Foolishness or Wisdom and Power?

 

1 Corinthians 1:17 – 25
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
     and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 
 
Why does Paul talk so much about foolishness and wisdom, folly vs power, over and over in these verses? What is his point and why does he feel the need for so much repetition to hammer his point home? I’d like to illustrate this.

Two women meet each other one morning as they sit down right next to each other at a scientific talk. They listen to the same lecture, which is on a new cure to a rare disease. At the end, the first woman thinks to herself, “What a boring dry speaker, I wish I had chosen the other session.” The other woman rushes forward to be the first to meet the speaker and to learn more. Both women have the same rare disease, for which a cure has just been discovered. But the difference is that the first woman doesn’t know she has it and the second woman knows she is dying and has no other cure. The first woman was unimpressed and heard nonsense. The second woman could care less about the eloquence of the speaker, she heard only POWER and WISDOM that would change her life.

The Corinthians were connoisseurs, they knew how to really appreciate and discern the best rhetoric and eloquence. They made much of the style and giftedness of the speaker, and little of the content. The content Paul preached was of Christ’s crucifixion, a method of execution considered so crude it was not even mentioned in polite company. There was no way to make this content “cool”, the “wow” factor wasn’t there. It’s a gruesome, shameful, topic that shouldn’t even be brought up. It was deemed nonsense for the elevated mind to find hope, power, and God in a man killed by crucifixion.

The same has been true across the following centuries and is true today. The world today, full of very smart people, scoffs at Jesus on the cross. What they miss is that the cross isn’t meant to be cool. It is meant to be so low, so painful, so ugly that we weep in amazement at a God who would lower himself to that point, the point we deserved, to heal us.

You, along with every human alive, were born with the spiritual disease of sin and guilt and the bad news is that it is terminal. But there is news of a single cure and you and I have heard it. We sit in our chairs now at the end of the talk and the question is, do we think it’s foolishness and walk away? Or do we rush the stage to follow our savior and to be healed by the wisdom and power found at the cross?