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Rev Graham Harrison           Sunday June 7th a.m. 1998

1 Corinthians 2:5

That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God [1 Corinthians 2:5].

But as he comes into the second chapter he does something that is very interesting and somewhat unusual. He returns to his own personal experience and describes to them his feeling as he had made his way to Corinth for the first time. Remarkably enough these feelings resulted in his being all the more determined both as to the manner in which he would conduct himself in Corinth and also the matter that would constitute the message that he would preach there. The first four verses of the chapter explain this: 'And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power' [1 Corinthians 2:1-4].

But what the fifth verse gives us is the reason for his preaching in this way: 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'. There had been nothing haphazard about his approach. Nor was it that intellectually he was incapable of conducting his ministry in the way they now thought he ought to have done. He knew that had he fallen in with what they were now requiring of him they would never be able to survive the trials and afflictions that were going to come upon them. Later on in the epistle (1 Cor.7:26-28) he refers to the 'present distress' and 'trouble', probably indicating the impending persecution that would break out under Nero. He wanted them to have a faith that would see them through that great trial. Therefore he deliberately rejected the manner and the methods that they obviously thought he ought to have adopted when he came to them. 'Had I done that,' he said, 'I would have been relying on man's wisdom, and that would not enable you to stand when the hour of trial and testing comes. Instead I came and I preached to you in the power of God, and that is more than sufficient for any eventuality that you will ever be faced with.'

So here then is the climax of his argument: 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'. Immediately you notice that there is a great contrast in the verse. A contrast between on the one hand the wisdom of men, and on the other the power of God. Those are the two things that we must occupy ourselves with in this sermon - the wisdom of men and the power of God.

In his letters Paul repeatedly comes back to this concept of the power of God. Indeed there are a number of places in the New Testament where it is as if he reaches out to virtually every possible word in the Greek language that has anything to do with power. He grasps hold of them and pulls them all in, in order somehow to explain to them the very might of God that is involved in the gospel.

Take, for example, the end of the first chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians, where he is trying to get across to them the greatness of the power of God. He tells them what his prayer for them is: 'The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints'. Then he begins to pile term upon term to make his point - 'And what is the exceeding greatness of his power', (it is the word from which we get the English word 'dynamite') - 'his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working' (and that, if you transliterated it into English, would come across as the word 'energy'), 'the 'energy of his mighty' (and it is a word that speaks of 'strength'), 'power which he wrought in Christ'. You can see what Paul is doing, he is taking hold of all these words that symbolise strength and power and might and energy, and he is using them all to convey to them something of the concept of the power of God.

Well here the Apostle contents himself with just one word, it is the word that translates as 'dynamite'. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'.

Basically there are perhaps two words that are used in the Greek New Testament that are often translated by 'power'. If you were to differentiate between them you would translate one as 'authority' and the other one as 'power'. For example, do you remember the words of the great commission at the end of Matthew 28. The Lord Jesus Christ says to his disciples shortly before He ascends into heaven: 'All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth' [Matthew 28:18]. It is the word for 'authority'. His is the authority of God. 'All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth' and therefore he gives His command to His disciples that they are to go forth preaching the gospel and making disciples of all nations.

But this other word is one that means not so much 'authority as 'might', 'strength', 'power'. Now, of course, in God those two things belong together. Often in this world they are not found together. You find, for example, that the people who might have power have no authority for it, but they impose their will. Might is right! They have the strength, the power, but they do not have the virtue and the authority behind them. Sometimes it can happen like that in a nation. There is a revolution and the people who come to power and wield the might may be corrupt and evil, holding things that are good and righteous in contempt. They have the power, but they do not have the authority. Sadly, of course, the reverse is sometimes true, you have the people who theoretically have the authority, but they do not have any power. They tell you what you are to do - but you snap your fingers at them because you know that they cannot back up what they are saying with any responsible power. So they are ignored and it is a pathetic state when you come into a situation like that. But it is never like that with God! Where God has authority, God has power! God's might is always backed by God's right.

Now here the Apostle says: 'My purpose was "that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God". So I came preaching as I did. I deliberately eschewed some of the things that you think I ought to have followed, some of the practices, some of the attitudes, some of the techniques that you so admire. I turned my back on them for the simple reason that I wanted you to have a faith that would stand. And it is able to stand only as it is grounded in the power of God.'

So we need to consider these two concepts that are here in this verse - the wisdom of men and the power of God. First of all, the wisdom of men. It is very interesting to study the history of ideas - the way in which at perhaps in one period of history, or in one country in a historical period, it is as if there are certain ideas that carry everything before them. They capture the imagination, not just of a nation but almost of a civilisation. Truth seems to be expressed in terms of the wisdom, the ideas that are current at that time. Then something happens. It may be gradual, or sudden and climactic, some tremendous upheaval in thinking. But what had been the received wisdom, suddenly has become history and nobody receives it any longer.

I am speaking now about the great history of ideas, but you can come down to much more trivial areas. I wonder if some of you ladies have ever looked back at photographs of your grandmothers and great-grandmothers. You have seen the dresses that they wore and the hats. Possibly you have smiled to yourselves and you have thought, 'I am very thankful I do not have to wear things like that!' I can assure you, your husbands are even more thankful. But at the time, it was the last word, just as you have probably come this morning in all your contemporary finery thinking similar thoughts! But I wonder what your grandchildren will think of you in thirty, forty, or fifty years time. They will look back at those photographs of those quaint old women and the sort of things that they used to wear - I am not mentioning the men. These things change, do they not?

Or sometimes it is in the realm of diet - the things that you are supposed to eat or you are not supposed to eat. Go back ten or twenty years and you will discover that truth has been stood on its head. The doctors then would have told you to do one thing; they tell you now to do something quite different. 'Medical wisdom,' they say, 'has moved on. We understand things now in a way that we did not understand them then!' But who knows if we have finally arrived at the end point? There is something very temporary, very uncertain, about all this human wisdom.

But to return to the history of ideas, the history of civilisation. Think of the long period of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages as sometimes they are called. There followed historically what is known as the Renaissance and the Reformation; new concepts, new ideas come to the surface and people begin to believe them. A great explosion of scientific investigation and discovery and suddenly people have got all these new concepts and civilisation itself seems to be different.

They tell us that we are living at one of those turning points in history. You have probably all heard the term 'post-modernism'. What it means is something like this - they say for about two hundred years western civilisation was dominated by science, it felt that you could have certainty about everything, and scientific certainty about everything else - but now all that is different. Now, so we are told, there is nothing fixed, nothing absolute. They are working it out in the realm of morality and ethics as well. We live no longer in what they call the era of modernism, but the era of post-modernism. So everything is supposed to be in the melting pot today.

I remember once reading a quite well known quotation and it went somehow along these lines: if theology marries the philosophy of today, she will be a widow tomorrow. In other words if you hitch your theological views onto what is current received wisdom, you know that tomorrow, or in a few years time, all that received wisdom is going to be rejected. Or, to use that illustration, if you get married to the contemporary philosophy, you are going to find yourself widowed before long because that philosophy will have died. That is why when the Apostle Paul went to Corinth he did not go there preaching something that was derived from the wisdom of men. He wanted something more substantial, more lasting than that.

There is something else that you can say about the wisdom of men. You can have men who are very wise, very learned, very clever, highly intelligent, the great professors and the leading intellects of the world. But do you know what their wisdom is not able to help them to do? It does not enable them to live. Take so many of the great intellectual figures of this century and look at their lives. Take a man like Einstein - I suppose some people would say he was the greatest genius, scientifically, of the twentieth century - but the man was an adulterer. Again Bertrand Russell was the same, he was an adulterer again and again. You can go through the life-stories of so many of these men of towering intellectual genius and you will discover that they were not able to live. They had great wisdom, so it seemed, at least that was the popular opinion of them, but they did not have power to live.

The same thing is true of so many of the opinion-formers in society - the politicians, the artists, the dramatists, the people who are there in the media. Indeed I was reading in the paper only yesterday something that I had read before but that I had forgotten. The late A.J.P.Taylor, one of the great historians of the twentieth century, with an expert knowledge of the nineteenth century, looking at British history commented that he could think of only five British Prime Ministers in the nineteenth century who were not adulterers! And if ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black it was so with A.J.P.Taylor!

So you see these people, for all their wisdom, their cleverness, their learning, they cannot help you to live. Indeed if you were to go right back to the wisdom that was current at the time of the Apostle Paul, the wisdom of the Greeks, you would find exactly the same to be true. Look at their great philosophers - the Socrates, the Platos, the Aristotles of this world, and you will find that so often they were morally corrupt. Many of them, in company with so many of the ancient Greeks, were pederasts, they had homosexual relationships with boys and approved of it morally! Yet here were the people who were supposed to speak consummate wisdom! Paul turns his back upon it. He says: 'I wanted you to have a faith that would not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. They cannot even help you to live and most certainly they are not able to help you to die.' If ever that was true of a society and of the intelligentsia of a society, it is true of our society today, is it not? They are not only unable to help you to live, they certainly cannot help you to die - except, as they would say, 'We will give you a shot in the arm that will take you off quietly and without pain.' And that is their answer to the problem of death - but it does not face up to the issue at all. It does not bring God into the picture.

So there is the wisdom of men, the wisdom that Paul has rejected because he knew that it was no foundation for faith. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'. When you begin to think of what Paul contrasts with 'the wisdom of men' - 'the power of God' - you realise immediately that you are operating in a different realm. Power is something that is almost synonymous with God. Think of all that we read about God in the Scriptures, going right back to the very beginning. What do you have? The demonstration of the power of God. God spoke and creation sprang into existence. Is not that power? Is that not infinite, illimitable, almighty power? God the Creator!

There are so many texts that one could turn to, but let me content myself with just a few in the New Testament. 'God, who ... hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, ... Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power' [Hebrews 1:1-3]. You have something very similar in Colossians 1:16, this pre-eminent Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, the One who upholds all things, the One in whom all things hold together - the power of God. Paul knew so much about the power of God. He knew that it was the power of God that had saved him. What else could have turned the inveterate hater of Christians that Saul of Tarsus had been, right round to become a great preacher and proclaimer of the gospel, risking even his own life and eventually giving his own life in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ? It is only the power of God that does something like that.

Paul did not need to be convinced of what so many of the Psalms say. 'God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God' [Psalms 62:11]. Paul knew that! That is why he went to Corinth as he did. He knew that he need not go with apprehension because God was with him and God's power was upon him. Or in the next Psalm where you get the longing of David when he is there pining away in the wilderness of Judah: 'O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary' [Psalms 63:1-2]. David is thinking back to those times when he had been there in the house of God, worshipping God where the power of God had been manifested. Now he was in the wilderness, hounded from pillar to post by Saul and his soldiers - and David longs for those times when he would be able to come back under the power of God, as he met with the people of God. That was the same power that the Apostle Paul was so abundantly aware of and that he had confidence in. That was the reason why he turned his back on all these other devices and strategies that evidently these Corinthian Christians thought he should have adopted. He wanted them to have a faith that would stand in the power of God.

When you think of the Lord Jesus Christ, you cannot think of Him without power. Go right back to His coming into the world, it was an impossibility, humanly speaking. But how did it happen? By the power of God! You can sympathise with the virgin Mary as she had this amazing announcement made to her. The angel has come to her; he has announced that she is going to conceive and bear a son whose name was to be called Jesus. 'He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end' [Luke 1:32-33]. Here is the perplexity of Mary, and one sympathises with her: 'Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?' But this is the answer of the angel: 'The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. ... For with God nothing shall be impossible' [Luke 1:34-37]. Right back there at the commencement of the Incarnation you are confronted with the power of God.

Then come on thirty years and the Lord Jesus Christ, by now a grown man, has come to the river Jordan and has been baptised by John the Baptist. Then He goes into the wilderness, led there by the Spirit to be tempted of the devil. Do you remember what happens after that? 'And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all' [Luke 4:14-15]. He comes to Nazareth, He begins to preach and He takes Isaiah 61. 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor'. The people are amazed, 'How can this man speak like this? We know who he is. Isn't he Joseph's son?' Our Lord takes it up with them and begins to explain to them. Then, when they try to assassinate Him, He just walks through the midst of them and goes His way.

He comes down to Capernaum and there He preaches: 'And they were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was with power' [Luke 4:32]. And on and on it goes through the earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ - power being demonstrated in what He does, in what He says - the very power of God. Then when He was hanging on the cross, seemingly impotent, He was never more powerful. There, bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, He was making atonement to God - and accomplishing the impossible, reconciling sinners to a Holy God. Three days later - the power of God - He is raised from the dead. The stone is rolled away and He who was dead comes forth alive. The power of God!

Now that was something that was so evidently true of the Lord Jesus Christ - the great power that He manifested. One day He is coming back to this world - you have only to read some of the accounts of that in these epistles, or even more notably in the book of the Revelation, and you realise that that is going to be a day when the majestic power of God finally is going to be displayed. The heavens departing like a scroll, the dead being raised, the Day of Judgment being inaugurated, the power of God manifested.

Now all of that is there in the background of Paul's mind when he speaks about the power of God. He knew that he was not speaking about some Greek deity of whom you could make a statue and to whom you could offer your prayers that would accomplish absolutely nothing. He knew that he was speaking of almighty God whose power is illimitable. So down he goes to Corinth. He knows the sort of place it is. He knew that the Greeks even turned the noun 'Corinthian' into a verb, in order to speak of somebody whose life was one of utter moral degradation and ruin. What hope has he going to a place like that! Who, in his right senses, would even contemplate going and preaching to that sort of person? But here was a man who believed in the power of God. So down to Corinth he went, deliberately eschewing all these other techniques and devices that he could have used. Yes, he went 'in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling' but he went 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power'. He knew this mighty power of God being manifest through the gospel that he was able to preach.

Imagine if someone had happened to fall in with him as he was walking down the road and had got into conversation with him, as men do, and had begun to ask him where he was going, and why, and what was his job. Perhaps he would have told them that he was a Christian. In one sense he did not have a job. He helped himself out, making ends meet by doing a bit of tent making if necessary. But his life's work was to preach about Jesus Christ. Preach about somebody who came from heaven to earth and lived a life of perfection and died a sin-bearing death and rose again from the dead and one day is coming back to this world. He would tell them that in Him there is salvation and hope. Jesus is able to take people whose lives are wrecks and miserable failures; He is able to transform them. Such a companion would have said, 'Oh, don't be silly! Don't go to Corinth of all places. Go somewhere else. The Corinthians are hopeless; they are beyond redemption! Why, even we Greeks speak so disparagingly of them. You are beaten before you start, if you go down to a place like that!'

But Paul did not turn aside; he knew that he had something that with the power of God upon it was able to transform the most hopeless sinner. It was, you might say, an act of great faith on the part of the Apostle Paul as went there with this determination in his heart. Yet go he did - and the power of God blessed him and used him. Do you know who was the emperor at this time? It was Nero. It was under the Emperor Nero that Paul was finally put to death, along with many other Christians. There was that terrible outbreak of persecution in Rome when Nero had Christians nailed to lamp posts with oil poured over them. Then he set light to them and that was the lighting system of Rome for a couple of days - blazing Christians. Others he tied in animal skins and set wild dogs on them. That was the Emperor Nero. Somebody once made a very perceptive comment about him: 'The time will come when men will call their sons Paul and their dogs Nero'. It happened. Nero has becomes one of the ogres of history. Who on earth would even think of calling their son Nero today? You would think them to be perverted in their understanding if they did something like that! Call a dog by that name, if you must, but not your son. Yet 'Paul' - it is an honourable name. 'Paul' the name of this very man who has written these letters for us in the New Testament. 'The time will come when men will call their sons Paul and their dogs Nero'. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.'

What happened in Corinth has happened again and again in Christian history. Situations that have not just been hopeless; they have been worse than hopeless. Impossible situations! But the power of God has come. You have all heard of George Whitefield; do you know how he began his preaching in the open air? It was an extraordinary thing for him to do, because up to that time in England preaching had been virtually always indoors, from pulpits and within church buildings. But they did not like what Whitefield was preaching and so they thrust him out of doors. what he would do would be to go to the graveyard of a church that was closed to him and stand on a tomb. There he would preach to the people who would come. Whitefield was in Bristol and just a few miles outside Bristol - it is probably incorporated into Bristol now - there was a little village called Kingswood, a mining village. The coal miners there had a terrible reputation. There were times when they would go on the rampage and would go into Bristol terrorising the place.

George Whitefield, who had just begun a little bit of open-air preaching, decided to go to Kingswood in the middle of winter, the worst winter that they had for many a long year. He went around those colliers and he told them that he would be preaching the gospel. A few hundred of them assembled. They just came out of the pit and there they were with all their coal dust and grime covering them - there were no pit head baths in those days. This young man, only about twenty one years of age, begins to preach - and the power of God was with him. It was evidenced in the most extraordinary way - suddenly he began to see rivers of white appearing down the cheeks of those blackened coal miners. They were weeping, weeping because of their sins. Weeping because of the salvation that was being freely offered to them in the Lord Jesus Christ. It was the power of God. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.'

Many of us in this church know something of the story of the Borneo Evangelical Mission, the mission that our sister Sylvia Webb first went out with. You remember those tribes up in the interior of Borneo? One in particular was so debauched and drunk - drunk literally for more days of the year than they were sober - that the British colonial authorities were waiting for them to die out. They thought that would be the best thing. Give them a few more years and they would have drunk themselves into extinction. Yes, but the gospel came to them and the gospel was believed by them and they were transformed. Suddenly it was discovered that they were the ones who were bringing that same message of the gospel to their fellow tribes people. The whole of the interior was transformed. By the wisdom of men? Oh, no! The wisdom of men said 'Let them die! The place will be better off without them.' But the power of God said 'No! let them live! there is a Saviour, Jesus, who has died for them. Something can be done for them.' And something was done to them - through Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.'

Christian do you believe that? Do you believe that this gospel is still the same? 'Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever' [Hebrews 13:8]. The eternal God who is our refuge and who always has those everlasting arms under us, is still the same, unchangeably faithful to save. Do you believe that? The power of God can come to the worst, the most hopeless, the most inveterate, the most hardened sinner in the world and it can save him. The wisdom of men cannot do it - but the power of God can. That is why I stand here week after week, it is because I believe in the power of God unto salvation. It is there in the gospel to every one that believeth.

Those of you who are not Christians, do you believe it? Perhaps you have written yourself off. Perhaps you think that even God could not reach you. But let me tell you again that His plan, His work, does not depend on the wisdom of men, but on His power - and God's power is illimitable. The gospel that transformed these Corinthians can transform you. Believe Him, trust in Him, come in your hopelessness to Him and ask Him to do in you what He did in these men and what He has done down through the running centuries of history and still is doing today. 'That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God'.

Amen
 

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