WWUTT 1423 Where is the Wise? (1 Corinthians 1:20)

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? The greatest wisdom we can have is in the gospel of Christ when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

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Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. First Corinthians chapter 1 is where we've been this week, verses 18 through 25.

And once again, I am reading from the Legacy Standard Bible. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, For the word of the cross is foolishness 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 cleverness of the clever.

I will set aside. Where is the wise man? 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 through its wisdom did not come to know

God. God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

For indeed, Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom.

But we preach Christ crucified to Jews, a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness.

But to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger.

Than men. So we've been looking intently at these two verses.

The first two verses of this reading here for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

Spent a couple of days meditating on that passage. And then yesterday came to verse 19, which is a citation from Isaiah chapter 29.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever.

I will set aside. This was something God was saying of Israel before they were to be punished for worshiping false gods, turning away from the one true

God. The Lord was going to send them into exile into Babylonian captivity.

And with the wonders that God would do in their midst wonders, in this case, talking about the judgment of God upon this nation, he said,

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. Those who think they are smart will be brought down low.

The cleverness of the clever. I will set aside these clever, sneaky people.

They just think that, hey, the judgment of God won't come upon me. I'll just walk over here. He won't even notice what it is that I'm doing.

I'll sidestep the lightning bolt right just before it strikes. I'll just jump over here and then

I'll be fine. But it says here that that the cleverness of the clever, I will set aside.

Those who do evil will not get away with it. Those who try to persist in their sin and think they can bargain with God or get away from God.

They will be found out. Malachi 2, 17 says, you have wearied the Lord with your words.

But you say, how have we wearied him by saying everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the

Lord and he delights in them or by asking, where is the God of justice?

As if I can do whatever I want, God is not going to punish me for this. Where is the

God of justice? Peter called these scoffers in 2nd Peter chapter three.

Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, where is the promise of his coming?

For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.

Peter goes on to say, this is 2nd Peter 3, 5, for they deliberately overlook this fact that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God.

This is a fact. They overlook the facts that the the word of God brought the earth forth and that by means of these, the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.

That's a fact. That is a historical fact in the scriptures and those who scoff or mock

God deliberately overlook what has been written down in the pages of scripture long ago.

But Peter goes on to say in verse seven, by the same word, by the same word that brought about all things into existence that brought all things into existence by the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire being kept until the day of judgment and the destruction of the ungodly.

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. As God said of Israel, so he will do with the whole world.

As God said of rebellious Israel, true Israel will be preserved.

True Israel will endure the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven. But those who are trying to sidestep the judgment of God, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever.

I will set aside verse 20. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe?

Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Society, our culture has a certain sense of justice. They have one way that they have defined justice.

But true justice comes from God. I taught in a study just yesterday morning about this as we were going through Psalm 72 together.

Here's what is said in Psalm 72, which I have in the legacy standard Bible because they also did

Psalms and Proverbs in addition to the New Testament. Still waiting on that full edition coming soon.

So here's what we have in the LSB in Psalm 72 one. Oh, God, give the king your judgments and your righteousness to the king's son.

May he render judgment to your people with righteousness and you're afflicted with justice.

We're talking about the justice of God here. You'll hear some of these social justice ministers when

I use the term social justice. I'm talking about something that's not in the Bible for that term. Social justice is not anywhere in Scripture.

Justice does not have an adjective. True justice is of God. So these social justice ministers, also known as cultural

Marxism, they're trying to push a worldly idea, not a biblical idea. Social justice ministers will tell you to go through your

Bible and underline every time you see the word justice come up, underline that word as if every time you see justice will go along with whatever justice that they are peddling.

It's as if they think that it will further their cause or that it justifies what they say about justice, which it really doesn't.

I mean, if you do a true study of justice in the Bible, it doesn't look anything like what these social justice peddlers are putting out there.

True justice comes from God. And when we're talking about righteousness and justice, according to the

Scriptures, we're talking about what God says is right. What he says is just.

And even here we read about justice for the poor. May he give justice to the afflicted of the people, save the children of the needy and crush the oppressor.

That's Psalm 72, 4. But even that right there does not mean justice to the poor does not mean that they won't be poor anymore.

Justice for the poor means that the Lord will not allow those who are powerful to oppress the poor and get away with it.

Like some of the things that are going on in our culture right now, they're calling for justice for the poor, but that isn't what they're really doing.

They're actually oppressing the poor. They're manipulating the poor to advance or further their own cause.

This happens politically all the time, right? You'll have political parties that will use or manipulate the poor to benefit themselves, get their guys elected, but then they don't really do anything to help the poor.

The poor still stay poor. And what they present as justice is that, you know, the poor won't be poor anymore.

And there are folks out there that will say as long as there's poor, there's injustice. People who are poor is not a sign of injustice.

In fact, Jesus said the poor you will always have with you. The law that was given to Israel. You just look at the

Torah. You look at the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The law that is given there doesn't say if there's poor among you, then there's injustice happening.

Rather, there's instructions there as to how you are to care for the poor. There's always going to be those who are poor and needy, and we have an obligation to care for those who are poor to share the love of Christ.

It doesn't mean that we make them not poor anymore. We just make sure that the poor are being taken care of and they're not being taken advantage of by those who have the power and control and manipulate the poor in order to advance or further themselves.

They'll take even from the poor what the poor has, what little they have to try to make themselves better.

We see this with the Black Lives Matter movement. Those three women that have pushed this Black Lives Matter movement, they're rich.

They are wealthy women. They have taken advantage of others' misfortune to give themselves fortune.

They've never been about caring for anybody or bringing about justice. In fact, you look at their methods, they're very unjust.

And shame on those people in the church who have been manipulated by these women and brought these worldly philosophies into the church to say that, hey, there's divisions in the church, so we need these worldly concepts like Black Lives Matter and critical race theory and intersectionality in order to solve our divisions.

My friends, if you are still talking in your church about brothers and sisters of color, like that's a term that you're using in your church, categorizing them in a group from which white people are separate, your church is divided.

If you're breaking people up in your church into this race category and this race category and then the white people are privileged while the people of color are not, you have a divided church and you're doing that by taking these race terms that exist in a worldly godless culture and bringing them into the church and breaking up the people of God in ways we were never meant to be divided.

And this goes right back to Paul's address in verse 10. I exhort you, brothers, by the name of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.

And somehow there are people in the church right now who think that in order to truly be united, we actually have to be divided.

We have to divide these people up into these different groups and solve our differences that way.

That's how you keep the church divided. That's not how you unite one another. As I mentioned yesterday, the only power that will bring a people together is the message of the cross.

The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. And here's the scary thing about that. If you got people in your church that are bringing in these worldly philosophies to unite people, they're actually demonstrating that they think the word of the cross is foolishness.

They don't think that the cross is good enough. The shed blood of Jesus is enough to unite a people and bring us together, heal a broken people, solve our differences, heal our hurts, our pains, give us forgiveness and grace.

They don't think the cross is enough for that. So we need these worldly philosophies to solve our problems.

We actually need to break ourselves into groups and black people need to be this way and white people need to be this way and Asians this way and Hispanics this way.

And on and on it goes. And it's based entirely on melanin, by the way, breaking people up according to the tones of our skin and saying this group of people deserve something because they look this way.

That's prejudice. That's discrimination. That's exactly the thing that we should not have in our church.

And people are bringing it in the church, believing that discrimination solves discrimination. That is absurd.

That is the foolishness of this world. But instead, these people demonstrate that they think the cross is foolish.

And it's foolishness to those who are perishing. That's the scary thing about that. So you need to repent of that.

If that is your mentality, if that's your way of thinking, because otherwise, if you think the cross is foolishness, if you don't think the cross is enough to mend us and solve our differences, to bring us together, to unify us, to know the grace of God, to reconcile us together as one, if you don't think the cross is enough for that, to reconcile us to God and to one another, beware that it could be you're on the road to perishing rather than the road to salvation.

To us who are being saved, the message of the cross is the power of God. It is the power to forgive us our sins and give us a life everlasting in Jesus Christ, our

Lord. And there is no worldly way that that will ever do what the cross alone can do.

The wise man, the scribe, the debater of this age that tries to come along and peddle his talk and take advantage of a situation.

God is going to make foolish the wisdom of the world. He'll make foolish this fool, and he will be exposed for his foolishness.

There are people out there who are trying to sell the gospel. They're trying to peddle the gospel. And in so doing, they will cheapen it.

How much do I have to bring the price down here for you to pay for it and give me money for it?

And so you have folks out there are softening the word of God who are even saying, hey, you can be same sex attracted.

That's totally OK. You can even dabble in it a little bit. There are some who claim to be

Christians who go as far as saying that same sex unions are holy. That's Jen Hatmaker, for example, had said exactly that.

You know, the the guy who wrote the Message Bible, what was his name? Eugene Peterson.

There was at one point where Jonathan Merritt, who is an LGBTQ sympathizer, he got

Eugene Peterson, the author of the Message Bible, which isn't really a Bible. It's a

Eugene Peterson commentary is what it really is. Anyway, Merritt got Eugene Peterson to say to accept same sex marriage as being something that was of God.

But then once the Christian bookstores threatened to yank the Message Bible for Eugene Peterson say that saying that he changed his tune and he ended up going to his grave, never going back to affirming the

LGBTQ position. So therefore, the Message Bible got to stay in Lifeway stores until Lifeway stores couldn't even keep their own doors open and they tore down all their brick and mortar stores.

But you still find it at Mardell's and things like that. Anyway, I think Eugene Peterson kind of pulled back the curtain on his orthodoxy a little bit there.

Now, he he said that I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. But did he really, truly repent?

I find the Message Bible extremely problematic, regardless of Eugene Peterson repenting.

But that was one of those one of those situations, one of those circumstances that he thought he could please everybody.

And then even when the fire started getting hot around him because of what he said when he walked it back, that was also an attempt to try to please everybody.

So there are people out there that try to please everyone. And in so doing, they end up softening the word of God.

They end up changing the gospel. This is one of the reasons why Paul says that a pastor, an overseer of the church, must not be a lover of money.

That's talked about in First Timothy three and in Titus chapter one, because if you have a pastor who is a lover of money, first of all, the scripture says you cannot serve

God and money or God and mammon. But secondly, because if he loves money, he's going to be willing to change sound orthodoxy for the sake of getting money, of pleasing enough people that he can keep the money rolling in.

There's a lot of pressure on the church right now coming from the culture. I mean, there has been for 2000 years of church history.

But this pressure on the church, you either go along with this, you either side with these ideas, you either do what we tell you to do or we're going to punish you somehow.

And then there's a lot of churches out there that are willing to bend. They're willing to capitulate to go with the shift, with the shifting winds of the culture in order to keep the money coming in.

And they are selling the gospel cheap. God makes foolish the wisdom of the world.

People who go along with the wisdom of the world, they're going to be exposed as fools also. Repent, repent of this before the judgment of God comes.

Follow what the scriptures say, what the scriptures say, what we are reading here is of God.

This is the word of God. Thus saith the Lord. Verse 21. For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God. God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe people are not going to come to Christ because the church decided to do like a

Star Wars skit, right? The seeker sensitive efforts of the seeker sensitive church.

They'll try to do things, bring in some worldliness to attract worldly people. Well, as Paul Washer has said, and you've probably heard many other ministers say it as well.

If you win people with carnal means, it's going to take carnal means to keep them there.

What you win them with is what you win them to. If you win them with worldly ways, you're still going to have worldly people.

That's what you're going to produce. Worldliness produces worldliness, but godliness produces godliness.

You remain steadfast and fixed upon the true word of God, not changing it in any way, not shifting from it at all.

And what you will produce are godly people. The apostle Paul warns in First Timothy, Chapter six, that if anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words, those of our

Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, understanding nothing, but having a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words out of which arise envy, strife, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth.

Is that not what we see in the world right now? People who are latching on to things that are not of God, it's not the gospel.

It is not the message of Christ that produces godliness. So they go along with worldly ways.

And what do we see is the result of that? We see people who are disputing over words, are arguing about definitions of words.

They envy each other. That's that's the race wars that are going on right now. There's a lot of envy in that.

This person has this and that's what I want. And so I am going to manipulate people in order to have it.

We have strife and slander, people saying lies about other people. We see the strife and the riots, the conflicts and all this stuff that's going on in the world.

We have evil suspicions. We're just going to assume everybody is a racist. This white person, he's a racist by the fact that he's he's white.

That's that's an evil suspicion. Constant friction between men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth who suppose godliness is a means of gain.

They're using godliness to benefit themselves. They're they're peddling the gospel for a price that they might get rich from it.

This is what we see going on in the world. But this is not the way that we came to faith.

We didn't come to faith by these worldly ways of of twisting scripture in order to know

God. In the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God. God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message. Preach speaking sarcastically about the message of the gospel to save those who believe the world calls it foolishness.

But it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. It was through the message of the gospel that we came to salvation.

It is through the message of this gospel that we are growing in that salvation, growing in godliness, being made in the image of Christ until the day that he appears and we join with him in glory, fully sanctified in his presence forever.

We're going to pick up here in first Corinthians one next week. Our study in Proverbs tomorrow.

Heavenly Father, forgive us our sins. Forgive us for for wanting to be smarter than everybody else, for thinking that we know the right answers and everybody else needs to go with us.

How selfish we are when we proclaim ourselves in such ways. God has made foolish the wisdom of the world.

We have come to salvation because we have believed in what the world calls foolish.

And that is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is really the greatest wisdom that has ever been.

The greatest thing that we could ever find in this universe is the good news, the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Cleanse us by this. Grow us in holiness and righteousness according to your word. And may we not be ashamed of it.

Romans 1 16. Once again, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe to the

Jew first and also to the Greek. Give us courage to proclaim this message in a crooked and twisted generation.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen. For more about our ministry, visit us online at www .utt