“1 Corinthians 2”

Thursday, March 02, 2017

Human wisdom is never a good solution for spiritual problems. The problem of division among God’s people continues to be the subject of 1 Corinthians 2.

This chapter begins with Paul’s admission that preaching in Corinth made him nervous. He refers to “weakness” and “fear” and “much trembling.” This was an extremely immoral city and one could not be certain how the gospel was going to be received. The Lord spoke to Paul, while the apostle was in Corinth, in a night vision, to reassure him that he should continue to work in this city and not to be afraid.

Paul reminds the Corinthians that, even in his work among them, it was not his persuasive speech or superior wisdom that had brought them into a saved relationship with the Lord. What Paul brought to them that made all the difference was “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

If we try to convert people to anyone or anything other than Christ, we will not succeed. Jesus is the message and we must never shrink from sharing our confidence in the Savior with a lost and dying world. All that we do must be to His glory, not our own.

Jesus is the only Savior, not Paul or Apollos or Cephas (Peter) or any other gospel preacher.

There is a section of the chapter which deals with the process of inspiration. Given through the Holy Spirit, the Bible came from God to man so that we might understand what God would have us to do, as we seek to serve Him in this earth life.

Verse 13 affirms that we have, in the New Testament, all that God wants us to know and that He has revealed His covenant with man, not in words of human wisdom, but as the Spirit taught, a message directly from our Creator. He says that the Bible combines “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” (NASV).

True spiritual wisdom comes from a deeper and fuller knowledge of God’s revelation. Mankind can only know God’s mind when He reveals it to us. And He did that in what we now call the Bible. It is a spiritual message for people who want to know and obey God’s will.

--Roger Hillis

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