Writing primarily to Gentile believers in 1 Corinthians 1:18-27, the Apostle Paul wrote this passage to show how God actively uses what the world deems as unimpressive to shame the wise. And borrowing from the wisdom of the Psalms, we can see how God counterintuitively designed His Gospel to draw out a certain type of lost person for salvation and exclude the wise and the proud. 

First, in Verse 18 of 1 Corinthians, Paul talks of the perception of the Gospel to perishing non-believers. From a human perspective, the Gospel is laughable and even pure foolishness! How could a God who became human get impaled on a Roman cross and erase mankind’s evil? Paul’s primary audience is Jewish and Greek, and he strikes at the heart of both cultures by exposing each of their primary tools for evaluating truth. For the Jew, for something to be true, required some type of “sign” from God. In Jewish history, they were miraculously freed from Egypt by 10 miraculous plagues followed by a miraculous Red Sea crossing. In both their Tabernacle and Temple, God approved of their initial sacrifices by sending fire from Heaven. God confirmed His approval of Isreal with signs. 

Greeks, on the other hand, prided themselves on the combined centuries of wisdom from their famous philosophers, backed by the dominance of their language and culture which had spread far beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. The Greek litmus tests of truth consisted of a heavy dose of pragmatic logic with a smattering of polytheistic narrative to cover the transcendent gaps in their scientific understanding. 

Both the Jew and the Greek had something to rest their human pride and faith on. And Paul then drops the counterintuitive bomb on this pride parade! For the God, who transcends time, space and human culture, had decided before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8, 1 Peter 1:19-20, Genesis 22, Genesis 3:21) to die for the sins of all mankind. This idea of a crucified Messiah, from both the prideful Jewish and Greek perspectives is both illogical and repulsive. And yet we see how the Apostle has become so deeply convinced of the power and the preaching of the Cross to the saving of sinners, that we are compelled to listen to his argument. 

God (who is not insecure like the polytheistic pantheon of Greece), does not have to pander to the philosophy of the age. Paul illustrates, rather, a God who is so great, that He can use small, insignificant and even foolish things, to bring shame the wise of this world. By foreshadowing the necessity of sacrifice in the Jewish religious economy, God strategically placed Jesus as “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) [Words spoken by forerunner John the Baptist a full three years in advance of His crucifixion before the holy day of Passover.] By prophetically stating that hanging a man on a tree automatically curses that man (Deuteronomy 21:23), God laid the groundwork for understanding how Jesus would receive the curse of Adam as an innocent sacrifice. God strategically embedded hundreds of details in the Law, Prophets and Psalms, so that any clear-minded Jew could comprehend that Jesus was fulfilling in His life and death, “all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40)

Psalm 14:1-4 tells us that the heart of a fool does not believe in the existence of God and blatantly denies His reality. In certain halls of higher human learning, atheism seems wise. In the halls of Heaven — before God, the religion of atheism is both laughable and foolish. David leverages this very perspective. “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Verses 2-3) THERE IT IS! We humans are all sinful. “There is no one who does good” applies to ALL OF US! In Verse 4, the Scripture adds that the wicked are unaware of their own wickedness — that they carry out the blackest, most oppressive actions against God and His people. The wicked don’t even call upon the Lord. They have no desire for a relationship with Him. And as we see in Psalm 10:4, “In his pride the wicked man does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God.” Oh, the great pride of the wicked man! He doesn’t bother at all to seek God. Instead, his thoughts dwell on his damning belief that, “There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) 

In view of these three passages, we see that God actively uses what the world deems as unimpressive to shame and humble the wise and proud of the world. 

Three hundred years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, His tomb was rediscovered by the Bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius. How did Macarius find Jesus’s tomb? He discovered it by simply listening to the locals of Jerusalem! The tomb was hidden under a pagan temple, dedicated to the god of Jupiter, built by Emperor Hadrian in 135 A.D. The emperor ironically erected a shrine to a pagan deity over one of the most important sites of hope for all of mankind. Hadrian was surely polytheistic. He clearly did not believe in Yahweh’s existence. In fact, he probably scoffed at the mere mention of His name. Emperor Hadrian cared even less about the stories of a risen, living Savior. Yet Hadrian had been dead for over 150 years, and the insignificance of both his life, death and even the clear waning of the worship of Jupiter, led to the dismantling of that temple to reveal the empty grave of the triumphant Christ. The Gospel of the Cross of Christ had become the dominant world view throughout the empire that Hadrian had once ruled. Due to the interest of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine and the efforts of Macarius, Jesus’s tomb didn’t remain concealed. The temple atop the tomb was dismantled. An empty tomb triumphed over a hollow shrine. The message of the Cross, as foolish as it seemed to the logic of the first century, in just a few short years, had transformed millions of lives by pointing to an empty tomb. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20)

Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-29. Why do you think God loves using weak and often insignificant things in His Kingdom economy?

How does the nature of the Gospel of the Cross of Christ naturally discriminate against human wisdom and pride?

What type of human is (super)naturally drawn to the preaching of the Cross?