1 CORINTHIANS CHAPTER 1.
The Wisdom of God and the Foolishness of Men. 1 Cor. 1, 17–31.
The foolishness of God wiser than men: V. 20. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? V. 21. For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
In a series of rhetorical questions the apostle brings out the foolishness of this world's wisdom when compared with the wisdom of God. Where is the wise? Where are all the wise men of the world with all their wisdom? What has become of all the learned Greeks whose wisdom was praised so highly? Not one sinner has ever been converted by their sayings and writings; not one person has obtained salvation by following their rules of conduct.
Where is the scribe? What is true of the heathen philosophers is true also of the Jewish lawyer and his insistence upon the righteousness of works. All this is false wisdom and must vanish before the light of eternal truth.
Where is the disputer, the rhetorician of this world? The men that prided themselves on their ability to sway multitudes according to their will, to make them accept as right and true whatever their skill dictated, are vanished with the others that were filled with intellectual pride.
Did not God render foolish the wisdom of the world? So far as God was concerned, the wisdom of this world always was folly, but through the revelation of the heavenly wisdom in the crucified Christ God has judged and condemned this world's wisdom as foolishness. All the knowledge that has been acquired by men since the dawn of history, all the wisdom that is stored in countless minds, all the prevailing ideas of the present life, is vain where the heavenly wisdom is wanting, and utterly foolish if it attempts to measure the wisdom of God or to judge spiritual matters.
This thought is carried out further by the apostle: For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom knew not God, it was God's pleasure through the foolishness of preaching to save those that believe. Although the entire world proclaims the wisdom of God, although His wisdom is evidenced both in the works of creation, Rom. 1, 20, and in the history of the world, Acts 17, 26, yet in all this wise plan of the world's government the world's wisdom failed to win the knowledge of Him. Because the children of the world became wise in their own imaginations, therefore their foolish hearts were darkened, Rom. 1,21. God cannot be comprehended by intellectual speculation, and all the efforts of the philosophers to penetrate into the mystery of His essence are bound to meet with abject defeat.
And since thus the world, with its own wisdom, could not find the way to the wisdom of God, therefore it pleased God, according to the good pleasure of His will, to lead men to the knowledge of His essence by a way which alone can bring sinful mankind to Him. By that which is considered the foolishness of preaching, by the proclamation of a message which is ridiculed as unreasonable by the wise men of this world, God brings salvation to the believers.
"God's sovereign grace rescues man's bankrupt wisdom: God saves by faith." Through the very same message of salvation which seems to man the essence of foolishness, God takes away the conceit of this human opinion and works faith in his heart.