The Wisdom of Men, or the Power of God?

I Corinthians 2:1-11

This meditation looks at the New Testament reading from the Book of Common Prayer Lectionary for this past Sunday.  It continues looking at the first letter of St. Paul to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth.

Although many of the apostles were fishermen, and would not have had much if any higher education beyond the synagogue education most boys of the era were given, the Apostle Paul was a very well educated man.  In addition to the traditional synagogue education, Paul studied for many years under Gamaliel, one of the greatest Pharisees and member of the Sanhedrin of the time.

If he wished, Paul could have preached any number of high-brow, intellectual and scholarly sermons.  He knew his Scriptures and theology extensively.  When Paul came to town to preach to the lost, though, he didn’t preach any messages like that.  Verse 2 of this passage, which is what I want to focus on, told us exactly what type of message Paul preached.  As he said in this verse, he preached only a message of salvation, of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

There are TV preachers today who preach anything but that.  They’ll preach messages about how God wants you to become rich, or preach all sorts of “feel good” sermons, but nothing of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross.  That was the message Paul believed was important, not one of fluff, or one that was so deep theologically it left one’s brain in knots, but spoke nothing of salvation through the Blood of Jesus.  He didn’t preach scholarly sermons to impress his listeners with his education.  The salvation of souls was the only thing important to Paul, not the length of his resume and of his references.

How many preachers today can say that?  Today, most of the intellectual elite associate preaching a salvation message with uneducated backwoods preachers. Instead, they preach politically correct sermons saying that everyone goes to heaven or a feel-good message, lacking any true substance.   The message of the cross, to them, is nonsense.  The Blood of Jesus is rarely mentioned any more today.  All hymns that mention the Blood have been eliminated from churches.  This is a message that the world looks on as nonsense.  The fact that God would come to earth as Jesus Christ and die a brutal, cruel death on the cross of all of our sins is ludicrous in the eyes of the lost.  An intellectual, scholarly sermon that tickles their brain is what they want to hear.  What will that do for their souls, for eternity, though?  Paul knew that only preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified is important for eternity.

If we met a starving man, and knew where he could get food, we would want to direct him there, not give him fancy recipes.  If someone had cancer, we would want to give him the healing medicine, not explain how all the chemicals work with each other.  Hundreds of thousands of people are dying each day without Christ, and go spend eternity in hell.  We need to do as Paul did, and tell them of a Savior who loved them and died on the cross for them, not all sorts of fancy words of worldly wisdom.