the imposing “entities” of the world, God has chosen to take and use “non-entities,” “things that are not,” have no existence [making His new creation out of “nothings”]. And, as truly, for their own salvation He has taken care that, if “they now are” at all, and are anything, or have anything—“wisdom, righteousness, holiness, redemption,” every man shall “glory only in the Lord.” Only “in Christ Jesus” have they, or are they, anything. “He is made” all these things to them. Apart from Him they are foolish, guilty, unholy, lost—nothing!

2. In this fact, that the Gospel does nothing to conciliate either the intellect or the proud heart of man, does it stand very sharply distinguished from all other religions. In varying form, but with substantial unity, these exalt human nature, not abase it; if in any degree it needs elevation or recovery, the sufficient force is said to be within the man himself. In Stoicism man could be his own saviour; he must be self-reliant, and independent of all men and all things in his struggle after good; pride was indulged on principle. And in this it was but a special and philosophic formulating of the thought and feeling of human nature, even at its best, everywhere. That Gospel can hardly be of human origin, which even conceives of attaining success in a totally different direction. It tells a man that of himself he has nothing to recommend him to God; that he can do nothing to win His favour; that, whether “by wisdom” (1Co_1:21), or by works, he can attain to no knowledge of God; that all he gets is “of God,” purely and simply, and for the sake of Christ; that even in the faith which lays hold of all, there is no merit—it is exercised in the strength of grace. As the Gospel has been seen above to be “a stumbling-block” to the natural understanding, so it is also an offence to the natural heart. All is of grace. Men, even the “Jew,” the “Greek,” the “wise,” the “scribe,” the “mighty,” are “perishing” together. There is now only one fundamental classification: “them that are perishing,” “us who are being saved.” No matter how high may rise the edifice of a Christian’s life and holiness, at the foundation of all, lies the fact that the grace “of God” “in Christ” has in the first instance made him who “was not” into a saint. After long ages of heaven’s perfected “redemption,” it will still remain true that Christ Jesus is “made redemption” to him. He is in that world only as a man “redeemed” “of God” “in Christ.”

SEPARATE HOMILIES

1Co_1:18. The Preaching [the Word] of the Cross.—Observe the connection between this and the preceding verse. Paul is jealous over himself as a preacher, and over his hearers, lest he should lay himself out to use, and they should desire to hear, “the wisdom of words”; he is jealous lest “The Cross should be made void.” For “the Cross” is the summary, and the very heart, of another “word” which God has spoken; the very strength of it, and the secret of its effectiveness, are there. It is God’s “argument,” set over against man’s “arguments.” [So Evans.] Its whole force lies in the fact that it is not a theory, or a philosophy, but a fact; and that fact a “Cross.” Christianity, the Gospel, God’s latest revelation of Himself, alt gather themselves up around this startling sight, a Cross and a Crucified One. The effectiveness of this “Word” must be guarded at all costs; therefore the “wisdom of words” must be watched or banished altogether. Observe then—

I. A wonderful fact about Christianity: the prominent place given in it to “the cross of Christ.”

1. The Russian painter Verestchagin a few years ago in his exhibition of paintings hung side by side three pictures: A Russian Nihilist being executed by hanging, in a thick-falling snowstorm; Several wretched sepoys of the Mutiny of 1857, writhing helplessly, and in terror, as they stood bound to the muzzle of the guns whose discharge was to execute the sentence upon their revolt or treachery; The crucifixion of Christ. Three executions! The realism of this last was exceedingly great. No doubt it was very true to what was to be seen outside the walls of Jerusalem on a certain Friday morning of April, in the year 30, by one of the visitors come from foreign lands to keep the Passover. No doubt an execution, the execution of a strange man of Nazareth, of whom there had been a good deal of talk in the country for some three years past, was what was discussed at the gatherings for the Supper in upper rooms in Jerusalem that evening. If there were, as an early Christian apologist asserts, an official report from Pilate to Rome, it would be the matter-of-fact report of an execution. How comes “an execution” to be the central argument of God’s message to mankind? Why is this crucifixion of the Author of the new religion so vital to it? One of the preachers of the new faith, Peter, was himself crucified, like the Master whom he served. But the cross of Peter has never affected the world’s religion and civilisation and history like the cross of Christ. Why not? Of the hundreds and hundreds of Jews who were crucified by Roman hands outside and upon the walls of the city in the day of its capture and destruction, not one has left his name, or by his death made any such perceptible mark on the world’s life and thought, as this other crucified Jew has done. Nobody would die for Peter because Peter was crucified. Thousands of spectators are year by year profoundly stirred by the pathos of the Oberammergau dramatisation of the scenes of Calvary; yet the emotion stirred by the intense realism of the death of Josef Meyer is of another older altogether to the stirring of hearts all over the world caused by even the mental contemplation of the dying of Jesus upon His cross. Why? If any heart is really “blessed” at Oberammergau, if by chance any life is changed by a real conversion in consequence of what is seen and felt there, manifestly it is not the crucifixion of the man Meyer which has effected the change, but the cross and death of Christ, which perhaps then was made for the first time to have any reality, and so any power of appeal, to the spectator’s heart.

2. The relation of the death of Christ to His Gospel is close, and uniquely close.—The death of Peter might have been, like Paul’s, by decapitation, for all that it would have mattered to the substance of his teaching and to the issue of his life’s work. It is an accident of history merely that Socrates died by the poison-cup, rather than by any other method of execution. Neither the fact nor the mode of the death of Buddha or Confucius is of any importance to their system of doctrine. Pascal lays his satirical finger upon the fact that, whereas the plan and the success of Mahomet meant the death of others, to the plan and success of Christ His own death was essential. [So Talleyrand’s well-known reply to Le Reveillière Lepeaux, who had read before the Institute in 1797 an essay upon the re-establishment of Theophilanthropy. “I have but one observation to make. In order to found His religion, Jesus Christ was crucified and rose again. You ought to attempt as much” (Guizot, Meditations, pp. 1, 2).] It would be impossible to exhibit Christianity, except in a mutilated form whose identity had become doubtful, if no stress were laid upon the fact that Christ was crucified, or, above all, if that fact were left out altogether. As Christ identifies Himself with His Gospel, and with Truth, so here Paul brings into solitary prominence this one fact, “the Cross,” as practically the sum and substance of Christianity. Without the story of the crucifixion of Christ, or with it, if that be only an accidental fact of the history; if that death were only an unfortunate, unintended, premature conclusion of the ministry of Christ—of Jesus; then His work and His works would perhaps long ago have faded into indistinct history or myth. At any rate, His teaching would at the utmost have been a beautiful code of ethics, the most beautiful the world possesses, but hanging, as it were, in mid-air, and weak, just as all the noblest systems of morals are all weak, in having no adequately efficacious working power. He would have been just one among the world’s greatest and choicest names; the best loved of them all, perhaps, but not the present-day personal power He is, not only to a few cultured people who can realise the past and be influenced by it, but to the masses who must live, and must be raised, and must be saved, in the present.

3. The guilty conscience and the burdened heart feel and know why Christianity meets them with a unique helpfulness and sufficiency.—Whatever be the reason, the fact is certain that it is the Cross which makes Christianity the religion of every heart. John Bunyan was not merely casting Puritan or any temporary phase of theology into the form of a story; he was not merely generalising from his own experience; he was summarising universal experience; when he takes his Christian to the Cross, and there, and not till then, makes his burden fall off, and the man set forth with a new freedom and lightness of heart. The sight of the Cross made the burden fall. So say all guilty souls. They push on past the manger of Bethlehem; they have no ear for the name “Immanuel” until they have been to Calvary. When their heart has there been disburdened of its load, then first is that heart at leisure to come back to Bethlehem and learn the lesson of the holy manger. But the profundities and mysteries of condescension and love in the Incarnate Babe need a heart to understand them which has first seen the Crucified One “made sin for us.” No New Testament writer, not even John, contributes more than does Paul to what light we have on the Incarnate Son; but the centre of gravity of Paul’s scheme of the Gospel, “my Gospel,” as he calls it often, will be shifted, if the Incarnation and the Birth become, more than the Death and its Atonement, the objects of attention, the subjects of preaching. It is a glorious Gospel, truly, which lies in the very name “Immanuel,” God with, instead of against, us; it has in it all the possibilities of life (Rom_8:31). The race now is made up of “men of God’s goodwill. “But how? Why? How is the individual, conscious of guilt in the past record, and more deeply conscious still of an inward, deep-seated heart aversion from God and from gôod, to enter into the Name “Immanuel”? Has the word reached him too late, since he has sinned, and is a sinner? The answer is at the Cross, or it is nowhere. It would not be fair to make the Incarnation merely one step in a chain of arrangements leading up to the Cross, and existing for its sake. Really each is in some points for the sake of the other. It is plain that if the Incarnate Babe exhibits and proclaims the reconciliation, the Cross makes it. “He hath reconciled us … by the death of His Son” (Rom_5:10). We can date the death on Calvary within narrow limits. We cannot date the true Reconciliation; we read mysterious things of “a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” (1Pe_1:20). But when God would make plain His heart to guilty, lost man, He chooses to emphasise the word of the Cross, not “the word of the Manger.” Reconciliation is the first step back to peace. Christian speculation on the meaning of the Incarnation, and its possible relations to the whole creaturely universe, has been fruitful in noble thinking. But Christian preaching which is to touch even “the base things,” in the most unworthy sense of “base,” has always, as matter of experiment, found in the Cross a better help for souls, and the best appeal for the use of the winner of souls. At the Cross he has found his ποῦ στῶ, from which to lift the world.

II. “The Cross” is a summary of Gospel preaching.—Of course the interpretation of this phrase of Paul will depend on our whole reading of the entire New Testament. It is one of those single words into which is condensed, and in which is assumed, all the customary belief and teaching of a man’s lifetime. “How much do you mean by ‘the Cross,’ Paul?” “How much? Ask them which hear me constantly, ask them who read me most closely; behold, they know what I mean!” But at least it is manifest that Christ Himself made it central to His Gospel. The Gospel lies within an ellipse, of which these are the two foci (and the two are fundamentally one, the central Truth of a circle):

1. A cross for the Master;

2. A cross for each of His disciples. Midway, or thereabout, in the course of His three years’ ministry, in the few days of retirement to the neighbourhood of Cæsarea Philippi (Mar_8:27-38), for the first time did Christ speak definitely to His disciples about death as the issue of His ministry, though not as yet precisely specifying that this should be by crucifixion. The news, so startling to a Jew, that this should be at the hands of the revered and representative men of his nation, and so saddening to a loving disciple, Peter was for hushing back, and, indeed, would have had His Master entertain no such gloomy thoughts: “Be propitious to Thyself, Lord (Mat_16:22, literally); be kinder to Thyself than that!” Quick and sharp the cry broke forth from Jesus, “Behind Me, Satan!” Had the Adversary himself retained Peter on his side, the disciple could have said nothing more thoroughly according to his mind. Such a suggestion—to delete the cross from the programme of the Saviour’s earthly sojourn and its work—was the very desire of the Devil. [It had been his proposition long before that the King should make a “short cut” to His kingdom, avoiding the cross, Mat_4:8-10]. The voice was Peter’s voice; the thought was the thought of Satan. There must be a cross for the Master, or His work would go undone; there would be no Gospel of redemption. A few days after, as the little company, Jesus leading the way, the twelve “coming after Him,” were slowly moving through some village of the neighbourhood, the villagers stood gazing at the little company of strangers, and Jesus stopped, and calling them to Him, said “unto them all” (Mar_8:24; Luk_9:23), what Peter was not for hearing even for his Master, “Every man must take up his own cross”—as I do Mine; “daily”—as from the first I have done Mine. What Peter would not hear of for his Master, he and every disciple must hear of for himself, else there can be no discipleship. The whole Christian host, the Captain and the rank and file, all carry their cross. There is no Christian who does not. To himself and to his Lord the Gospel is “the word of the Cross.”

1Co_1:21. Seeking and finding God.

Introduction.—Some striking and suggestive turns of phraseology here:

1. “The world” is seeking “to know God.” Of the “believers” who are brought to the goal which “the world” misses, it is not said that they “know God,” but, what at first seems a very much smaller thing, that they are “saved.” “Is that all?” “Yes; and a very glorious attainment too. It is, in fact, the reward and goal of the world’s search.” “To know God” and “to be saved” were long before closely linked (Joh_17:3). “In knowledge of whom standeth [consisteth] our eternal life.” (I.e. as in the ancient collect, “Quem nosse vivere est.”)

2. The world seeks for God by the way of “wisdom.” They who find this salvation which is the knowledge of God, find Him by the path of “believing”; another path altogether, which nevertheless justifies itself as the highest wisdom (1Co_2:6) to those who are brought by it to the goal.

3. Are we to press the distinction between “in the wisdom of God” [taking the customarily accepted turn of thought as that of Paul] and “it pleased God”? Perhaps not too strongly or too far. Yet it is true that it is no “good pleasure” of God to see His world groping after the knowledge of Himself in vain. [Act_17:26-28 is very explicit: “He hath made … that they should seek … if haply they might find Him.”] It may be His “wisdom” that they should not “by wisdom find Him out”; but He loves to be found and known and loved. We have, then,

I. The world’s inquiry.

II. God’s answer.

I.

1. The heart and the intellect of man do inquire after the knowledge of God.—Man’s mind and heart will not be forbidden to inquire after God. Of no avail to throw doors open—invitingly open—and to solicit exploration, in directions to which admittance is given by gates inscribed “To Science,” “To Music,” “To Philanthropy,” “To Truth and Right,” and to shut up Religion-gate, or to build up the door leading out towards the road “To God.” This fact in itself goes some way towards, and has someworth as, an answer to the question, “Is God knowable?” It were strange if the instinctive, or at least the ever-recurrent, inquiry of mind and heart, “O that I knew where I might find Him!” were a mere lying, deluding impulse, driving men to search endlessly after what could not be found, or after One who did not choose to be found; or if the idea of a God were only an ignis fatuus leading into mere bottomless bog and darkness. There can be no demonstration of Him, as there can be no demonstration that there is no God. But if the very constitution of man’s mind be not a contradiction and a lie, then the unceasing quest after God witnesses to a possibility of a real knowledge of Him. Not a complete one—that is out of the question, by universal consent; but a real, if incomplete, knowledge, sufficient, moreover, for regulative [though not merely regulative] purposes. [The child “knows” the father, even though the man’s life, and the particular character of its own parent, be in their whole round far beyond its present comprehension.

2. Man is morally a strange contradiction in this matter.—The natural heart is averse from God, “and desires not the knowledge of His ways” (Job_21:14); yet the famous sentence of Augustine is the summary of the universal human experience: “Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet; quia fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.” (Conf., I. i. 1.) “The fool says in his heart ‘No God,’ ” but, as Bacon quaintly puts it: “It is not said, ‘The fool hath thought in his heart,’ so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, and be persuaded of it; for none deny that there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God” (Essays, “Atheism”). It is a lesson which the “fool” must say over and over to himself, to be quite sure: “No God, No God, No God.” David never heard of an atheist by professed creed. [Another David, David Hume, avowed at the table of Baron d’Holbach, that he had never met with an atheist. “Allow me,” said his host, “to introduce you to thirteen,” indicating his guests.] Long ago Cicero pointed out that no nation of atheists had ever been found (De Nat. Deor., i. 16). It is another thing, and capable of ready explanation, that now and again peoples have been found, few in number and low down in the scale of civilisation, in whom the very idea of worship seemed almost or quite extinct, and their life and thinking reduced to the narrowness of the animal existence. Yet the vague sense of a supernatural is hardly ever absent, and the idea of a God can always be called out again in even the most imbruted and degraded. Every man is capable of it, as no noblest animal is. As matter of history, belief has ever been before disbelief; belief has seemed natural, disbelief and denial have been induced, and matters of education. Man “cries out after God, after the living God” (Psa_74:2). “This inquiry and search after God is the origin of all religion, and the truth even of heathenism” (Luthardt). And yet man is a prodigal who “goeth into a far country,” where his Father may be out of sight and out of mind. It is the dislocation of God’s order seen everywhere in His creation; man, like the rest, is “out of joint,” as the result of a moral confusion in God’s “very good” world and its order.

3. The intellect starts on its quest on some four great lines of argument, four great highways, as it hopes, to the assurance that there is a God and to some knowledge of Him. A few, capable of such thinking, have argued that, because man can have the conception of a Perfect Being, there must be somewhere a reality corresponding to the conception; that there must be an Infinite Substance, of whom [or which] Time and Space must be “accidents”; that the ideas of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, must have their root and basis somewhere; “the thought of God implies the existence of God.” Often discredited, argued out of court, criticised or refined away, dismissed, buried, but with a wonderful resurrection power about it, the “No effect without a cause” argument has been a path along which a far larger class of minds—“practical people”—has set out to find God. Wider still in the field of its appeal, a broad way at which many—most—have gone in in their search, is the argument from Design, which is not really affected even if modern “evolutionary” science makes good all its claims, and turns every hypothesis into certainty; it would only be a revolutionising of our knowledge of the method, by which the Creator had effectuated and carried out His design; however the result has been brought about, He is still there, directing the processes, guiding the whole, from inception to conclusion. [Said Newton: “Hæcce compages solis, planetarum, et cometarum et stellarum, non nisi Consilio et dominio entis cujusdam potentis et intelligentis oriri potuit.”] “Every science without exception shows that the order and [concurrent] adaptation and harmonies of nature are such as to make the chances no less than infinite against the supposition of Chaos, or the absence of the designing intelligence.” Said Bonaparte in Egypt, after listening to the atheistic talk of a group of officers and savans, gathered at his tent door under the lustrous stars of a sub-tropical night, “All very well, gentlemen; but who made all these?” [There is even in the Sublime and the Beautiful in Nature, secured as so much of it is by the very same properties of matter—mechanical, chemical, or other—and their combinations, as secure the more utilitarian results of Design, a concurrent “design argument,” which leads many minds towards the Mind, towards God. (See this popularly accessible in Pres. Day Tracts, No. 20, R.T.S.] The common agreement of the vast majority of the race, account for it how men may, has always been to some a promising line of quest after God. “Where all the world have turned their steps, surely in that direction He is to be found.” So men have said, nor without justification.

4. The heart and the moral nature have contributed to all the inquiry. The heart, as well as the intellect, has had its own “wisdom” by which it has sought “to know God.” And its wisdom has been the wisest. It has, indeed, affected the search after Him, in every line of quest. Very much according as their heart and moral condition have been, so have the inquirers valued or disparaged the paths by which the reason sought after Him; so have they hoped or feared that the path might lead them to His throne; so have they been urged onward by desire or dragged forward with reluctance, towards the place where perchance He might reveal Himself to the searchers. But the moral nature of man reaches out groping hands after Him. The sense of wrong and right has looked eagerly if it might see a Supreme Lawgiver somewhere behind “Right” and “Wrong.” Conscience has intimated a moral world and its Ruler. The personal manhood has given supreme testimony to a Person with whom it may have fellowship, and the sense of dependence has reinforced the argument. “The same heart in man which trembles before an Authority above him yearns to be able to trust in Him.” And the inquiry of the heart after God is the more earnest when the sense of guilt, so strange, so unreasonable, so inexplicable, and yet so completely justifying itself to the man who passes through its experiences, presses home the question: “How may I find God? If I find Him, what kind of God shall I meet? Will there be any pity, any mercy, any pardon, any love? Can there be? Can He show any?” Man can give no satisfying peace. The sinner has no authority to speak peace to himself. Nature is not without analogies which may suggest forgiveness; she has healing herbs for wounds and diseases, occasioned by violations of her own laws. But the guilty heart wants to know the Lawgiver, and His mind towards itself and its sin.

5. Abundantly clear from the history of human thought, philosophical or theological, that by any of these roads, or by all combined, the race has never come to any satisfying certainty about God. “His eternal power and Godhead” have not always been understood by the things that are made (Rom_1:20). All these arguments have always been open to all, to study and use. They none of them depend upon Revelation. The wisest wisdom of this world has exercised itself upon them. Yet there is not one of them which is so demonstrative in its force as to compel assent or to give certainty. [There is not one which may not be frittered away by over-subtle criticism; not one from which the intellect cannot find a way of escape, if sore pressed by it in controversy.] There is not one which brings absolutely and infallibly to God. Phenomena and the Finite have not necessarily suggested an Infinite Subsistence. The unity of design is as consistent with the operation of one of two, or of one of many, workers left to do as he wills, as with the operation of One Only Worker. He must be very and sufficiently wise and powerful, but not of logical necessity all-wise, all-powerful. “Is number finite or infinite?” asked a believing French savant of some atheistic men of science. “Finite.” “Then the universe had a beginning.” But the argument does not of necessity shut men up to a Creator. Men of “wisdom” have, in fact, held an Eternal Matter, or a self-originated Universe. Endless have been the ancient and modern, Oriental and Western, variations upon the Pantheistic theory of God and the world. A personal God, who is Creator, has not always been a God of providential rule over, and care for, His creation. Polytheism has been the belief of large sections of the race in all ages. The inquiry of mere wisdom has always, in point of fact, left men without just views or settled convictions. “The various apprehensions of wise men,” said Cicero long ago, “justify the doubtings of sceptics, and it will be time enough to blame these when others agree, or any one has found the truth” (De Nat. Deor., i. 10, 11. See Note at end of Homily). “(The wisdom of this world) does not deny Divine existence, though a good many persons are coldly doubtful and ‘agnostic’ on the subject. But as in the first century any effective conception of God was wearing out of thoughtful minds [Emperors, not only like Augustus, but like Tiberius and Nero, were deified. On the other hand, all the vilest, meanest, Oriental or African gods and cults were being welcomed at Rome], … so now there are mere vague and high-sounding phrases about the Almighty current among the worldly-wise. He is a force—personal or impersonal, no one knows; where seated, why operative, how directed, none can tell. Or, He is a dream of Ineffable Beauty, and a fountain of Ineffable Pity; but how to reconcile this with the more severe aspects of nature and life baffles all the wisdom of the world. The sages are puzzled; the multitude know not what to think; and so ‘the world by wisdom knows not God’ ” (Dr. Donald Fraser). “Anima naturaliter Christiana,” cried the old apologist; but his word is both true and untrue. The anima Christiana truly finds reason enough to believe that in the design of its Maker it would “naturally” have known God. But there has been a blinding of the eye that looks for His traces; it cannot read aright the teachings of (say) nature. [It is “the pure in heart” now that alone “see God.” The Sir Galahads, not the Lancelots, see the Holy Grail.] In some lines of argument the evidence also has got confused; it cannot be read with absolute confidence; [the pieces of the puzzle have got jostled, and some perhaps are lost; it is not easy to discover the design which would lead to a Designer]. The altar “to an unknown God” in Athens is confessedly a symbolical fact in a representative city; man’s wisdom with all possible advantages avowing a result so incomplete as to be a defeat of any search “by wisdom” only. The wisest minds need God’s pilotage if they are to reach Himself. Science does not find man in man’s body, nor God in God’s world. The most modern thing is to take the confession of failure and wear it as the badge of superiority: “Agnostic, we!”

6. And this was “in the wisdom of God.”—The whole moral history of earth and mankind may probably be a great object-lesson in sin, its meaning, its mischief, its misery, and in grace, its manifold wisdom, and infinite fulness, for the teaching of other worlds and other races. The failure of mere fallen, darkened reason, even in its wisest, mightiest, most industrious examples, to “come at” God, “though He be not far from any one of us,” may not be the least instructive detail in this great Didactic of the story of our race. However that may be, with regard to “principalities and powers in heavenly places,” and however the question may be decided whether, if sin had not darkened man’s reason and perverted his heart, and confused and blurred some of the clearest evidence for a God, man might then “by wisdom” have known God, [if, indeed, he would then have had any need to search; man is seeking now a lost vision and knowledge]; as things are, this world-wide, age-long result all falls in with the great principle of 1Co_1:29; 1Co_1:31, that all pride of human intellect should be utterly excluded, made impossible by its utter failure to “find out God” (Job_11:7). The knowledge, when it comes, is to be through a “Salvation,” and salvation is for “those who believe.”

II. God’s answer.—

1. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in” the midst of Israel, so God has “lifted up” His Son upon a cross in the midst of mankind, groping with blind eyes, and outstretched hands, and yearning heart after Himself. The central Figure of history is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. The central Fact of the history of the Christ is the Cross. [The wise men from the East asked, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews?” Thirty years after Pilate gave the answer, putting upon the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”] The world for ages had been asking, “How, where, may we find and know God? Is there a God to know and find?” The answer given by the “preaching” of Paul and his fellows and their successors is, “Look at Jesus Christ, and above all at Him crucified, and see and know God.”

2. All we need to know, perhaps all we can be made to know, about God, we hear from Jesus of Nazareth; indeed, more truly still, we see it in Jesus of Nazareth. “He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father.” [As we say of a boy whose father is unknown to an inquirer who, nevertheless, is acquainted with the lad, “Well, he is his father over again.”] What He said and did, and above all, the reasons, the principles of judgment and action, which underlie all He said and did,—we may transfer them all to God, and say, “Thus and thus does He act and judge.” His relation, e.g. to prayer and to sin, is exhibited in Christ. His requirement of faith in Himself in order to sight and health and blessing, is a revelation of God in this respect. We have a record, attested by historical evidence, sufficient when the nature of the case is taken into full account, of a Person and His character and teaching, starting with which we gain, at the least, a crucial and probative instance that there is a “supernatural” Order, which in that one case at least has broken in upon, and manifested itself in the midst of, the natural. The world of God and of things spiritual disclosed itself in Him, His life and work. It is an ascertained fact, and level to the apprehension of the simplest. And when, moreover, it is understood that the whole Written Word is the word of Christ the Revealer, then all its teachings about God become those of Christ. And, as matter of fact, the only certain and satisfying knowledge of God has been that which is given in the Word of God; the Written and the Incarnate are for this purpose one.

3. But Paul singles out again and again the Cross as the central point of the revelation. A knowledge of God is, in his view, given there which does not even come through the three years’ ministry. [When Moses pleaded, “Show me Thy glory,” and God made His goodness to pass before His servant, it was not even a partial refusal of his request. His “goodness,” “pardoning iniquity, transgression, and sin,” is His “glory” to sinners’ hearts (Exo_33:18 to Exo_34:7).] It is interesting in the last degree to hear the confession of even secular students of history that the cross of Christ is the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the modern; that all ancient history, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, all led up to it and converged upon it, whilst all the life of the modern world radiates from it; interesting to see how typical was the simple fact that in the very inscription on the cross were gathered up all the best history of preceding ages,—Hebrew, Greek, Latin—Religion, Wisdom, Law—Worship, Speculation, Government; profoundly interesting to see how Christianity meets the “Jew”-type, “requiring a sign” of the nearness of the Supernatural [“for outward, visible wonders”], and of the “Greek”-type, asking for the True and Beautiful and Good [“for inward completeness of system”]; meeting the one in the failure of his moral quest, and the other in the failure of his intellectual inquiry. But the “base” and “despised” and guilty want first and most urgently an answer for the conscience. And, once more it may be said, that the Cross has, age after age, given a satisfaction on this point found nowhere else. “Theories of the Atonement” have not always been consistent or wise, or duly considerate of all the facts; the analysis of the way in which the holy Justice of God was displayed at Calvary, as well as the Mercy, may sometimes have been mechanical and overdone. Much of all this has, moreover, been beyond the mass of seeking souls. And, apart from it all, by “believing” they have at the Cross come into a “salvation” which has meant “knowledge of God.” Their faith in Christ has been crowned by a gift of the Spirit, whose indwelling has restored more and more perfectly spiritual vision and judgment and power. They have been put by Him en rapport with spiritual things. There has come a “demonstration of the Spirit,” which has given evidence and proof and certainty. God reveals Himself to their “spirit.” They understand the reason of the failure of the search “by way of wisdom.” “Wise” or “foolish” after the mere intellectual standard of “the world,” the “saved” “know,” and they are saved at the Cross by “believing.”

NOTE.—Plato complains how hard it is to discover the Father of the universe. Socrates held it to be the greatest possible happiness to know the will of the gods, but did not believe this discoverable by principles of reason, and recommended divination [Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Chr. Belief, pp. 78, 79. He, with others, says further:] Men never found God as personal, as holy, as Creator. Plato’s God oscillates between Nature and a Divine Idea. Aristotle made Him personal, but limited by primordial matter, and only a Demiourgos. The utmost attained to by the race was an intermittently shining, half-obscure presentiment, but not that God is and can only be One.

1Co_1:30. Christ our Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption.

I. Wisdom.—In two senses. Not even in Paul’s, or in God’s, could we be “wise” if there were no Christ to know, and unless He helped us to know Himself. He is the great Fact to know which is Wisdom. He gives the faculty for knowing, and the Spirit who exhibits Him to our awakened perception. He is Himself the Revealer, the Sum of all Revelation, and the giver of the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (Eph_1:12). Like the “world” at Corinth, the “world” to-day makes no account of such “wisdom.” But “knowledge” and “ignorance,” “wisdom” and “folly,” are all relative terms. Measured by one standard, placed in one set of circumstances, judged by one purpose, a man may be wise. With no change in himself, but with another set of conditions, in other circumstances, for another purpose, he may be a fool. To be really wise he must have the knowledge just then required and must know how to apply it. On a certain voyage, for example, so long as all went well, the ship’s surgeon was the wise man of the company. Besides his medical skill, he knew everything which could make the tedium of life on shipboard pass agreeably away. He easily carried the palm for popularity, and for being the universally clever man. The ship was wrecked on a desolate island. It became a question of finding shelter, of finding and cooking food, and here the many-sided man was utterly at fault. The common sailors, with their experimental knowledge of a thousand-and-one odds and ends of practical convenience, despised the doctor as a helpless hindrance. There was a curious reversal of the position. He had been a hero, a little god, on board; now he was a fool who wanted feeding and could find no food. The only wisdom known to the Book of God is Divine knowledge, and that is all bound up in Christ. No Christian will wisely undervalue mere natural wisdom or culture. The wide knowledge of the facts of the universe and their laws—Science; the wide mastery of the facts of the past and the great principles underlying them—History; the full-stored knowledge of the human mind, and of its laws—Philosophy; literary lore; the accumulations of the linguist; all these are noble and ennobling possessions, elevating, widening, as well as furnishing the mind which is enriched by them. All due honour even to the “wise man after the flesh.” All highest honour to such Wisdom when she becomes the handmaid of Divine truth. But all this is only fair-weather knowledge. The storm is coming, the wreck of the present order of things; the day of peril and of judgment, when the great question will be Eternal Life or Eternal Death. Even now all mere human knowledge is of things that “vanish away.” Knowledge and the objects of knowledge both are in ceaseless flux; a shifting, ever-changing knowledge of a shifting, ever-changing world, a partial knowledge perpetually under revision, correction, or enlargement. The one unchanging Fact is God in Christ. When, in “the new heavens and the new earth,” our science, history, literature, language, art, shall have been made obsolete, or shall have become mere curious memories, the knowledge of God will abide, true as ever, important as ever. “Can you tell me about God?” is a question which somehow the human mind cannot let alone. “Tell me about man, about myself. What is the meaning of the strange conflict always going on within me, between a higher and a lower self? What is the voice I sometimes seem to hear within me? and why is it so often a voice of self-reproach?” And then, when sin is understood, come the great questions: “Tell me whether there is any way of peace with myself and with God? Is He good? But that only makes me the more sadly wrong. Do not tell me what you hope, or think. Has He spoken? What are His terms of restoration?” Up to Paul’s day the wisest man of this world never answered such questions with any finality of satisfaction. The world’s wisdom has no final answer to-day. The very simplest Christian has an answer—an answer which, in ten thousand instances, has “worked” well in practical life. He believes he has reached certainty, where the wisest thinkers who disdain the help of Revelation go, groping and guessing, over the same wearisome ground of human ignorance; he certainly has learned to solve moral questions in practical living, as they are never solved elsewhere. He has learned a wisdom on these topics which will have abiding value in the dissolution and vanishing of all other knowledge besides, and will avail even at the bar of God. The Christian man’s theory of life and morals, his doctrine of God and of creaturely existence, are in fact a complete philosophy, which centres for him in Christ. All we can know, certainly all that we need to know, of God, for regulative ends, is exhibited in Christ. We hear from His lips a revelation of God; but we do not only listen, we look and see what God is, in His own holiness. Every great principle of His dealing with petitioners and with sin may be traced out in, and often lies upon the very surface of, the works of Christ. Said Augustine: “The works of Christ are themselves words of The Word.” The Bible is through the Spirit the revelation of Jesus Christ; and thus again He is “made to us wisdom” on the great topics of the inward moral schism, its meaning and origin and remedy. At His cross is the only definite word anywhere found about the pardon of guilt. And all the “wisdom” is one into which they have lived their way. It is verified knowledge; it is the knowledge of Life. God and Conscience and Sin—they understand these by the teaching of the Spirit of Christ. The way of peace with God, they know it, they have availed themselves of it—it is Christ’s work. Peace within themselves instead of the old moral discord—they have learned the secret of that also. And everything which is really wisdom, before God, and in the presence of eternity, they are being taught by the Spirit of Christ. The Revealer is Christ, the great Prophet of God.

II. This passes over into Righteousness and Sanctification.—We should once more have expected “power” to be linked with “wisdom.” But no, something better—“righteousness.”

1. These to be taken together.—They go together, in fact, as closely as in the grammar of the text. To a heart which learns Paul’s dialect they become almost a familiar two-worded unit of his customary thinking, as they are used in the vocabulary of Paul. Righteousness and Sanctification cover the whole career of the Christian life from pardon to glory. They are one work; one salvation; one glorious life. [Rom_8:30, “them He glorified,” began to be true from the moment of “them He justified.”] Not the same thing: the one the first step; the other the whole subsequent course. [In the illustrative language of Psa_40:2, the Righteousness is located at the point where the foot is first set firmly upon the rocky brink of the “horrible pit”; Sanctification is the progressive departure farther and farther from the pit, with “goings” which are more and more “established.”] The one the work of pardoning, the other of the purifying, grace of God; in modern phraseology, blessings respectively objective and subjective; in old theological language, relative and real; imputed, imparted. The one restores His favour, the other His image. Apart from all technical phraseology, the fashion of which may change from teacher to teacher, from Church to Church, from century to century, the distinction is a real one and an inevitable one. The righteousness is the result of an act of pardon; the sanctification is the result of a process. It is one thing, and a simple one, to “justify” a man from his past debts; it is another and a longer, greater matter to cure him of thriftless or extravagant habits; yet both combine, and are needed, for complete help for the debtor. Something must be done for men, very much in men, if the work of redemption is to be accomplished. [The “Jews” were not only delivered from their captivity in Babylon; they were cured by it of the love of idolatry which had brought the captivity upon them. In the unvarying symbolism of Scripture the “blood” deals with guilt, the “water” with impurity. The “water and the blood” are the credentials of a complete Saviour (1Jn_5:8).] A man who is “safe” in regard to the guilt of the past is “saved,” but in a very elementary sense only. That does but clear the way for a “salvation” which is larger, and complete: “Sanctification.” The man who is forgiven must go on to be holy.

2. Christ is our sanctification.—Not at all as though there were in the Gospel any vicarious holiness belonging to His work, such as will excuse the man who believes in Christ from seeking and working out a very real personal holiness. There was truth in the out-of-fashion and discredited phrase “Imputed Righteousness” (meaning “imputed holiness”). But it was only true to those who are aiming at realising their holiest in practice and attainment. Imperfection will cling where it brings no guilt. In Christ they are judged “holy” by a law which for His sake is interpreted in evangelical grace, and is reckoned as fulfilled by love. But God desires to have His “righteous” ones really “sanctified.” And the grace which sanctifies is secured for them, as pardon was, by the work of Christ. With Him was freely given the Spirit who makes them holy—Christ is the model and the means of their sanctification. It is the work of the Great Priest of the Gospel order.

III. Redemption is the crown of the work of Christ.—The word is here used in its highest and noblest sense. In a lower, narrower use it is the foundation of salvation; men could not be “saved,” if they had not been first “redeemed.” The redemption of the race is the basis and background of the salvation of the individual. But, looking forward, we see salvation fulfilled, culminating in redemption. Man is not only soul and spirit, “but body, soul, and spirit.” The body was redeemed by Christ [not Eph_5:23; but 1Co_6:20]; and as it has shared in the ruin and curse wrought by sin, so it will share in the deliverance wrought by Christ. [It is part of the “creature,” Rom_8:21-22.] It must wait longest for, and must receive latest of all, its part in the redemption of our complete manhood by Christ; but He wore it Himself, and still wears it, in a glory which is an earnest and pledge to the very body that He will not reckon His redemption complete until His people stand by His side before His Father [“Behold, I and children which God hath given Me” Isa_8:18; Heb_2:13], the last trace of the fell work of sin gone from every part, even the humblest, of their nature. The body will rise because He has risen, body and all. It will appear in glory, as, and because, He appears in glory. The vista of New Testament revelation leads up to a House in whose courts there move about, as if “to the manner born” [they have been “new-born” to it], a glorious Family, every one of whom is “conformed to the image of God’s Son,” “the firstborn amongst many brethren” (Rom_8:29). He is the pattern whose reproduction in them accounts for the strong “family-likeness” in them all. This is their “good” (Rom_8:28), up to which “all things have been working together”—Grace, Providence, even History in its worldwide, age-long course. The “redemption of the body” (Rom_8:23) will be the latest element in a redemptive process which at last puts every man who is in the new Race, whose Head is the Second Adam, beyond the reach of sin or death. As an Idea in the mind and heart of God—to speak humanly—the beginning of this whole Redemption is dateless, “before the world was.” Historically, its unfolding anticipated Calvary. But in a true sense the initial moment was when He cried in death, “It is finished!” And its completion will date from the moment when the Divine-human Redeemer looks for the first time upon the gathered, completed company of His own, and sees His own victory over Sin and its work, Death, realised in His people. The King and Deliverer will then cry once more, “Finished!” His people will say, “Thou art made unto us Redemption!”

HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS

1Co_1:20-21. Human Wisdom.

I. Challenged,

II. Confounded,

III. Superseded, by the Gospel.—[J. L.]

1Co_1:20. “Where,” indeed!

I. What have they not attempted?

II. What have they not promised?

III. What have they achieved?

IV. How are they brought to nought?—[J. L.]

1Co_1:30. Christ is made [cf. Joh_1:14 (another tense of same verb), the great primal wonder, of which this is one purpose and outcome. See Appended Note] Wisdom to us.

The true culture is the conforming of our manhood to the ideal in Christ. “Is it not a fact that a certain superficial refinement of manners, some acquaintance with the forms of good society, a little stock of ordinary phrases, and the fact of having seen or heard something of the best known products of literature, together with a fashionable style of dress, is, in the opinion of most, a sufficient claim to the possession of culture.… Only look at the simple-minded man, not possessing much outward culture, but animated by the Spirit of Christ, and by sound piety; what a sense of moral fitness, what correct tact, what sound judgment, especially as to the ethical value of any person or action, do we find gradually produced in him. In such a case the educating influence of Christianity is frequently shown in a most surprising way.” (Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, pp. 40, 43.)

1Co_1:30. Christ is made unto us Redemption.

I. By an atoning sacrifice (Gal_3:13).

II. By infusing the spirit of a new life.

III. By abolishing death as the penalty of sin. There was evidently death, violent death, in the pre-Adamic geological ages. But the “violent” death may have been painless, for aught we know. If not, it may have been that there would have been no death for the crown of creation, man. Or if there had been death for him, it would have been only dissolution, natural, happy. Sin, indeed, turned dying into Death. It is Death because it is not only the penalty of sin, but it is the physical anticipation and adumbration of the true Death—“death that is death indeed”—the abandonment of the soul by God Who is its Life. Sin links fear with the thought of death, for to an innocent moral nature, one might as reasonably hope as fear, before the presence of the unknown future. Now in Christ death is once more only dying; decease, departure, falling asleep. The one thing which now the dying of a Christian is never called is “death.” He hath abolished death; it practically counts for nothing to His people. He has abolished its bondage of fear (Heb_2:15).

1Co_1:30. Christ made to us … Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption.

Stanley brings out three pairs of correlatives.

I. Subjective.

1. Righteousness.

2. Holiness.

3. Freedom.

II. Objective.

1. Acquittal.

2. Consecration.

3. Deliverance.

APPENDED NOTES

1Co_1:21. Seeking God.—To be blessed by God, to know Him, and what He is, that is the battle of Jacob’s soul from sunset till the dawn of day. And this is our struggle—the struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer us, what is the cry that comes from the most real part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that in his first communion with God—preservation, safety. Is it even this, to be forgiven our sins? Jacob bad a sin to be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about it. Or is it this, “Hallowed be Thy name”? No! Out of our frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier hours of our religion may be this, “Save my soul”; but in the most unearthly moments it is this, “Tell me Thy Name.” We move through a world of mystery; and the deepest question is, “What is the being that is ever near, sometimes felt, never seen? That which has haunted us from childhood, with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realised? That which sweeps through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness? That which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain? That which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness, and conceptions of superhuman excellence. Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He? Those anticipations of Immortality and God, what are they? Are they the mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing through the vast void of Nothingness? Or shall I still call them God, Father, Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy Name, thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest life.”—F. W. Robertson, “Sermons,” i. 45, 46, “Jacob’s Wrestling.” Cf. “In Memoriam,” cxxiv., “The heart’s refusal of Atheism.”

1Co_1:21. The Foolishness of the Preaching.—If Christianity had been an “idyll” or a “pastoral,” the product of the simple peasant life and of the bright sky of Galilee, there is no reason why it should not have attracted a momentary interest in literary circles, although it certainly would have escaped from any more serious trial at the hands of statesmen than an unaffected indifference to its popularity. But what was the Gospel, as it met the eye and fell upon the ear of Roman Paganism? 1Co_1:23; 1Co_2:2. Here was a truth inextricably linked with other truths equally “foolish” in the apprehension of Pagan intellect, equally condemnatory of the moral degradation of Pagan life. In the preaching of the Apostles, Jesus Crucified confronted the intellectual cynicism, the social selfishness, and the sensualist degradation of the Pagan world. To its intellect He said, “I am the Truth”; He bade its proud self-confidence bow before His intellectual Royalty. To its selfish, heartless society, careful only for bread and amusement, careless of the agonies which gave interest to the amphitheatre, He said, “A new commandment,” etc. (Joh_13:34). Disinterested love of slaves, of barbarians, of political enemies, of social rivals, love of man as man, was to be a test of true discipleship. And to the sensuality, so gross, and yet often so polished, which was the very law of individual Pagan life, He said, “If any man will come after Me,” etc. (Mat_16:24); “If thine eye offend thee,” etc. (Mat_18:9). Sensuality was to be dethroned, not by the negative action of a prudential abstinence from indulgence, but by the strong positive force of self-mortification. Was such a doctrine likely, of its own weight and without any assistance from on high, to win its way to acceptance? Is it not certain that debased souls are so far from aspiring naturally toward that which is holy, elevated, and pure, that they feel toward it only hatred and repulsion? Certainly, Rome was unsatisfied with her old national idolatries; but if she turned her eyes toward the East, it was not to welcome the religion of Jesus, but the impure rites of Isis and Serapis, of Mithra and Astarte. The Gospel came to her unbidden, in obedience to no assignable attraction in Roman society, but simply in virtue of its own expansive, world-entrancing force. Certainly, Christianity answered to the moral wants of the world, as it really answers at this moment to the true moral wants of all human beings, however unbelieving or immoral they may be. The question is, whether the world so clearly recognised its real wants as forthwith to embrace Christianity? The Physician was there; but did the patient know the nature of his own malady sufficiently well not to view the presence of the Physician as an intrusion? Was it likely that the old Roman society, with its intellectual pride, its social heartlessness, and its unbounded personal self-indulgence, should be enthusiastically in love with a religion which made intellectual submission, social unselfishness, and personal mortification, its very fundamental laws? The history of the three first centuries is the answer to that question. The kingdom of God was no sooner set up … than it found itself surrounded by all that combines to make the progress of a doctrine or of a system impossible. The thinkers were opposed to it; they denounced it as a dream of folly. [He quotes Tacit., Ann., XV. 44, “Exitiabilis superstitio”; Suetonius, Nero, xvi., “Superstitio nova et malefica”; Celsus’ comparison of the worship of Christ with the Egyptian worship of cats, crocodiles, etc.] The habits and passions of the people were opposed to it; it threatened somewhat rudely to interfere with them. There were venerable institutions, coming down from a distant antiquity, and gathering round them the stable and thoughtful elements of society; these were opposed to it, as to an audacious innovation, as well as from an instinctive perception that it might modify or destroy themselves. National feeling was opposed to it; it flattered no national self-love; it was to be the home of human kind; it was to embrace the world; and as yet the nation was the highest conception of associated life to which humanity had reached. Nay, religious feeling itself was opposed to it; for religious feeling had been enslaved by ancient falsehoods. There were worships, priesthoods, beliefs, in long-established possession; and they were not likely to yield without a struggle … It was a time when the whole administrative power of the empire was steadily concentrated upon the extinction of the Name of Christ What were then, to a human eye, the prospects of the Kingdom of God? It had no allies, like the sword of the Mohammedan, or like the congenial mysticism which welcomed the Buddhist, or like the politicians who strove to uphold the falling Paganism of Rome. It found no countenance even in the Stoic moralists; they were indeed amongst its fiercest enemies. [In foot-note he adds, “Who can marvel at its instinctive hatred of a religion, which proclaimed a higher code of Ethics than its own, and which, moreover, possessed the secret of teaching that code practically to all classes of mankind? (See next Appended Note, a.)] If … it ever was identified by Pagan opinion with the cœtus illioiti, the collegia illicita, with the moral clubs of the imperial epoch, this would only have rendered it more than ever an object of suspicion to the government. Between the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was a deadly feud.”—Liddon, “Bampton Lectures,” III. iii. 3 (β).

a. Appended Note to above: “Most men, being incapable of understanding logical arguments concerning truth, need instruction through parables; thus those who are called Christians derive their faith from the parables of their Master. They sometimes act, however, like those who follow true philosophy. There are some among them who, in their zeal to control themselves, and to live honourably, have succeeded in becoming in nothing inferior to true philosophers.”—Galen (the physician); from a lost work on Plato. Quoted in Luthardt.

1Co_1:23. The Cross and its Victory.—To the ancient world the cross was the symbol of shame; to us it is our joy, our comfort, and our boast. There is nothing which can possibly be more opposed to all our natural ideas than the cross. We can understand a God of majesty; we can comprehend a manifestation of God in the great interests of humanity; but nothing could be more directly opposed to our every notion than that the death on the cross should be His supreme manifestation. “To the Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness” (1Co_1:23). And so it is still. And yet it was just the preaching of the Cross that conquered the world. In proportion as concessions are made to the repugnance of the natural reason to the cross is Christianity weakened and its efficacy lessened. It is only the Christianity of the cross which is the victory over the world. And it has conquered. A few years since a drawing representing the Crucified was found upon the walls of the ancient palace of the Cæsars in Rome. The rude sketch speaks to us from the midst of the times of the struggle between Christianity and heathenism, and is a memorial of the manner in which the minds of men were then stirred. Some heathen servant of the emperor is taunting his Christian fellow-servant with this contemptuous sign. The relic belongs to about the year 200, and is by far the most ancient crucifix we know of. But this … is an ironical one. It is a caricature of Christ, before which a Christian stands worshipping, and it bears the inscription, “Alexamenos”—the name of the derided Christian—“worshipping his God.” We see that the Crucified Saviour and the preaching of the cross were the scorn of the world; and yet this conquered the world. In the great struggle between heathenism and Christianity the cross was the sign of victory. Whether the story is true or not that Constantine, before his decisive battle with Maxentius, saw in the clouds of heaven the appearance of a cross, with the inscription, “By this shalt thou conquer,” even if it is a fiction, it is yet truth in the form of fiction, for the cross was the victorious power, and such it will remain. If Christianity is to conquer the world, it will only do so as the preaching of the Cross, and not by concessions to the natural reason. It is contrary to all natural logic that God should humble Himself to such an extremity. That death upon the tree of shame should be His supreme revelation is contrary to all the logic of the natural reason. But it is the logic of love; and love can hold its own against the logic of the mere understanding, for it has on its side the higher logic of truth.—Luthardt, “Saving Truths,” 136–8.

[The caricature referred to, known as the Graffito, was on the plaster of the wall of one of the guard-rooms of the Pretorians, the body-guard, the household troops, of the Emperor, in the ruins of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine. The head of the Crucified One is probably that of an ass. (It was a common popular slander that the Christians worshipped an ass.) The worshipper is most likely a Pretorian, like the draughtsman of the caricature. A readily accessible engraving and description of the Graffito may be found in “Italian Pictures” (p. 55), Religious Tract Society, Pen-and-Pencil Series.]

1Co_1:23. The Victory of the Cross.—Everything seemed to conspire to render its victory utterly impossible. Its origin was against it; it seemed but a Jewish sect. Its advocates and followers had nothing attractive about them, and belonged for the most part to the lower and uneducated classes. Its doctrine was a “stumbling block”; it appeared a most vexatious “foolishness.” Its reverence for God, too, was suspected, for the Christians, using no images of the gods, were taken for atheists. The worst and most immoral things were said of its mysterious rites. Public opinion was prejudiced against them, philosophy assailed Christianity with intellectual weapons, whilst the authorities opposed it with brute force. And yet it triumphed. So early as the reign of Nero it was, as Tacitus indignantly asserts, very widely diffused. (Multitudo ingens, Ann., xv. 44.) Nor did it avail to arrest its progress, that Nero, in order to divert from himself the guilt of the great conflagration of Rome, executed vast numbers of Christians; not so much, as Tacitus says, because they were guilty of this crime, as because they were hated by the whole human race. (Tac., ut supra.) Nevertheless, Christianity continued to spread. An interesting letter of the younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia, to his friend the Emperor Trajan, written about seventy years after the death of Christ, is still extant, distinctly pourtraying the state of the Christian cause at that time in the places which had been the scenes of St. Paul’s and St. John’s ministries. “This superstition,” writes Pliny (Epp. v. 97), “has spread on all sides, in towns, in villages, and in the country; the temples of our gods stand deserted, and sacrifices have now for a long time ceased to be offered. I arrested a few girls called deaconesses, and put them to the torture, but discovered nothing besides excessive and pernicious superstition.” … And a century later, Tertullian, in his Apology (c. 37), could say to the heathen, “We are but of yesterday, and yet we have taken possession of your whole country—towns, islands, the camp, the palace, the senate, the forum; we have left you only the temples!” Nor could the great persecutions—of which ten may be enumerated—ever hanging over the Christians arrest the triumphs of Christianity. No age, no sex, was spared; all the strength of the empire was put into requisition; certain of the most energetic of the emperors, such as Decius and Diocletian, considered it their special duty to root out Christianity from the world, because the very existence of the Roman Empire depended upon its extirpation. But the arm of the executioner failed before the fidelity of the Christians. Diocletian was obliged to give up his work; he retired from the stage, but Christianity remained, and in the person of Constantine ascended the imperial throne, and has since governed, even externally, the Roman world.—Luthardt, “Fundamental Truths,” 267–9.

1Co_1:23. The Victory of the Cross over Heathenism.—“As Heine puts it, while the gods of Greece were assembled at the feast of the immortals, and Hebe tripped round with her goblets of pleasantest nectar, and infinite laughter rang round the happy banqueting board, and the feast was at its fullest, the music at its sweetest, suddenly there came gasping towards them a pale Jew, dripping with blood; a crown of thorns on His head, bearing a great cross of wood on His shoulder; and He cast the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden goblets trembled and fell, and the gods grew dumb and pale, and ever paler, till they melted in utter mist.”—From “A Lay Sermon” by Gerald Massey.

1Co_1:30. Christ … Wisdom to us.—“Verse 30, viewed apart from its connection, is a great text, and great in the greatness of its mystery. Became, not was made. This verb denotes a transition from one state or mode of subsistence to another, e.g. ‘the Word became flesh,’ i.e. being God, the Word passed into a mode of subsistence in which He was man as well as God. Similarly we are said (2Co_5:21) to ‘become the righteousness of God in Christ,’ i.e. to pass from our low estate of sinful humiliation to the high level of God’s perfect righteousness. Thus, according to 1Co_1:30, the Son of God, when He entered into human nature, entered also into the Divine scheme of wisdom, and translated it into life. For unquestionably the substance of that scheme of wisdom was the union of the two natures in the Person of God’s Son, together with the manifold benefits flowing from that union. Of this hidden counsel of redemption, which was willed and planned before Creation itself, Jesus Christ was in His Person the embodiment, and in all that He wrought and suffered, the historical manifestation and pleroma. Thus He became wisdom from God; not ‘became from God’; the order of the Greek is against that view. Again, as the Father in heaven was the first cause or fountain of this wisdom, … so Christ on earth may be regarded in His work as a cistern gradually filling with this wisdom, and after His ascension overflowing with it from heaven into the larger cistern of His Church below. This overflow commenced on the Day of Pentecost. Thus He became wisdom to us from God, i.e. wisdom from God for us to receive. But this abstract counsel or wisdom of the Father, which was planned by Him before the ages were made, and which in the sphere of time became concrete in the Incarnate Son, what was it? What it more precisely was, both in its embodiment in Christ and in its relation to us men, is further defined in three heads. The eternal purpose is drawn out of its secret depths, so to speak, like a telescope of three lenses, in three evolutions, each in its own place:

1. Righteousness;

2. Sanctification;

3. Redemption.

1. Righteousness of God the Father imputed, not the righteousness of Christ, for that is nowhere in the New Testament said to be imputed. It is the proper fruit of Christ’s obedience unto death, and the imputatation of it to believers on earth approaches by degrees to assimilation precisely as progress is made in the inner life of sanctification. Indeed, the “both and” indicates this mutual correlation. Of the absolute Righteousness God is the giver because of Christ’s meritorious Passion, and in it the saints, after the Resurrection, are set indefectible. The last link in this threefold chain of wisdom is redemption, i.e. of the body together with the soul and spirit in the resurrection of the saints at the Parousia. In brief, the whole means this: God—He alone is the first and efficient cause of your union and fellowship with Him who became flesh and translated into life and made actual in time the ideal plan of eternity, mediating for us the threefold benefit of that Divine counsel, righteousness imputed, holiness imparted, redemption consummated.—Evans, “Speaker.”

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

1 Corinthians

PERISHING OR BEING SAVED

1Co 1:18.

The starting-point of my remarks is the observation that a slight variation of rendering, which will be found in the Revised Version, brings out the true meaning of these words. Instead of reading ‘them that perish’ and ‘us which are saved,’ we ought to read ‘them that are perishing,’ and ‘us which are being saved.’ That is to say, the Apostle represents the two contrasted conditions, not so much as fixed states, either present or future, but rather as processes which are going on, and are manifestly, in the present, incomplete. That opens some very solemn and intensely practical considerations.

Then I may further note that this antithesis includes the whole of the persons to whom the Gospel is preached. In one or other of these two classes they all stand. Further, we have to observe that the consideration which determines the class to which men belong, is the attitude which they respectively take to the preaching of the Cross. If it be, and because it is, ‘foolishness’ to some, they belong to the catalogue of the perishing. If it be, and because it is, ‘the power of God’ to others, they belong to the class of those who are in process of being saved.

So, then, we have the ground cleared for two or three very simple, but, as it seems to me, very important thoughts.

I. I desire, first, to look at the two contrasted conditions, ‘perishing’ and ‘being saved.’

Now we shall best, I think, understand the force of the darker of these two terms if we first ask what is the force of the brighter and more radiant. If we understand what the Apostle means by ‘saving’ and ‘salvation’ we shall understand also what he means by ‘perishing.’

If, then, we turn for a moment to Scripture analogy and teaching, we find that that threadbare word ‘salvation,’ which we all take it for granted that we understand, and which, like a well-worn coin, has been so passed from hand to hand that it scarcely remains legible-that well-worn word ‘salvation’ starts from a double metaphorical meaning. It means either-and is used for both-being healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in the Gospel narratives of our Lord’s miracles, and it involves the metaphor of a sick man and his cure; in the other it involves the metaphor of a man in peril and his deliverance and security. The negative side, then, of the Gospel idea of salvation is the making whole from a disease, and the making safe from a danger. Negatively, it is the removal from each of us of the one sickness, which is sin; and the one danger, which is the reaping of the fruits and consequences of sin, in their variety as guilt, remorse, habit, and slavery under it, perverted relation to God, a fearful apprehension of penal consequences here, and, if there be a hereafter, there, too. The sickness of soul and the perils that threaten life, flow from the central fact of sin, and salvation consists, negatively, in the sweeping away of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is healed, and the man in peril is set in safety.

But, besides that, there is a great deal more. The cure is incomplete till the full tide of health follows convalescence. When God saves, He does not only bar up the iron gate through which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He flings wide the golden gate through which the glad troops of blessings and of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys and with all beauties. So the positive side of salvation is the investiture of the saved man with throbbing health through all his veins, and the strength that comes from a divine life. It is the bestowal upon the delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for duty. All good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark den, such is the Christian conception of salvation. It is much that the negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison with the rich fulness of positive endowments, of happiness, and of holiness which make an integral part of the salvation of God.

This, then, being the one side, what about the other? If this be salvation, its precise opposite is the Scriptural idea of ‘perishing.’ Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire failure to be what God meant a man to be. That is in it, and no contortions of arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance out of the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness, perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into fragments.

Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so dreadful as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the salvation, which consists in the healing from sin and the deliverance from danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and beautiful, is the Christian idea of the alternative ‘perishing.’ Then it means the disease running its course. It means the dangers laying hold of the man in peril. It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness. It does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious existence, any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious existence. But he who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he knows the process while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore, we have to think of the gradual fading away from consciousness, and dying out of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious, of the gradual increase of distance from Him, union with whom is the condition of true life, of the gradual sinking into the pit of utter ruin, of the gradual increase of that awful death in life and life in death in which living consciousness makes the conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost to himself.

Brethren, it is no part of my business to enlarge upon such awful thoughts, but the brighter the light of salvation, the darker the eclipse of ruin which rings it round. This, then, is the first contrast.

II. Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the alternative.

All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of continuance. Life is a process, and every part of a spiritual being is in living motion and continuous action in a given direction. So the law for the world, and for every man in it, in all regions of his life, quite as much as in the religious, is ‘To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.’

Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two conditions become more and more confirmed, consolidated, and complete. Salvation is a progressive fact. In the New Testament we have that great idea looked at from three points of view. Sometimes it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past in the case of every believing soul-’Ye have been saved’ is said more than once. Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in the present-’Ye are saved’ is said more than once. And sometimes it is relegated to the future-’Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed,’ and the like. But there are a number of New Testament passages which coincide with this text in regarding salvation as, not the work of any one moment, but as a continuous operation running through life, not a point either in the past, present, or future, but a continued life. As, for instance, ‘The Lord added to the Church daily those that were being saved.’ By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified. And in a passage in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, which, in some respects, is an exact parallel to that of my text, we read of the preaching of the Gospel as being a ‘savour of Christ in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing.’

So the process of being saved is going on as long as a Christian man lives in this world; and every one who professes to be Christ’s follower ought, day by day, to be growing more and more saved, more fully filled with that Divine Spirit, more entirely the conqueror of his own lusts and passions and evil, more and more invested with all the gifts of holiness and of blessedness which Jesus Christ is ready to bestow upon him.

Ah, brethren! that notion of a progressive salvation at work in all true Christians has all but faded away out of the beliefs, as it has all but disappeared from the experience, of hosts of you that call yourselves Christ’s followers, and are not a bit further on than you were ten years ago; are no more healed of your corruptions {perhaps less so, for relapses are dangerous} than you were then-have not advanced any further into the depths of God than when you first got a glimpse of Him as loving, and your Father, in Jesus Christ-are contented to linger, like some weak band of invaders in a strange land, on the borders and coasts, instead of pressing inwards and making it all your own. Growing Christians-may I venture to say?-are not the majority of professing Christians.

And, on the other side, as certainly, there are progressive deterioration and approximation to disintegration and ruin. How many men there are listening to me now who were far nearer being delivered from their sins when they were lads than they have ever been since! How many in whom the sensibility to the message of salvation has disappeared, in whom the world has ossified their consciences and their hearts, in whom there is a more entire and unstruggling submission to low things and selfish things and worldly things and wicked things, than there used to be! I am sure that there are not a few among us now who were far better, and far happier, when they were poor and young, and could still thrill with generous emotion and tremble at the Word of God, than they are to-day. Why! there are some of you that could no more bring back your former loftier impulses, and compunction of spirit and throbs of desire towards Christ and His salvation, than you could bring back the birds’ nests or the snows of your youthful years. You are perishing, in the very process of going down and down into the dark.

Now, notice, that the Apostle treats these two classes as covering the whole ground of the hearers of the Word, and as alternatives. If not in the one class we are in the other. Ah, brethren! life is no level plane, but a steep incline, on which there is no standing still, and if you try to stand still, down you go. Either up or down must be the motion. If you are not more of a Christian than you were a year ago, you are less. If you are not more saved-for there is a degree of comparison-if you are not more saved, you are less saved.

Now, do not let that go over your head as pulpit thunder, meaning nothing. It means you, and, whether you feel or think it or not, one or other of these two solemn developments is at this moment going on in you. And that is not a thought to be put lightly on one side.

Further, note what a light such considerations as these, that salvation and perishing are vital processes-’going on all the time,’ as the Americans say-throw upon the future. Clearly the two processes are incomplete here. You get the direction of the line, but not its natural termination. And thus a heaven and a hell are demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of growing badness which we see round about us. The arc of the circle is partially swept. Are the compasses going to stop at the point where the grave comes in? By no means. Round they will go, and will complete the circle. But that is not all. The necessity for progress will persist after death; and all through the duration of immortal being, goodness, blessedness, holiness, Godlikeness, will, on the one hand, grow in brighter lustre; and on the other, alienation from God, loss of the noble elements of the nature, and all the other doleful darknesses which attend that conception of a lost man, will increase likewise. And so, two people, sitting side by side here now, may start from the same level, and by the operation of the one principle the one may rise, and rise, and rise, till he is lost in God, and so finds himself, and the other sink, and sink, and sink, into the obscurity of woe and evil that lies beneath every human life as a possibility.

III. And now, lastly, notice the determining attitude to the Cross which settles the class to which we belong.

Paul, in my text, is explaining his reason for not preaching the Gospel with what he calls ‘the words of man’s wisdom,’ and he says, in effect, ‘It would be of no use if I did, because what settles whether the Cross shall look “foolishness” to a man or not is the man’s whole moral condition, and what settles whether a man shall find it to be “the power of God” or not is whether he has passed into the region of those that are being saved.’

So there are two thoughts suggested which sound as if they were illogically combined, but which yet are both true. It is true that men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to them respectively ‘foolishness’ or ‘the power of God’; and the other thing is also true, that the Cross is to them ‘foolishness,’ or ‘the power of God’ because, respectively, they are perishing or being saved. That is not putting the cart before the horse, but both aspects of the truth are true.

If you see nothing in Jesus Christ, and His death for us all, except ‘foolishness,’ something unfit to do you any good, and unnecessary to be taken into account in your lives-oh, my friends! that is the condemnation of your eyes, and not of the thing you look at. If a man, gazing on the sun at twelve o’clock on a June day, says to me, ‘It is not bright,’ the only thing I have to say to him is, ‘Friend, you had better go to an oculist.’ And if to us the Cross is ‘foolishness,’ it is because already a process of ‘perishing’ has gone so far that it has attacked our capacity of recognising the wisdom and love of God when we see them.

But, on the other hand, if we clasp that Cross in simple trust, we find that it is the power which saves us out of all sins, sorrows, and dangers, and ‘shall save us’ at last ‘into His heavenly kingdom.’

Dear friends, that message leaves no man exactly as it found him. My words, I feel, in this sermon, have been very poor, set by the side of the greatness of the theme; but, poor as they have been, you will not be exactly the same man after them, if you have listened to them, as you were before. The difference may be very imperceptible, but it will be real. One more, almost invisible, film, over the eyeball; one more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of insensibility round heart and conscience-or else some yielding to the love; some finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening of the pressure of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the danger. The same sun hurts diseased eyes, and gladdens sound ones. The same fire melts wax and hardens clay. ‘This Child is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel.’ ‘To the one He is the savour of life unto life; to the other He is the savour of death unto death.’ Which is He, for He is one of them, to you?

Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1:18-31 Paul contrasts eloquence and human wisdom, which were highly valued by some of the Corinthians, with the foolish message of the cross—the expression of God’s wisdom. The followers of Apollos, in particular (see 1:12), were probably attracted by his rhetorical abilities and intellectual approach to ministry (see Acts 18:24-28). In contrast, Paul emphasizes that the real power lies in the simple message of the cross of Christ.

1:18 The message that God is saving the world through a condemned criminal is foolish to unbelievers, for their eyes are blinded to the truth (2 Cor 4:4). For believers, whose eyes have been opened by God, the message of the cross has the ring of truth to it, and they know its power to convict the human heart (see 1 Cor 1:23-24; Rom 1:16). Unbelievers, still in their sin, are headed for destruction, for ultimate condemnation. Believers, whose sins have been forgiven, are being saved: They are on their way to eternal life and glory.

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

1Co 1:18. Μωρία, folly) and offence. See, immediately after, its antithesis, power. There are two steps in salvation, Wisdom and Power. In the case of them that perish, when the first step is taken away, the second [also] is taken away; in the case of the blessed, the second presupposes the first.—σωζομένοις, to them, that are being saved) The Present tense is used, as in the phrase, to them that perish. He, who has begun to hear the Gospel is considered neither as lost, nor as saved, but is at the point, where the two roads meet, and now he either is perishing, or is being saved.—δύναμις, the power) and wisdom, so also, ch. 1Co 2:5.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co_1:18. Establishment of the foregoing ἵνα μὴ … Χριστοῦ. Were, namely, the doctrine of the cross, although folly to the unbelieving, not a power of God to believers, it would be impossible to speak of a ἵνα μὴ κενωθῇ of its substance, the cross of Christ, as the aim of the εὐαγγ. οὐκ ἐν σ. λ.

The ἐστί with the dative expresses the actual relation in which the λόγος stands to both; it is for them in fact (not, as might be thought, simply in their judgment) the one and the other.

τοῖς ἀπολλυμ.] to those who are incurring (eternal) ἀπώλεια. Comp 2Co_2:15; 2Co_4:3; 2Th_2:10. The present participle[216] betokens either the certainty of the future destruction (Bernhardy, p. 371), or it brings the being lost before us as a development which is already taking place in them; just as τοῖς σωζομ., those who are being saved unto Messianic bliss. From 1Co_15:2, Rom_5:9-10; Rom_8:24, al[217], also Eph_2:5-8, the former mode of conceiving it seems to be the correct one; comp 1Co_2:6. Paul designates in this way the believers and unbelievers, ἈΠῸ ΤΟῦ ΤΈΛΟΥς ΤᾺς ΠΡΟΣΗΓΟΡΊΑς ΤΙΘΕΊς, Theodoret. He has certainly (Rückert) conceived of both classes as predestinated (1Co_1:24; Rom_8:29; Rom_9:11; Rom_9:19; Rom_9:22 f.; Eph_1:4 f.; 2Th_2:13, al[219]); but this point remains here out of view.

ΜΩΡΊΑ] This doctrine is to them (to their conscious experience) an absurdity (μωρία τε καὶ ἀλογία, Plat. Epin. p. 983 E; Dem. 397, pen.). Why? see 1Co_1:22. Comp 2Co_4:3. Billroths answer is un-Pauline.

ἩΜῖΝ] is not put last out of modesty (Billroth), but because the emphasis of the contrast lies on the idea of ΤΟῖς ΣΩΖΟΜ. Comp Eur. Phoeniss. 1738. Pors.: ἐλαύνειν τὸν γέροντα μʼ ἐκ πάτρας.

δύναμις Θεοῦ] Comp on Rom_1:16. That doctrine is to them (to their conscious experience) Gods power, inasmuch, that is to say, as God works mightily in them through the saving tidings of the Crucified. The contrast is stronger than if it were σοφία Θεοῦ, and is also logically correct; for ΔΎΝΑΜΙς ΘΕΟῦ necessarily presupposes the opposite of ΜΩΡΊΑ, because the power of God brings about enlightenment, repentance, sanctification, love, peace, hope, etc. Comp Ignat. a[224] Eph. 18, where it is said of the cross, that it is to us ΣΩΤΗΡΊΑ Κ. ΖΩῊ ΑἸΏΝΙΟς.

[216] Bengels ingenious exposition: qui evangelium audire coepit, nec ut perditus nec ut salvus habetur, sed est quasi in bivio, et nunc aut perit aut salvatur, is wrecked on the word ἡμῖν, which the audire coepit does not suit.

[217] l. and others; and other passages; and other editions.

[219] l. and others; and other passages; and other editions.

[224] d refers to the note of the commentator or editor named on the particular passage.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co 1:18 . What P. asserted in 1Co 1:17 as intrinsically true, he supports by experience (1Co 1:18 ) and by Scripture (1Co 1:19 ), combining their testimony in 1Co 1:20 . ὁ λόγος γάρ , ὁ τοῦ σταύρου , “For the word, namely that of the cross”. ὁ λόγος (distinguish from the anarthrous λόγος above) takes its sense from εὐαγγελίζεσθαι (1Co 1:17 ); it is “the tale” rather than “the doctrine of the cross,” synonymous with μαρτύριον (1Co 1:6 ) and κήρυγμα (1Co 1:21 ). τοῖς μὲν ἀπολλυμένοις … τοῖς δὲ σωζομένοις , the two classes into which P. sees his hearers divide themselves (see parls.). The ptps. are strictly pr [197] not expressing certain expectation (Mr [198] ), nor fixed predestination (Bz [199] ); the rejectors and receivers of “the word” are in course of perishing and being saved respectively ( cf. 1Co 15:2 ; contrast the aor [200] of σώζω in Rom 8:24 , and the pf. in Eph 2:5 ). “In the language of the N.T. salvation is a thing of the past, a thing of the present, and a thing of the future.… The divorce of morality and religion is fostered by failing to note this, and so laying the whole stress either on the past or on the future on the first call or on the final change” (Lt [201] ). Paul paints the situation before his eyes: one set of men deride the story of the cross these are manifestly perishing; to another set the same story is “God’s power unto salvation”. The appended pers [202] pron [203] ( τ . σωζομένοις ) ἡμῖν , “to the saved, viz., ourselves,” speaks from and to experience: “You and I know that the cross is God’s saving power”. Cf. with the whole expression Rom 1:16 , also Joh 3:14-17 . The antithesis to μωρία is not, in the first instance, σοφία , but δύναμις Θεοῦ a practical vindication against false theory; saved men are the Gospel’s apology. Yet because it is δύναμις , the word of the cross is, after all, the truest σοφία (see 30, 1Co 2:6 ff.). The double ἐστὶν emphasises the actuality of the contrasted results.

[197] present tense.

[198] Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Commentary (Eng. Trans.).

[199] Beza’s Nov. Testamentum: Interpretatio et Annotationes (Cantab., 1642).

[200] aorist tense.

[201] J. B. Lightfoot’s (posthumous) Notes on Epp. of St. Paul (1895).

[202]ers. grammatical person, or personal.

[203]ron. pronoun.

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Vv. 18. “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”

The for announces the proof of the assertion (1Co 1:17): that to preach the gospel as a word of wisdom would be to destroy its very essence.

The antithesis of the words foolishness and power is regarded by Rückert and Meyer as inexact, because the opposite of foolishness is wisdom, not force. But these commentators have failed to see that the term wisdom would here have expressed too much or too little: too much for those who reject the gospel, and in whose eyes it can be nothing else than folly; too little for those who are disposed to receive it, and who need to find in it something better than a wisdom enlightening them. As sin is a fact, salvation must be laid hold of above all as a fact, not as a system. It is an act wrought by the arm of God, telling with power on the conscience and on the heart of the sinner: this alone can rescue from ruin a world which is perishing under the curse and in the corruption of sin. — The two datives: τοῖς ἀπολλυμένοις, to them that perish, and τοῖς σωζομένοις, for those who are saved, have not an exactly similar meaning; the former indicating a simple subjective appreciation, the latter including besides an effective relation, the idea of an effect produced. The participles are in the present, not as anticipating a final, eternal result (Meyer), or as containing the idea of a Divine predestination (Rückert), but as expressing two acts which are passing into fulfilment at the very time when Paul mentions them. In fact, perdition and salvation gradually come to their consummation in man simultaneously with the knowledge which he receives of the gospel.

The addition of the pronoun ἡμῖν, to us, is due to the fact that the letter is intended to be read to the believers in full assembly.

This way of treating human wisdom taken by God in the gospel is the fulfilment of threatenings already pronounced against it in the prophetic writings:

The gospel is not a Wisdom 1:18-2:5.

Such, strictly speaking, is the truth which Paul is called to expound to the Corinthians. He demonstrates it to them:

1. By the irrational character of the central fact of the gospel, the cross: 1Co 1:18-25.

2. By the mode of gaining members to, and the composition of their Church: 1Co 1:26-31.

3. By the attitude taken in the midst of them by the preacher of the gospel: 1Co 2:1-15.

2. The nature of the gospel. 1:18-3:4.

The gospel in its essence is not a wisdom, a philosophical system; it is a salvation. It is this thesis, summarily formulated in the second part of 1Co 1:17, which the apostle proceeds to develop in the following passage. We have already pointed out, p. 86, the close relation in which it stands to the question that is the subject of this part of the Epistle, that of the parties formed in the Church.

The thesis itself is treated from two points of view which complete one another: in a first passage, 1Co 1:18 to 1Co 2:5, the apostle demonstrates it directly; in the second, 1Co 2:6 to 1Co 3:4, he prudently limits its application. Undoubtedly the gospel is not essentially wisdom; but it nevertheless contains a wisdom which is unveiled to the believer in proportion as the new life is developed in him, and which is really the only true wisdom.

Frédéric Louis Godet — Commentaries on Luke, John, Romans, and 1 Corinthians — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1870s–1890s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co_1:18

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish, foolishness; but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God.

The preaching of the cross, or, the doctrine (ὁ λόγος), of the cross, that is, the doctrine of salvation through the crucifixion of the Son of God as a sacrifice for the sins of men. This doctrine, though to one class, viz., those who are lost, i.e. those certainly to perish, foolishness; yet to another class, viz., those certainly to be saved, it is the power of God. That is, it is that through which the power of God is manifested and exercised, and therefore it is divinely efficacious. All the hearers of the gospel are divided into two classes. To the one, the doctrine of salvation through a crucified Redeemer appears absurd. They are called the lost, not only because they are certainly to perish, but also because they are in a lost state while out of Christ, Joh_3:18. To the other, this doctrine is divinely efficacious in producing peace and holiness. These are called the saved, not only because they are certainly to be saved, but also because they are now in a state of salvation. Compare 2Co_2:15.

This verse contains the reason why Christ sent the apostle to preach, and why he preached the doctrine of the cross, and not human wisdom. That reason is, because the doctrine of the cross alone is effectual to salvation. This proposition he proceeds to establish by a series of arguments designed to prove that the wisdom of the world cannot save men. His first argument is derived from the express declaration of the word of God to this effect.

Charles Hodge — Commentary on Romans (1835), First Corinthians (1857), and Ephesians (1856) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The preaching of Christ crucified, or the kinds of speech which we use.

It is that wherein he declareth his marvelous power in saving his elect, which would not so evidently appear, if it hanged upon any help of man: for so man might attribute that to himself, which is proper only to the cross of Christ.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

preaching, &c.--literally, "the word," or speech as to the cross; in contrast to the "wisdom of words" (so called), Co1 1:17.

them that perish--rather, "them that are perishing," namely, by preferring human "wisdom of words" to the doctrine of the "cross of Christ." It is not the final state that is referred to; but, "them that are in the way of perishing." So also in Co2 2:15-16.

us which are saved--In the Greek the collocation is more modest, "to them that are being saved (that are in the way of salvation) as," that is, to which class we belong.

power of God--which includes in it that it is the wisdom of God" (Co1 1:24). God's powerful instrument of salvation; the highest exhibition of God's power (Rom 1:16). What seems to the world "weakness" in God's plan of salvation (Co1 1:25), and in its mode of delivery by His apostle (Co1 2:3) is really His mighty "power." What seems "foolishness" because wanting man's "wisdom of words" (Co1 1:17), is really the highest "wisdom of God" (Co1 1:24).

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Verse 18. For the preaching of the cross] Ὁ λογος γαρ ὁ του σταυρου, The doctrine of the cross; or the doctrine that is of or concerning the cross; that is, the doctrine that proclaims salvation to a lost world through the crucifixion of Christ.

Is to them that perish foolishness] There are, properly speaking, but two classes of men known where the Gospel is preached: απολλυμενοι, the unbelievers and gainsayers, who are perishing; and σοζομενοι, the obedient believers, who are in a state of salvation. To those who will continue in the first state, the preaching of salvation through the merit of a crucified Saviour is folly. To those who believe this doctrine of Christ crucified is the power of God to their salvation; it is divinely efficacious to deliver them from all the power, guilt, and pollution of sin.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

18. For the preaching of the cross, etc. In this first clause a concession is made. For as it might very readily be objected, that the gospel is commonly held in contempt, if it be presented in so bare and abject a form, Paul of his own accord concedes this, but when he adds, that it is so in the estimation of them that perish, he intimates that no regard must be paid to their judgment. For who would choose to despise the gospel at the expense of perishing? This statement, therefore, must be understood in this way: “However the preaching of the cross, as having nothing of human wisdom to recommend it to esteem, is reckoned foolishness by them that perish; in our view, notwithstanding, the wisdom of God clearly shines forth in it.” He indirectly reproves, however, the perverted judgment of the Corinthians, who, while they were, through seduction of words, too easily allured by ambitious teachers, regarded with disdain an Apostle who was endowed with the power of God for their salvation, and that simply because he devoted himself to the preaching of Christ. In what way the preaching of the cross is the power of God unto salvation, we have explained in commenting upon Romans 1:16

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

(18) For the preaching.—In the original the contrast comes out more strongly between this and the previous statement, the same phrase being repeated, thus, “For the word of the cross,” in contrast to “the wisdom of more words” above. This is the word of real power.

Them that perish.—Better, those that are perishing, and us who are being saved, the former referring to those who have not received the gospel, and the latter to those who have (2Co_2:15; 2Co_4:3).

The power of God.—The cross and all that it represents is the greatest display of the power of God (Act_8:10).

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

18–31. God’s Message not intended to flatter the pride of man

18. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God] Literally, to them that are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the (or a) power of God. The connection of this verse with the preceding is not quite clear. It may, however, be thus explained: The doctrine of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing, because they conceive of some inherent excellence in humanity, whereas the Cross proclaims and justifies God’s sentence of death against the human race. The same doctrine is the power of God to those who are in the way of salvation, because it is through faith in Christ’s Blood alone that man can be justified from sin, crucified to the old man, and united to the new man which is created in righteousness and true holiness. To preach the Gospel, then, with wisdom of words, to exalt, that is, the human element, is to take away the power of the Gospel, and to make it in reality the folly which it is deemed to be by unspiritual men. Cf. Rom_1:16; Rom_3:22; Eph_4:22-23; Col_3:9-10.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

For the preaching of the cross,.... Not of the Christian's cross, which he is to take up and bear for the sake of Christ; though this is a doctrine taught by Christ, and his apostles, and found to be true by the saints in all ages; and is what is had in great aversion and contempt, being very disagreeable to the natural man: but of the cross of Christ, the doctrine of salvation by a crucified Christ; or the doctrine of peace and reconciliation by the blood of his cross, and of righteousness, pardon, atonement, and satisfaction by the offering up of himself upon it as a sacrifice for sin, is here intended; and which

is foolishness in the esteem of many; and that because man's wisdom has no hand either in forming the scheme of it, or in the discovery of it to the sons of men; and besides, being revealed, it is very disagreeable to the carnal reason of man. This way of preaching is very impolite and unfashionable, and therefore despised; it is a doctrine which is not received by the wise and learned, but has been in all ages loaded with reproach, stigmatized either as a novel or licentious doctrine, and attended with persecution; though the only doctrine God owns for conversion, which administers comfort to distressed souls, and is food for the faith of believers; yea, it is a display of the highest wisdom; is what angels approve of, and desire to look into; is wiser than the wisdom of men; it has made foolish the wisdom of this world, and is what is only able to make a man wise unto salvation; and yet this doctrine is accounted foolish, yea foolishness itself; but to whom is it so?

to them that perish. All mankind are in a lost and perishing condition, by reason of sin, and want of righteousness. There are some who shall not perish; the Father has chose them unto salvation, the Son has redeemed them, and the Spirit sanctifies them; but there are others who do perish in their sins; wicked and ungodly men, Carried away with their own lusts and blinded by Satan, the god of this world: these are they that are lost, to whom the Gospel is hid, and who judge it foolishness; but their judgment of it is not to be regarded, being no more capable to judge of the glory and wisdom of the Gospel, than a blind man is of colours: but unto us which are saved; who are chosen in Christ unto salvation; whose persons and grace are secured in Christ, and in the everlasting covenant; for whom Christ has wrought out salvation; and to whom it is applied by the Spirit of God; and who are kept unto the full enjoyment of it by divine grace: to thest is the power of God; organically or instrumentally; it being the means of quickening them when dead in sin, of enlightening their dark minds, of unstopping their deaf ears, of softening their hard hearts, and of enemies making them friends to God, Christ, and his people: and it is likewise so declaratively, there being a wonderful display of the power of God in the ministration of it; as may be seen when observed who were the first preachers of it, men of no figure in life, of no education, illiterate mechanics, very mean and abject; into these earthen vessels were put the treasure of the Gospel, that the excellency of the power might appear to be of God, and not man; as also the doctrine they preached, a crucified Christ, disagreeable to the wisdom of men; the manner in which they spread it, not by force of arms, by carnal weapons, but spiritual ones; moreover, the opposition they met with from rabbins, philosophers, princes, kings, and emperors, and all the states and powers of the world; and yet in how short a time, maugre all opposition, did they carry the Gospel throughout the whole world, to the conversion of millions of souls, and the planting of churches everywhere; and which Gospel has continued and increased, notwithstanding the efforts of persecutors and false teachers, and all the power and artifice of men and devils; all which can be attributed to nothing else but the mighty power of God: add to this, that the Gospel is the power of God in the esteem of the saints, who know it to be so by inward experience; they have felt the power of it on their hearts; it has wrought effectually in them, and therefore they are the best judges, and are capable of giving the best account of it.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Ver. 18. To them that perish, foolishness] As it is to the Jews to this day, who rail against Christ’s person, calling him the hanged God, the woof and the warp, Lev 13:52, because these two make the figure of the cross. And being asked whether they believe to be saved by Christ’s righteousness, they answer, That every fox must pay his own skin to the flayer. The pagans also jeered at Christ and his people, as did Julian, Lucian, Porphyry, &c.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

For the word of the cross. That is, the preaching that the Son of God, both God and man, died nailed to an infamous cross, is folly, is looked upon as ridiculous and incredible, by all obstinate unbelievers that perish: but it is received as the work of God, and an effect of his divine power, by such as are saved. (Witham)

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness: I know (saith the apostle) that plain discourses about a Christ crucified are to some persons foolish things, and accounted canting; but to whom are they so? To those who, if they be not some that shall perish eternally, yet are some of those who at present are in a perishing estate; these indeed count sermons of Christ silly, foolish things.

But unto us which are saved it is the power of God; but to those who shall be eternally saved, and are at present in the true road to eternal life and salvation, it is, that is, the preaching of the gospel is, that institution of God by which he showeth his power in the salvation of those who shall be saved. The apostle saith the same, Rom 1:16.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

2. He abases all beneath the supremacy of the cross, 18-31.

18. That perish—That are perishing.

Foolishness—The precise opposite of sophia.

Are saved—Are being saved. Note Act_2:47.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Vers. 18-25. The nature of true Christian preaching.

For the preaching of the cross; rather, the word of the cross. To them that are perishing; rather, to the perishing; to all those who are now walking in the paths that lead to destruction. (2Co_2:15) To them it was foolishness, because it requires spiritual discernment; (1Co_2:14) and, on the other hand, human wisdom is foolishness with God. (1Co_3:19) Foolishness. It shows the heroic character of the faith of St. Paul that he deliberately preached the doctrine of the cross because he felt that therein lay the conversion and salvation of the world, although he was well aware that he could preach no truth so certain at first to revolt the unregenerate hearts of his hearers. To the Jews "the cross" was the tree of shame and horror; and a crucified person was "accursed of God" (Deu_21:23; Gal_3:13) To the Greeks the cross was the gibbet of a slave"s infamy and a murderer"s punishment. There was not a single association connected with it except those of shame and agony. The thought of "a crucified Messiah" seemed to the Jews a revolting folly; the worship of a crucified malefactor seemed to the Greeks "an execrable superstition" (Tacitus, "Ann.," 15:44; Pliny, "Epp." 10:97); yet so little did St. Paul seek for popularity or immediate success, that this was the very doctrine which he put in the forefront, even at a city so refined and so voluptuous as Corinth. And the result proved his inspired wisdom. That very cross became the recognized badge of Christianity, and when three centuries had elapsed it was woven in gold upon the banners and set in jewels on the diadems of the Roman empire. For had not Christ prophesied, And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me"? Unto us which are being saved; who are on the way of salvation. The same present participle is used in Luk_13:23; Acts 2Co_2:15; Rev_21:24. It is the power of God. Because the cross is at the heart of that gospel which is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth", (Rom_1:16 Rom_8:3) though many were tempted to be ashamed of it. It could never be a carnal weapon of warfare, and yet was mighty for every purpose. (2Co_10:4, 2Co_10:5)

Vers. 18, 19.

Two classes of gospel hearers.

the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent." Instead of the "preaching of the cross," the New Version reads, the "word of the cross," and the word of the cross stands in contrast to the word of worldly wisdom. How great is the contrast! We have here two classes of gospel bearers.

I The one is gradually PERISHING, the other is gradually BEING SAVED. The perishing and the saving are gradual.

1. There is a class in every congregation, perhaps, gradually perishing. They are gradually losing moral sensibility contracting fresh guilt, etc. They are not damned at once.

2. There is a class in every congregation, perhaps, gradually being saved. Salvation is not an instantaneous thing, as some suppose.

II To the one class the gospel is FOOLISHNESS, to the other the POWER OF GOD.

1. It is "foolishness to them that are perishing, because it has no meaning, no reality.

2. It is a Divine "power" to them that are being saved. Enlightening, renovating, purifying, ennobling. The power of God stands in contrast with mere philosophy and eloquence.

Vers. 18-31.

How St. Paul regarded the preaching of the gospel.

By an easy movement he advances to the gospel, to the mode of preaching it as essential to its Divine success, and thus reaches the climax of his reasoning in the first chapter. Other functions of his apostleship will come hereafter into view the resolute disciplinarian, the firm, administrator, the tender but unyielding executive of the Head of the Church. At present, however, one thing absorbs him, namely, the Divine institution of preaching. What is his foremost relation to these Corinthians? It is that of a preacher of Christ"s gospel. And how had he preached it? "Not with wisdom of words not as a speculative thinker, not as a Greek rhetorician, not in the spirit of worldly eloquence the cross of Christ should be made of none effect." Two things are prominently set forth the gospel and its manner of presentation; and Christ is in each of them, and in each of them alike, so that not only the substance of the gospel, but the mode of its exhibition, must conform to his sovereignty as the Head of the Church. All preaching of the gospel is not gospel preaching. Looking at the character in the light St. Paul viewed it, the preacher was an original creation of Christ, a new force ordained and anointed of him, and introduced by him for the proclamation of the gospel. It dated no further back than Pentecost; it was of universal adaptation; it was to command all languages, and speak to the simplest instincts, not of men, but of man as man; and this original creation, this new force, was to continue through all time, and never surrender its rights and prerogatives to any successor. And the spirit and matter of fulfilling this grand office were thoroughly unworldly, so much so, indeed, that, it would strike the Greek as "foolishness," and prove to the Jew "a stumbling block." But in contrast with the Greek and his search after wisdom, and with the Jew in his love of national signs as the elect race of Jehovah, Christ was preached as "the power of God and the wisdom of God." The word "power" is not used except in connection with the preaching of "Christ crucified," and its value in the argument is assured by its specialty of application. All the aid of contrast and comparison is given to this one word. Power, God"s power, is the designation of preaching Christ crucified. Over against it are put "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble," and the array of dissimilarity is lengthened out by "foolish things," "weak things," "base things," and "things despised." But what bearing has this condensed energy of a single idea and its rapid accumulation of phraseological forms on the partisanship of these Corinthians? Has not the apostle wandered from the main idea of the chapter the "contentions among you"? Nay, this very partisanship is the exact opposite of Paul, Peter, Apollos, in preaching the gospel, and they can never consent to this abuse of their position. Nay, further, it is in downright antagonism to "Christ crucified." There is no "power" in it, no "wisdom." It is the idolatry of the senses. It is the intellect of the senses repeating the folly of Greek and Jew in another but equally fatal shape. It is mere seeking to find themselves and their glory in man. Directly opposite to this, St. Paul argues, we preach "Christ crucified," so that "no flesh should glory in his presence." A great lesson it is in the true spirituality of Christianity as the only strength and safeguard of the Church. If Christ is "made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption;" if Christ become "the power of God" to our hearts in this fourfold form of the "riches of grace;" the root of all worldliness is destroyed, partisanship is at an end, because self-seeking is ended, and henceforth that Scripture has a very real import to us, "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." A man may admire others for their own sakes, and this admiration may be very helpful. To admire others because our image is projected upon them can only augment our own weakness. Our praise in such cases is but the echo of our self admiration, and echoes are dying sounds. L.

The doctrine of the cross.

There is a holy zeal of indignation in the spirit animating this passage. Paul, the rabbinical scholar, not untinctured with Hellenic culture, must have felt it hard that the life he had voluntarily adopted often brought him into disrepute even amongst his intellectual inferiors. But he had chosen deliberately and in the sight of God, and no power on earth could make him swerve from his course. His own mind was satisfied that the gospel could do for man what no other power could effect, and his daily observation convinced him that in this judgment he was right. He could afford, then, to endure the scorn of men, for the doctrine he was promulgating was attested as the power of God.

I THE SUBSTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE, OR WORD, OF THE CROSS.

1. The cross had to Paul no merely material and superstitious meaning. In after ages men heard much of "the true cross," and even now relics (supposed) of the instrument of our Saviour"s sufferings are treasured and revered. The cross may be reproduced in shape, in ornament, in architecture, in posture, and there may all the time be no spiritual understanding of the cross.

2. Nor did a merely sentimental meaning attach itself in Paul"s mind to the cross. Suffering, and especially the suffering of innocence, awakens sympathy, and people talk about the cross they carry, with no other apprehension of the meaning of the phrase.

3. But it was a symbol of Christ"s sacrifice. Jesus bare the cress before he set out for Calvary; its shadow had been for years upon his soul. In his death upon the cross he bore our sins, and secured that his people should with him be crucified unto the world. Thus the tree of death became the sign of redemption and the law of life.

II THE OFFENCE OF THE DOCTRINE, OR WORD, OF THE CROSS.

1. In itself. The cross was associated in men"s minds with slavery, with guilt and crime, with suffering, with shame, with reviling, and with death.

2. In its position in the Christian scheme. To hope to convert the world by preaching seemed to many the vainest folly; by preaching a person, ridiculous; by preaching a person judicially put to death, insanity; by preaching one crucified, a moral obliquity and infamy.

3. There was a special reason why the Jews should resent this doctrine. They cherished a carnal love of splendour and power of a manifest and impressive kind, and the word of the cross outraged their sentiments. They looked for a temporal deliverer in the Messiah, and this expectation was disappointed in the gospel of the Crucified.

4. There was a special reason why the Gentiles, especially those of education and philosophical tastes, should take offence at the word of the cross. They disdained the barbarian and despised the Jew, and they contemned the form in which Christianity was proclaimed. They loved health, beauty and power, and had no sympathy with a religion which gloried in the Crucified, and appealed to the sinful and the wretched. Their taste for speculation and for novelty was not gratified by Christian doctrine, and the cross would fit into none of their schemes of the universe.

III THE POWER OF THE DOCTRINE, OR WORD, OF THE CROSS.

1. The source of this power. It is Divine. The word of the cross expresses the Divine mind, shows God"s estimate of human sin, exhibits the Divine righteousness, reveals the Divine love, and does all this on a human platform, so that we are enabled to appreciate the mystery of heavenly counsels.

2. The sphere of this power. Unbelievers cannot recognize it; they cannot but regard it as folly, for they are perishing in the sin from which it might deliver them. But all who are "in course of salvation" are living witnesses to the efficacy of the gospel. In a free moral nature, truth and love must be received in order that they may operate.

3. The proofs of this power. Compare it with any other power, and its superiority is manifest. What else can awaken the selfish, the sensual, and the obdurate to a sense of sin; can impel the low minded and earthly to the pursuit of holiness; can guide and graciously constrain to a life of consecrated service; can enter a corrupt society as leaven, and can purify it as salt? T.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

To them that perish - By obstinately rejecting the only name whereby they can be saved. But to us who are saved - Now saved from our sins, and in the way to everlasting salvation, it is the great instrument of the power of God.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

saved

(See Scofield "Rom 1:16")

The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Observe here, 1. The character and description given of the preaching of the gospel: it is called the preaching of the cross, that is, of a crucified Saviour; it represents him who died upon the cross as the proper object of our faith and hope, of our affiance and trust.

Observe, 2. The low and mean esteem which the philosphers and wise men among the heathens had of the doctrine of the cross, and of the preaching of the gospel; they esteemed it foolishness: The preaching of the cross is, to them that perish, foolishness.

So esteemed, 1. In regard of the subject of it; it is the doctrine of the cross, that is, of a crucified and despised Saviour; it accquaints us, that the eternal God, in the fulness of time, became a mortal man; that life became subject to death, and blessing subject to a curse; all which are such appearing contradictions, that natural reason is very prone to scorn and deride them.

2. The wisdom of the world, or the wise men among the Gentiles, did esteem the preaching of the gospel foolishness, in regard of the manner of it; because the gospel doth nakedly and barely propound some doctrines of faith, and positively requires our assent to them from the evidence if the things themselves, and from the authority of the principal speaker, God himself.

The mysteries of the Christian religion, though not contrary to reason, yet are above our comprehension; notwithstanding which, they do not only require our assent, but also challenge the obedience and adoration of our faith.

Now the wisdom of the world is not satisfied with God’s autos efey, with God’s authority in asserting; but requires that every doctrine of faith, and every mystery of the gospel, be made so plain and obvious, so clear and perspicuous, that their shallow reason may be able fully to comprehend it; for these reasons is the preaching of the cross, to them that perish, foolishness.

Observe, 3. What efficacy and virtue the gospel is of unto believers: Unto us which are saved, says the apostle, it is the power of God; that is, a powerful instrument in God’s hand for men’s conversion and salvation; the word preached is the organ or instrument through which the vital power of the Spirit is conveyed unto the souls of sinners, how much soever it is contemned and despised in the world.

Observe, 4. How the apostle upbraids the pride and folly of the learned philosophers and reputed wise men among the heathens, who, though they excelled in natural wisdom, yet despised evangelical truth, making reason their supreme rule, and philosophy their highest principle: "Where," says the apostle, is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? That is, where is the wisdom now of the wisest philosopher among the Gentiles? where is the wisdom of the scribe, or the interpreter of the law among the Jews? where is the disputer of this world, or the curious searcher into the depths and secrets of nature? Let them show so many brought, by all their wisdom, learning, and eloquence, to the knowledge of God, and to the practice of their duty, as the preaching of a crucified Christ hath done; yea, all their natural wisdom is mere folly, in comparison of the glorious effects which the preaching of the gospel has produced.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

18. “For the word of the cross is to them that are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” So long as the wicked are in this world they are in a land of grace, and have a chance to be saved. Hence they have not utterly perished, but are only in a perishing condition. So long as the righteous are in this world they are not finally saved, but are exposed to temptation, still on probation, liable to forfeit all and make eternal shipwreck. Hence they are only in the process of salvation, i. e., being saved by the blessed Holy Spirit. Regeneration is primary salvation; sanctification, full salvation and glorification, final salvation.

William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

For the word of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God . [From this point Paul proceeds to contrast the "words," or message of the cross, with the "wisdom of words," or worldly wisdom, i. e., the philosophical messages or schemes of men, of which he has just spoken; having particularly in mind those of the two leading classes; viz.: Greeks and Jews. He first notes that the word of the cross is differently viewed by two different classes; those who, whether as disciples of Greek philosophers or of Jewish scribes, have dulled their moral perception by following worldly wisdom, and leading a worldly, perishing life, look upon it as foolishness; while those who have quickened their apprehension by leading a godly life, look upon it as God's saving power.]

J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

18–21. The preaching of the cross. The gospel of a Crucified Savior. To them that perish. Those who are unregenerate. Is foolishness. The Greek philosopher and the Jewish scribe scoffed at the thought of a Savior who had been crucified. They held that his crucifixion proved that he was not divine. Unto us who are saved. There are two sections of mankind—the unsaved and the saved. To the first, the cross is folly; to the second, the gospel of the Crucified One comes as the power of God. See Rom. 1:16. To the unsaved, the cross is a pillar of cloud; to the saved, a pillar of light.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

Connecting Statement:

Paul emphasizes God's wisdom rather than man's wisdom.

the message about the cross

"the preaching about the crucifixion" or "the message of Christ's dying on the cross"

is foolishness

"is senseless" or "is silly"

to those who are dying

Here "dying" refers to the process of spiritual death.

it is the power of God

"it is God working powerfully in us"

I will frustrate the understanding of the intelligent

"I will confuse intelligent people" or "I will make the plans intelligent people make completely fail"

translationWords

cross

fool

die

save

power

written

wise

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

18–31. GOD’S MESSAGE NOT INTENDED TO FLATTER THE PRIDE OF MAN

18. ὁ λόγος γὰρ ὁ τοῦ σταυροῦ. The Apostle here gives the reason why he does not use what is reputed as wisdom in the external style and framework of his discourse. It would be of no use. His teaching is not intended to convince the intellect, but to change the heart. His message is the message of the Cross. Until men have grasped the inner power of this doctrine to transform the life, it does and must appear an absurdity to them. The meaning of the words is the discourse which relates to the Cross, the genitive being the genitive of the object. See note on 1Co 1:6.

τοῖς μὲν ἀπολλυμένοις μωρία ἐστίν. To the perishing is folly. It must have struck the cultivated Greek and Roman as the very quintessence of absurdity for anyone to go about the world maintaining that a man who had been put to death for sedition in the reign of Tiberius was the Supreme God Himself, in fleshly form. Cf. Act 24:24. But such persons were perishing. They were on the road to destruction. Until they could acknowledge the mysterious law of redemption by the Blood of the Holiest, there was nothing to prevent them from increasing in sinfulness day by day, until their sins had brought that destruction to pass.

τοῖς δὲ σωζομένοις ἡμῖν. But to us who are in a state of salvation, or rather, perhaps, in process of salvation. The word σώζω signifies to rescue from any kind of present danger or evil. See Schleusner, Lex. s. v. In the LXX. it is used in several senses: (1) of saving from danger, Psalms 68 (69):1, 43 (44):3; 2Ch 32:22, (2) of helping, 2Ch 32:8, (3) of healing, Jer 17:14, though this is not quite certain. For a similar use of the word and its derivatives in the N.T. see (1) Mat 24:22; Mat 27:42; Mat 27:49, (3) Mat 9:21; Mat 14:36; Mar 6:56. (2) is not found. For instances of the use of this word in the Classics we may take Soph. Phil. 919 σῶσαι κακοῦ μὲν πρῶτα τοῦδε, Thuc. I. 74 ἔσωσε τὰ πράγματα. Cf. Xen. Hellen. VII. 5, also Arist. Nic. Eth. II. 2 σώζειν τὴν ὑγίειαν, and Dion. Hal. De Comp. Verb. 15. σώζειν δύναμιν, to preserve the force of syllables, and according to some editors σώζειν συμμετρίαν to preserve symmetry of sentences. Here the word refers to a power existing in the Cross capable of rescuing men from the dominion of their sins. Cf. Mat 1:21. Its use differs both from the LXX. and classical Greek. See also note on ch. 1Co 7:14. ἡμῖν is by its position emphatic.

δύναμις θεοῦ ἐστίν. It is the (or a) power of God. The death of Christ on the Cross was the great motive power of human regeneration. From that full and complete surrender of His Life and Will, His whole Self, to the Will of the Father, mankind derived the strength which, if used, would enable them also to free themselves from the yoke of sin. The power of God means here the God-given faculty of overcoming sin. δύναμις (see Aristotle, Nic. Eth. I. 1, 1Co 1:1, &c.) signifies power in itself, the capacity or faculty for doing things, as opposed to ἐνέργεια, which signifies power in action. We can now see how the employment of ‘wisdom of words’ would make the Cross ‘of none effect.’ It is the eloquence not of words but of facts which St Paul wishes to use. And he points to the Cross as the one great Fact which has changed the relations of God and man. Anything which serves to exalt man’s opinion of himself apart from that great Fact, is only to rob it of its power to change the life. Cf. Rom 1:16; 2Co 4:7; 2Co 13:4; Eph 3:16; Eph 3:20. Also ch. 1Co 2:4-5; Php 3:10; 1Th 1:5. Thus the term ‘saving power’ is applied by St Paul to the Gospel, to the Cross, to the Resurrection, to the Holy Spirit, to Christ, and directly to God Himself. And rightly so, for from God, through Christ, in the Spirit, imparted to us by the Gospel, comes a power which is able to transform us, who are crucified with Christ, from the likeness of sinful flesh into the image of the living God. See also Col 1:29.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

18.] For (explanation of the foregoing clause,—and that, assuming the mutual exclusiveness of the preaching of the Cross and wisdom of speech, and the identity of οἱ ἀπολλύμενοι with the lovers of σοφία λόγου: q. d. ‘wisdom of speech would nullify the Cross of Christ: for the doctrine of the Cross is to the lovers of that wisdom, folly.’ The reasoning is elliptical and involved, and is further complicated by the emphatic position of τοῖς ἀπολλ. and τοῖς σωζ.) the [preaching (speech, or] doctrine “there is a word, an eloquence, which is most powerful, the eloquence of the Cross: referring to σοφία λόγου.” Stanley) of the Cross is to the perishing (those who are through unbelief on the way to everlasting perdition) folly: but to us who are being saved (Billroth (in Olsh.) remarks that τ. σωζ. ἡμ. is a gentler expression than ἡμῖν τ. σωζ. would be: the latter would put the ἡμ. into strong emphasis, and exclude the opponents in a more marked manner.

οἱ σωζόμενοι are those in the way of salvation:—who by faith have laid hold on Christ and are by Him being saved, see reff.) it is the power (see ref. Rom. and note. Hardly, as Meyer,—a medium of divine Power,—etwas, wodurch Gott frastig wirft: rather, the perfection of God’s Power—the Power itself, in its noblest manifestation) of God.

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

18-31. The message of the Cross is foolishness to the wonder-seeking Jew and to the wisdom-seeking Greek: but to us, who have tried it, it is God’s power and God’s wisdom. Consider your own case, how God has chosen the simple and weak in preference to the wise and strong, that all glorying might be in Him alone.

18 To those who are on the broad way that leadeth to destruction, the message of the Cross of course is foolishness; but to those who are in the way of salvation, as we feel that we are, it manifests the power of God. 19 For it stands written in Scripture, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will set at nought. 20 What, in God’s sight, is the Greek philosopher? What, in God’s sight, is the Jewish Rabbi? What, be he Jew or Gentile, is the skilful disputer of this evil age? Did not God make foolish and futile the profane wisdom of the non-Christian world? 21 For when, in the providence of God, the world, in spite of all its boasted intellect and philosophy, failed to attain to a real knowledge of God, it was God’s good pleasure, by means of the proclaimed Glad-tidings, which the world regarded as foolishness, to save those who have faith in Him. 22 The truth of this is evident. Jews have no real knowledge of the God whom they worship, for they are always asking for miracles; nor Greeks either, for they ask for a philosophy of religion: 23 but we proclaim a Messiah who has been crucified, to Jews a revolting idea, and to Greeks an absurd one. 24 But to those who really accept God’s call, both Jews and Greeks, this crucified Messiah is the supreme manifestation of God’s power and God’s wisdom. 25 For what the Greek regards as the unwisdom of God is wiser than mankind, and what the Jew regards as the impotency of God is stronger than mankind.

26 For consider, Brothers, the circumstances of your own call. Very few of you were wise, as men count wisdom, very few were of great influence, very few were of high birth. 27 Quite the contrary. It was the unwisdom of the world which God specially selected, in order to put the wise people to shame by succeeding where they had failed; and it was the uninfluential agencies of the world which God specially selected, in order to put its strength to shame, by triumphing where that strength had been vanquished; 28 and it was the low-born and despised agencies which God specially selected, yes, actual nonentities, in order to bring to nought things that are real enough. 29 He thus secured that no human being should have anything to boast of before God. 30 But as regards you, on the other hand, it is by His will and bounty that ye have your being by adoption in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom manifested from God,—wisdom which stands for both righteousness and sanctification, yes, and redemption as well. 31 God did all this, in order that each might take as his guiding principle what stands written in Scripture, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

The Gospel in its essence makes no appeal to appreciation based on mere externalism. Divine Wisdom is not to be gauged by human cleverness (18-25). The history and composition of the Corinthian Church is a refutation of human pretensions by Divine Power (26-29), which, in the Person of Christ, satisfies the deeper needs and capacities of man (30, 31).

18. ὁ λόγος. In contrast, not to λόγος σοφίας (v. 5, 2:6), but to σοφιά λόγου (v. 17); the preaching of a crucified Saviour.

The AV. spoils the contrast by rendering ‘the wisdom of words’ and ‘the preaching of the Cross.’ The use of σοφία in these two chapters should be compared with the ἅγιον πνεῦμα in the Book of Wisdom (1:5, 9:17), πνεῦμα σοφίας (7:7), etc. St Paul had possibly read the book. We have in Wisdom the opposition between the σῶμα and the πνεῦμα or ψυχή or σοφία (1:4, 2:3, 9:15).

τοῦ σταυροῦ. “This expression shows clearly the stress which St Paul laid on the death of Christ, not merely as a great moral spectacle, and so the crowning point of a life of self-renunciation, but as in itself the ordained instrument of salvation” (Lightfoot). Cf. Ign. Eph. 18.

τοῖς μὲν ἀπολλυμένοις. ‘For them who are perishing’ (dativus commodi), not ‘In the opinion of those who are perishing’ (Chrys.). Compare carefully 2Co 2:16, 2Co 2:4:3; 2Th 2:10. The verb (Joh 3:16) is St Paul’s standing expression for the destiny of the wicked (15:18). The force of the present tense is ‘axiomatic,’ of that which is certain, whether past, present, or future: ἀπὸ τοῦ τέλους τὰς κατηγορίας τιθείς (Theodoret). The idea of predestination to destruction is quite remote from this context: St Paul simply assigns those who reject and those who receive ‘the Word of the Cross’ to the two classes corresponding to the issues of faith and unbelief; and he does not define ‘perishing.’ It is rash to say that he means annihilation; still more rash to say that he means endless torment. Eternal loss or exclusion may be meant.

μωρία. See on v. 21 and 2Co 4:3.

τοῖς δὲ σωζομένοις. It is not quite adequate to render this ‘to those who are in course of being saved.’ Salvation is the certain result (15:2) of a certain relation to God, which relation is a thing of the present. This relation had a beginning (Rom 8:24), is a fact now (Eph 2:5, Eph 2:8), and characterizes our present state (Act 2:47); but its inalienable confirmation belongs to the final adoption or ἀπολύτρωσις (Rom 8:23; cf. Eph 4:30). Meanwhile there is great need for watchful steadfastness, lest, by falling away, we lose our filial relation to God. Consider 10:12, 9:27; Gal 5:4; Mat 24:13.

ἡμῖν. ‘As we have good cause to know.’ The addition of the pronoun throws a touch of personal warmth into this side of the statement: ‘you and I can witness to that.’*

δύναμις Θεοῦ ἐστίν. See Rom 1:16. Not merely ‘a demonstration of God’s power,’ nor ‘a power of God,’ but ‘God’s power.’ The contrast between δύναμις (not σοφία) Θεοῦ and μωρια belongs to the very core of St Paul’s teaching (2:4; cf. 4:20). Wisdom can carry conviction, but to save, —to give illumination, penitence, sanctification, love, peace, and hope to a human soul,—needs power, and divine power.

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The word of the cross [ο λογος ο του σταυρου] . Lit., the word, that, namely, of the cross. The second article is definitive and emphatic. The word of which the substance and purport is the cross.

To them that perish [τοις απολλυμενοις] . Lit., that are perishing. So Rev. The present participle denotes process : they who are on the way to destruction. Compare 2Co 2:15.

Foolishness [μωρια] . Only in this epistle. See on have lost his savor, Mt 5:13.

Which are saved [τοις σωζομενοις] . Rev., being saved : in process of salvation.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.