Learning Spiritual Truth (cont.)

v2. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Because it’s not about Paul! Eloquence, superior wisdom reflects on the speaker. All Paul wanted to do was point people to Christ.

v3. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.

Now there’s a resume enhancer. How many of you who are looking for a new pastor for your church have “weakness, fear and trembling” as a requirement? Paul answers why he came to them in this manner in the next verse.

v4-5. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

Paul’s tremendous responsibility was to get his own “wisdom and words” out of the way so that the Holy Spirit could speak through him with the result that the Corinthian’s faith would not be in Paul but in God!

v6-8. We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Just who were those rulers that crucified Christ? Well, we know Pilate, a Roman, pronounced the sentence and carried out the execution, but it was the Jewish religious leaders who brought Jesus to Pilate for execution, because they were not permitted to crucify him themselves. These religious leaders were the keepers of the scriptures and devoted their lives to reading and studying the law handed down from Moses. These are the same leaders that Jesus was talking to in John 5:39-40 “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

All their “study” of the Scriptures did not lead them to the truth, Jesus Christ.

v9. However, as it is written: “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”

“Wait a minute! If I can’t use my eyes, ears or mind, how can I possibly know what God is telling me?”

"All their "study" of the Scriptures did not lead them to the truth, Jesus Christ."

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