1 Corinthians 2

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 2

Paul has just told the Corinthians that God saves the world by a message the world calls foolish, and now he turns to his own arrival among them as living proof of it. He came into that glittering Greek city carrying none of the equipment the city admired. No polished oratory, no philosopher’s reputation, no display to make a crowd lean forward. He came, he says, in weakness and fear and with much trembling, and he had settled it beforehand that he would know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The reason he gives is worth the whole chapter: he wanted their faith to rest on God’s power and not on a man’s persuasion, because a faith built on a speaker falls the day the speaker does. Then Paul turns the coin over. There is a wisdom he does speak, a wisdom hidden in God and settled before time began, which the rulers of this age never grasped, and the proof that they never grasped it is that they crucified the Lord of glory. So how does anyone come to know such a thing? Not by eye, not by ear, not by the reach of imagination, but by the Spirit of God, who searches the deep things of God and has revealed them. The chapter closes by dividing every hearer into two kinds: the natural man, who cannot receive what comes from the Spirit because it is spiritually discerned, and the one taught by the Spirit, of whom Paul makes the astonishing claim that ends the chapter, “we have the mind of Christ.”

As you read, hold this: The wisdom that saves us was hidden in God before time began, and no one arrives at it by cleverness; it comes only as the Spirit of God gives it and opens it to us.

1 Corinthians 2:1–2 (BSB)

¹ When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ² For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Notice that Paul is describing a decision, not a limitation. “I resolved,” he says. Before he ever opened his mouth in Corinth he had drawn a line around what he would talk about, and the line was narrow enough to fit on a gravestone: Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Think what that cost a man of his training. He had the education, he knew the poets, he had stood on the Areopagus in Athens and reasoned with philosophers in their own idiom. In a city that bought and sold eloquence he could have bought himself a following. He deliberately did not, because a preacher who dazzles must keep dazzling, and the day he stops, whatever was built on him comes down. So Paul took the low road on purpose. He did not arrive as a performer with a topic; he arrived as a witness with a testimony. And of all the things he might have said about Christ, he pressed hardest on the one the world found most embarrassing. Not Christ the teacher, not Christ the good example, but Christ crucified, the Lord of glory hanging on a Roman gibbet for sinners. That is the message he handed them, and it is the only message that has ever saved anybody.

1 Corinthians 2:3–5 (BSB)

³ I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. ⁴ My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵ so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

Now hear how honest he is willing to be about himself. “I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.” That is an apostle talking. Not a man striding into town full of confidence, but a man who was frightened, who shook, who found the work nearly more than he could bear. Let that sit with you, because we so easily assume that the people God uses are the ones who feel strong. Paul felt anything but strong, and the Lord had to come to him at night in that very city and tell him to keep speaking. Yet look what stood alongside the trembling. His preaching came “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power (δύναμις) dynamis, pronounced DOO-nah-mis. Strong's G1411, power, ability, might. The word Paul reaches for is the great New Testament word for ability, for sheer capacity to do what nothing else can do. Dynamis is what went out from Jesus when the sick were healed, what the risen Lord promised when He told the disciples to wait in the city until they were clothed with it from on high, and what Paul had just called the cross itself: the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the dynamis of God. The word does not mean force or noise. It means that something happens which no human effort could have produced. And notice where Paul refuses to locate it. Not in his delivery, not in his argument, not in any quality of his own the orators could have measured. He was shaking. The power was the Spirit’s, and it was doing what eloquence never could, opening dead hearts and making them alive. There is real comfort in that for anyone who has ever tried to speak of Christ and felt utterly unequal to the task. The inadequacy is not the obstacle. It may be the very thing that leaves the room clear for God to be seen working. .” The weakness was real and the power was real, and the two were never in competition, because the weakness was exactly what kept anyone from mistaking whose power it was. And in verse five Paul names the purpose behind the whole strategy: “so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” He is thinking about the long haul. A faith argued into existence by a brilliant man can be argued back out again by a more brilliant one. A faith laid on the power of God rests on what will not shift when the arguments change and the clever men die.

1 Corinthians 2:6–8 (BSB)

⁶ Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom—but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. ⁷ No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began. ⁸ None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Do not miss the turn Paul makes here. He has spent two chapters saying the gospel is not human wisdom, and a hasty reader might conclude that Christianity has no wisdom in it at all, that it is simple in the sense of being shallow. Paul will not allow that. “Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom.” There is wisdom here, wisdom of the deepest kind, only it is not the wisdom of this age, and the rulers who trade in that wisdom are, in his blunt phrase, “coming to nothing.” Every empire and every intellectual fashion that ever looked permanent is on its way out. What Paul preaches is the mysterious (μυστήριον) mystērion, pronounced moos-TAY-ree-on. Strong's G3466, mystery, hidden secret now disclosed. In the Greek world a mystērion was a secret belonging to the initiated. Corinth was full of mystery cults, and to join one you paid your fee, went through the rites, and were let in on things outsiders were never told. The secret was the property of an inner circle, and the whole point was that most people would never know. Scripture takes the word and turns it inside out. A mystērion in Paul’s mouth is not a puzzle for the clever and not the private possession of an elite. It is something God kept hidden in Himself through long ages and has now announced out loud, published to anyone who will hear it, the crucified Christ held up before the whole world. So when Paul calls the wisdom of God a mystery, he does not mean it is murky. He means no human being could ever have reasoned his way to it, and it would not be known at all if God had not opened His own counsel and told us. The secret is out, and it is out to fishermen and slaves and tentmakers and children. You do not get in by being admitted to an inner circle. God has flung the doors open and preached His hidden wisdom in the street. and hidden wisdom of God, and he tells us how old it is: God “destined it for our glory before time began.” Sit with that. Before the first star, before there was a Corinth or a Rome or a you, God had settled on this plan, and the plan had your glory in it. Then comes the proof that such wisdom lies beyond the reach of the world’s best minds. “None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” The most powerful and educated men on earth looked straight at the Lord of glory and saw a problem to be disposed of. That is what human wisdom does with the Son of God when left to itself. And in the mercy of God, the very act by which they showed their blindness was the act by which He accomplished our salvation.

1 Corinthians 2:9–10 (BSB)

⁹ Rather, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.” ¹⁰ But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

Paul reaches back to Isaiah for a line that closes off every road but one. No eye has seen it. No ear has heard it. No heart has imagined it. Take the three great avenues by which we gather knowledge, what a man can observe, what he can be told by other men, and what he can conceive within himself, and Isaiah shuts all three. This is not first of all a verse about how splendid heaven will be, though it is that as well. It is a verse about how completely we are shut up to God if we are ever to know anything worth knowing. And then comes the “but” that carries the gospel in it. “But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit.” What no eye could see, God showed. What no ear could hear, God spoke. The road was closed from our side and He opened it from His. And who is fit for such work? Only the Spirit, who “searches all things, even the deep things of God.” That word searches does not mean He is investigating something He does not yet know. It is the language of a searchlight sweeping the depths and leaving nothing dark. The Spirit knows the depths of God as God knows Himself, and He is the one who has carried that knowledge out to us.

Be careful here, and be glad here. When Paul says “revealed it to us,” the “us” is in the first place himself and the apostles, the men to whom God entrusted the message and whose words we now hold in our hands as the New Testament. This is Paul telling us where his preaching came from. It did not come from his schooling. The Spirit of God gave it. And that founding work of revealing is finished, because the book is finished; the deposit has been delivered once for all, and we are not waiting on further installments, nor do we go looking for words that would bind the conscience alongside Scripture. Do not hear that as a loss. The same Spirit who gave the Word is the one who still opens it. Every time a plain believer sits down with a Bible and something long familiar suddenly stands up off the page and burns, that is the Spirit doing exactly what this verse describes. He gave us this Word, and He opens this Word to us. Both halves belong to the same faithful God, and both are pure mercy.

1 Corinthians 2:11–13 (BSB)

¹¹ For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹² We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. ¹³ And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.

Paul now proves his point with an illustration anyone can follow. You are sitting across from another person. You can see the face, hear the voice, watch the hands. But what is he actually thinking, down underneath? You do not know and cannot know unless he tells you, for only his own spirit within him knows his thoughts. Well, says Paul, run that up to the height of God. Who could possibly know the thoughts of God? Only the Spirit of God. There is no telescope, no argument, no ladder of philosophy that climbs into the mind of the Almighty. If we are ever to know what God thinks, God must open His mouth. And notice the quiet dignity of that sentence for what it tells us about the Spirit Himself: He stands to God as a man’s own spirit stands to the man, knowing Him from the inside. He is not a force God sends. He is God.

Then verse twelve turns it toward the reader, and it is a generous verse. “We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.” God did not go to the trouble of purchasing our salvation and then leave us in the dark about what we own. He gave the gift, and He gave the Spirit so we would know what the gift is. There are believers holding unsearchable riches in Christ who walk about as though they were paupers, and this verse is aimed at that poverty. Verse thirteen carries it one step further, down to the very words. Paul says the message came to him in “words taught by the Spirit,” not a general impression that he then dressed in language of his own choosing. The wording itself was given. That is why we can bend over a single phrase of Scripture and weigh it, why a preposition matters, why it is worth the trouble to look at the Greek at all. These are not merely Paul’s words about God. They are, through Paul, God’s own words to us.

1 Corinthians 2:14–16 (BSB)

¹⁴ The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. ¹⁵ The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. ¹⁶ “For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

So the chapter comes down to two hearers, and everything Paul has said gathers here. The natural man (ψυχικός) psychikos, pronounced psoo-khee-KOSS. Strong's G5591, natural, soulish; having only natural human life. The word is built on psychē, the soul, the natural human life we all share, and psychikos means simply the person who has that and nothing more. It is worth saying plainly what the word does not mean. It does not mean stupid, and it does not mean wicked in some spectacular way. A psychikos man may be the finest mind of his generation, honest in business, kind to his neighbors, admirable by every measure the world can take. James uses the same word of a wisdom that is earthly and unspiritual, and Jude of those who are worldly and devoid of the Spirit, and in both places the point is not a lack of ability but the absence of a whole dimension. The man is living on one floor of a house that has two. So when the gospel is preached to him and he finds it ridiculous, he is doing exactly what this verse says he will do, and no cleverer presentation will mend it. That should keep us humble about our own understanding, since whatever we see of Christ we were given and were not born with. And it should send us to pray for people rather than merely to argue with them, for the ear itself must be opened before the music can be heard, and God alone opens ears. “does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God.” Look closely at the reason. It is not that he has been given too little evidence, and it is not that the case was argued badly. “They are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” It is a matter of faculty. Describe a symphony in perfect detail to a man born without hearing and he will not despise you for it, but he will not hear the music. That is the honest situation of every person apart from the Spirit of God, and it explains something that otherwise puzzles us badly, why brilliant and decent and thoughtful people can look at the cross of Christ and find it merely absurd. They are not being stubborn for sport. They lack the organ by which such things are known, and only God can give it.

Over against him Paul sets the spiritual man (πνευματικός) pneumatikos, pronounced pnyoo-mah-tee-KOSS. Strong's G4152, spiritual; belonging to and taught by the Spirit. This is the opposite number of the word Paul has just used, and it must be heard rightly. Pneumatikos comes from pneuma, breath or wind or Spirit, and it describes the person in whom the Spirit of God has taken up residence. It is not a badge for an advanced class of Christian who has climbed above the ordinary ones. Paul proves that himself in the very next breath of the letter, where he tells these same Corinthians that he could not address them as pneumatikos but as worldly, as infants in Christ. They had the Spirit and were behaving like people who did not, which is a rebuke and not a separate category. Elsewhere he simply calls on those who are spiritual to restore a fallen brother gently, meaning any believer walking in step with the Spirit. So the line in this chapter is not drawn between good Christians and poor ones. It is drawn between those in whom the Spirit dwells and those in whom He does not, and everyone standing on the right side of that line stands there by gift alone. If you can read this chapter and find your heart warmed rather than bored, take no credit for it and give great thanks, for something has been done in you that no education could have done. , who “judges all things,” meaning he is able to weigh and appraise what is really going on, to see this age and its rulers for the passing thing they are, because he has been given light to see by. And then, because such a claim could puff a man up in a hurry, Paul quotes Isaiah in a way that levels everyone flat: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?” The answer is nobody. Not one creature has ever been in a position to advise God. And just when you expect him to close on that humbling note, Paul adds seven words that ought to take your breath away. “But we have the mind of Christ.” Not that we comprehend God, and certainly not that we could instruct Him. But by His Spirit, God has given His people to think His thoughts after Him, to see the cross as He sees it, to love what He loves. The trembling tentmaker who came to Corinth with nothing the city admired had this, and so does the plainest believer with an open Bible on the kitchen table. What the rulers of this age could not buy or reason their way to, God has freely given to His own.