1 Corinthians 1:18-24

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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, PM service, April 26, 2009

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1 Corinthians 1:18-24

1 Corinthians 1:18-24

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I thought, considered that we might do this text this morning, and then the subject we did this morning.
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This evening, there might have been a logical reason to do that, but I felt that the discussion of the common objection to God's existence based upon His great judgment against people would be more fitting in the
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Sunday morning context. And so, this evening, looking at this text, certainly they're very closely related to one another.
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1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 18 through 24 will be our text for this evening.
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Before we look to the Word of God, let us ask Him to bless our time together. Indeed, once again, our
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Father, we pray that You would be pleased to visit Your people by Your Spirit.
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May we understand Your Word, remember and believe. We pray in Christ's name. Let's say you have the opportunity over the course of this next week, as Lord willing,
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I will, to apply some of the things we spoke of this morning in regards to God's righteous judgment.
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Let's say there is someone in your place of employment, someone at school, who has often raised objections to your faith based upon this idea that, well, this
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God that you serve is too stern, is not loving enough.
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He judges people. Look at what happened with the Amorites, or the
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Amalekites, or name some other Old Testament group, and hence the objection is made.
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And let's say you had the opportunity of sitting down with them. It wasn't one of those super -rushed conversations.
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It wasn't one of those situations where you had to, in essence, be very quiet in what you were saying.
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You had the opportunity of really going through things. And you start a conversation that leads to a lengthy witnessing encounter, maybe multiple sessions over time, something that hopefully everyone here has had that opportunity of having and look forward to having in the future as well.
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And yet, after all of your best efforts, and after much exposure to the truth of God, what will be the final deciding factor in how that person responds to what you say?
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Now, if you ask that question of many in our world today, the answer will be, well, it will all depend on how winsome you have been, how good your presentation has been, how accepting you have been, how comfortable you've made them feel, how much their heart has been warmed by how kind you are.
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Now, if you listen to what I just said, what was the focus of every single comment?
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The focus of every single comment was the person to whom you were speaking. How they felt, what their attitudes were, for many, many people today, that is, of course, the only way it can be whether a person is going to accept the gospel message is completely up to that person.
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He has his free will, doesn't he? He's a morally neutral agent, and if you just present the right facts to him, and you do it with a smile on your face, in fact, you can buy entire books on how to do it in the proper orders, and it's very appealing, certainly all of that will result in a positive response.
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But if you mess up, and if you aren't loving enough, well, maybe they might not accept what you have to say.
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That is how many people understand the gospel task, and it is not overly surprising to me that especially in an ever more anti -Christian society, that people don't really look forward to this thing called bearing witness.
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Because if you really speak the truth of what the word of God says, the natural man in this society is going to really look down upon you.
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You sound like you're spewing forth hate speech. You sound like you're talking about a
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God who judges sinners, and didn't you get the memo?
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That's the old style of Christianity. That's passed away. We need the new style. What will make the difference?
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I truly believe that as far as I can tell, and we know that all scripture is
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God -breathed, but that doesn't mean that all scripture is addressing the same subjects. And it's very clear that when you're talking about certain topics and certain subjects, there are certain texts of scripture that glow in the light that they can provide on that particular subject.
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It seems to me that the first chapter of Romans, that we looked at briefly this morning, in his discussion of sin, the third chapter of Romans, concluding that discussion of sin, and then these first two chapters of 1
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Corinthians, seem to distill down some of the key issues in regards to the natural man, his response to the gospel.
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There's all sorts of reasons for us to understand this in our day. Most of you are sitting there going, ah,
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White's got a debate this week, doesn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And so whenever he's got a debate, he preaches on something that's relevant to the debate so he has something to say, otherwise he's just saying it through stammering because his mind is someplace else.
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And so I always appreciate the patience of you all surviving me, preaching on things relevant to some person that I'm going to be going toe -to -toe with in front of an audience and video cameras in a matter of hours, literally, on Thursday evenings specifically.
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And that's true. But you know, as I was thinking about it, it's not just dealing with the nasty atheist that this text is so vitally important.
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It doesn't matter who you're talking to. Parents, talk to your children. Your children are so deeply influenced by the ways of thinking of the world today.
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Anyone that you work with, your family members, your lost family members, maybe you have family members who are nominally
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Christian and they're some of the most difficult people in the world to reach because they think they've already got it. Whatever it might be, the words of this text in describing the natural man and how the natural man responds to the gospel,
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I think, has to be understood. You may be speaking to a friend who's a part of a false religion.
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You say, well, does this really have to do with religious people? Yes. It has to do with people who are secular, people who are religious, people who are just debauched in their sin.
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It doesn't matter. The description that is provided here, I think, is extremely important to understand.
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Let's look at 1 Corinthians chapter 1. We'll just look at verses 18 through 24, and I'll draw a few comments therefrom.
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For the word, the preaching, the message of the cross is indeed to those who are perishing foolishness, but to those who are being saved, us, to us who are being saved, the power of God has been written.
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I will set aside or I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the understanding of the understanding ones
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I will place aside. Where is the wise person? Where is the scribe?
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Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish?
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That's a very strong term from which we get moronic. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
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For since in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not come to know
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God. God was pleased through the foolishness of what is preached. The message that is preached to save those who believe.
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For since Jews seeking after signs, the Greeks seeking after wisdom, but we are proclaiming
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Christ crucified. To the Jews indeed a scandal, and to the
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Gentiles foolishness. But to the call, the elect, whether Jew or Greek, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
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What a tremendous text. There is so much we could spend a great deal of time on each one of these verses, but I just want to hit the high points and sort of provide a foundation for some of the things that I said this morning, because the fact of the matter is, in the situation
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I just presented to you, you can do your best to present a wonderfully biblical answer to any objection that someone might raise.
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You might take time away from other duties and away from things you like to do, and you may delve deeply into the text, and you might provide this wonderful response to someone who has asked you a question, a reason, a hope that's within you.
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And you spend all this time, and it's very clear if they just would open their eyes, that you have spent a lot of time, you've invested yourself in this, and yet the response you get from it.
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Oh, I just don't like it. But what about this? This doesn't make any sense.
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And you're disappointed. And for a lot of folks, they do that once or twice, and say, oh forget it,
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I'm just not, my obvious effort's not cut out for this. But you see, the problem is, you need to realize that the motivation that you should have had all the way through the preparation of that material and the study that you were doing was first and foremost to glorify your
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God. You should have been concerned about having a deeper knowledge of His truth.
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And you need to recognize that even when you present a message and it is rejected, God is still glorified when
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His truth is proclaimed. Your faith has increased. Your foundation has been made more firm.
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I've seen many a person, with great zeal, was eventually burned out because they didn't have that important piece of information to realize
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God has a purpose, even when I speak to someone and they reject the truth.
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If we can learn anything from the prophets, do we not learn that? How many of them were wildly popular?
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How many of them have wildly popular ministries? Well, not many at all, in fact.
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And yet God was glorified in what? In their obediently proclaiming the message that He gave them, no matter how unpopular it was.
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And so, you may spend that time, and on the one hand, you find a person rejecting you.
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In another instance, you may not even feel you did as good a job. You may not even feel that you invested as much effort, and yet there is acceptance.
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There's interest. There's a moving on, and it seems this person begins to understand what the gospel message is, and there's conversion.
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What's the difference between the two? Well, I know that I'm talking to the
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Sunday evening crowd at Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. And in all probability,
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I could ask almost any one of you up here to finish the sermon, because you know, we emphasize all the time, it's
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God who makes men indifferent. It's God who, by His Spirit, opens hearts and minds. That's exactly what the apostle is emphasizing here.
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But you see, I think one of the reasons we need to repeat this in our day and age is because in the society in which we live, there is such an emphasis upon this idea of worldly wisdom.
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Worldly wisdom. You have your scholars, you see. And the scholars say this, and the scholars say that.
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And the scholars assure us that what you believe is not true.
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The scholars assure us that the Bible is not trustworthy. The scholars assure us that it's your
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SUV that's killing the polar bears. And that that's why you need to have your taxes doubled and tripled, so that we can save the polar bears by stopping the sun from warming the planet.
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There is such emphasis upon the wisdom of man. And much emphasis upon the foolishness of Christian faith.
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Now, some elements of that might be new, in the sense of the ubiquity of communication.
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Satellites, and the internet, and so on and so forth. The speed with which blasphemy can be communicated is indeed unparalleled in history.
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But the mockery of God's truth is nothing new.
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For some reason, when we experience it, we tend to think that we're the only ones who've ever experienced this.
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Oh, woe is me. But my friends, there's a great deal of strength and comfort to be obtained by the recognition that you stand in a long line of believers when you experience the look of disapproval of the world.
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The apostle knew all about it. The apostle very well knew what his audience wanted to hear him say.
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And what would have been popular had he said it. He knew.
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Paul was no dummy. Paul knew what would have been, what would have caught fire with his audience.
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Notice he talks about the fact that, well, the Jews, they seek after signs.
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And so if I really wanted to get the Jews excited, I would have sought to do miracles and signs.
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And it's obvious that when Paul went to Athens, looking around at all that was going on there, he knew exactly what would have caught their attention.
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And he had read philosophy. He was a learned man. He could have spun things in a particular direction.
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He knew what subjects to avoid if he wanted to get the adulation of those at the
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Areopagus. But he didn't. And that's because he had a fundamental recognition of how it is that people come to have saving faith in Jesus Christ.
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And no one has ever been tripped into saving faith in Jesus Christ. There have been many people who had their emotions manipulated.
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There have been many people that tripped into a religious experience. But saving faith is the work of the
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Spirit of God based upon the truth of God. And any time you compromise the proclamation of that truth, you're demonstrating you don't trust that spirit.
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They go hand in hand. And so what does he say?
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Paul says, I understand the preaching of the cross. What stays the same here?
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What's the consistency in this text? It's the message it's preaching. It's described in different ways.
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It's called the Word of the Cross. It's called the foolishness of God, the foolishness of what is preached. But it stays the same.
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What's the variable? Mankind's reaction to it. Mankind's reaction to it.
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Paul knows that the message of the cross, that thing which was so despicable and despised in that day, that message, to make it the center of your building the church, is from the world's perspective absolutely foolish.
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No one in that day could have possibly seen wisdom, worldly wisdom, in making the cross the centerpiece.
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It was revolting to people. It was revolting to people. The only people who died on crosses were the lowest dregs of society.
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You don't want to follow somebody who died on a cross. Sure, it's become religious art in our day.
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It's become something you wear around your neck in our day. But that's 2 ,000 years down the road.
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When it was first proclaimed, the only image that comes into the mind when you start speaking about the cross is agony and blood and gore and death and defeat.
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And so the idea that the preaching of the cross would be the means by which
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God would build his church, God would save his people, there are two groups of people described there in verse 18.
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Those who are perishing and those who are being saved. They're directly parallel to one another.
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There's nothing wrong in recognizing the ongoing nature of the Greek term there, those who are being saved.
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This is something God's doing. Just as there are those who are perishing, it's describing the very kind of life that these two different kinds of groups of people experience.
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And it is appropriate to say that a person outside Christ is perishing, not just that they will perish, but they don't have
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God's life. They're stealing life in a sense.
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But outside the proper relationship with God, they are not experiencing life in the way that we can.
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And those who are perishing, the message of the cross, the word of the cross, is foolishness.
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And it's not just foolishness in the sense of sometimes the term fool is used in the Bible, a person lacking understanding.
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It's not just that, well, this is beyond them. No, this is the kind of foolishness that you make reference to someone who's just simply the court jester.
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It's something to be mocked. And that is exactly what we hear today.
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All you have to do is turn on your television, and once in a while you'll see a proper
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British man. He has a wonderful British accent, and he sounds very wise when he's not inebriated.
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He's a very brilliant man named Christopher Hitchens. He doesn't drink water while he's debating.
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He's got something much harder there. So by the end of the debate, he's much looser at the beginning. But he's on television all the time.
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You want to debate him, come up with $20 ,000. That's what he gets for each speaking thing he does.
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So he's traveling around, and he's debating folks. Doug Wilson just did a series of debates with him.
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He debated at Westminster Seminary and stuff like that. And he sounds so wise, and he's very learned.
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Tremendous grasp of history and names and citations and quotes. And imagine what it would be like if he laid off the sauce.
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It would be incredible. But the world looks at someone like that, and they hear worldly wisdom.
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How does he respond to Christianity? With measured words of scholarly acumen?
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No. With gut -level hatred. He detests them.
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He detests Christ. He detests the cross. He detests the gospel.
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And he uses his considerable linguistic ability to make sure to mock it in the most blasphemous ways.
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Turn your television on and see that almost any time you want to. If you ever want to. The message of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness worthy to be mocked.
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Yet, there are those just as learned, just as brilliant, just as bright.
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They hear the message. And in it they find the very power of God.
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The very power of God. Those are the ones who are being saved.
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Now, it's not that by choosing to hear that this is the word, the power of God, that they become those who are being saved.
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No, no, no. The Apostle Paul is very clear. Those who are perishing, those who are being saved, that's
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God's activity. That's God's work. That's God's choice. But they hear the same message, and they respond differently.
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What does this tell us? It tells us that this myth of moral neutrality is a lie.
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There is nobody sitting there waiting to hear the gospel, and they're just right on the boat.
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And it's just a little breeze to push them over the right direction. Anybody who thinks that that's where the lost person is is going to find evangelism a very frustrating experience.
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It does not do honor to God's word to view things in that way. So you see,
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Paul draws from the Old Testament. And he says, the prophets knew about this.
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The prophets knew about this issue of the wisdom of man. And then he uses a description.
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He uses hyperbole. He starts talking about the foolishness of God. The foolishness of God is wiser than men.
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That which is foolish is wiser. He's obviously drawing a strong contrast, as he possibly can.
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But notice what he says. It is God's wisdom.
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It is God's wisdom that the world would not come to know
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Him through the means of wisdom. It's not the person who somehow manages to make it through the ontological argument that plows through Anselm and plows through the responses and works day and night for years and years until finally you climb up upon the philosophical mountain and there is
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God. That is not the method that God has chosen.
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That's what the wise of the world would like us to think. They'd like us to think that if we just would listen to them and we work hard enough, we'd eventually by the means of wisdom come to know
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God. Instead, it pleased God. It seemed good at God's sight through the foolishness of what is preached to save the ones who believe.
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The foolishness of what is preached. From the world's perspective, our message is foolishness.
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And woe be to the church when we stop believing this.
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Woe be the church when we try to dress up the foolishness of God as the wisdom of men.
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We are demonstrating that we do not trust the truth of the Scriptures and the work of the
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Spirit of God when we do this. I understand the temptation.
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But we need to understand that so did the Apostle Paul. And he addressed it. God is pleased.
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How does God save those who are believing? How does God save believers? Through the foolishness of the message that is preached.
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And that foolishness is focused upon the cross of Jesus Christ. He knows that his audiences are not going to like that.
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He knows what Jews want. He knows what Gentiles want. He knows how he could grab them.
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He says, no, I can't do that even though I know that when I open my mouth to speak the truth, when we proclaim
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Christ, we proclaim Him crucified. And I know that when my audience is filled with Jewish people, that will be a scandal.
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It will cause them to stumble. I know that.
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But I am constrained by the responsibility that is mine as an ambassador of Christ to speak the truth.
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Knowing what the response is going to be. I've never been dragged out of a synagogue and stoned.
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I wouldn't really want to experience that. Paul had.
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But I do know, I have had the experience of knowing that I had to say things,
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I had to deliver a message that was going to be offensive to the audience to whom
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I was delivering. That's not unusual for me. Last year
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I went over to California, northern California, near Berkeley.
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And I went on to a secular campus to do a debate on gay marriage.
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Quote, unquote. It's an oxymoron. That's why I put it in parentheses. It doesn't exist. And the thought crossed my mind that someone in that audience might start yelling and screaming.
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The thought crossed my mind that someone might throw something. And at the very least
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I knew there was going to be a lot of people in that audience that were not going to be coming up to me afterwards thanking me for my comments.
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When I was in London, a few months later, and the whole section over here, people dressed in erotic dress, women in full burqas, all
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I see are their eyes looking at me. And I know
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I'm going to have to look at them and say Mohammed was not a prophet of God. He misunderstood the doctrine of the
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Trinity. He was ignorant of these things. As a result, his teachings are in error here, here, and here. I knew that was not going to get me any invitation to come over afterwards for dessert.
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And I'm certain that Thursday evening, when I have to talk about men who suppress the knowledge of God, when
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I have to very openly say that everyone in that room knows the triune God of Scripture exists in the sense that God has revealed
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Himself to them, and that they're suppressing that knowledge, and that they're doing so in unrighteousness and in direct rebellion against God that the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all of that activity,
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I'm not so naive as to think that walking onto a secular campus, that that's going to be a really popular thing to do.
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And so I understand the temptation to try to find weasel words. I understand the temptation to try to find ways of getting around having to say the hard words like repentance and wrath and judgment.
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I understand that. But I also understand verse 24 of chapter 1.
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And I'm so thankful for these words. I'm thankful for the confidence that I have, a confidence born by the
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Spirit of God, but also one that is joined with study, that these were the words that the
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Apostle sent to the church in Corinth so long ago.
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This is what the Apostle said. And I'm so thankful that he said it.
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He knows that this message of Christ crucified is to the Jews a scandal on them, to the
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Gentiles absolute foolishness. Oh, your Creator died on a cross in Palestine.
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Good, yeah, sure. But to the called.
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Not to those who called themselves. To those who are the called, the elect, the chosen ones.
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Jew or Gentile. Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
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Those perishing, foolishness, a scandal. Those who are called.
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Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. One message received in two completely different ways.
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And what is the only functional difference? It is not the intelligence of the people who hear it.
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It is not the methodology of the delivery of the message. Paul himself said,
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I came to you with weakness of speech. I'm not... Paul doesn't hold himself up as the standard of methodology in that sense.
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What's the one thing that makes the difference? The call of God. The action of God.
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The work of God. The will of God. It's not in the people.
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It's in what God has done in changing. So one message that the world outside of the special grace of God that brings spiritual life to them the world calls foolishness.
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The very same message to us we see in the crucified Christ, the very power of God.
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We see in the crucified Christ the very wisdom of God. The world in its darkness, in its blindness, sees a
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Jewish peasant preacher, maybe an apocalyptic prophet of some kind who runs afoul of the authorities of the day and gets himself killed and that's it.
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End of story. But we see the very power of God.
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Prophecies given hundreds of years before their fulfillment woven together into the tapestry of the
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Old Testament. God working with the people and providing in His working with them the symbols and the pictures of the coming one.
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Through the sacrificial system pointing them away from themselves to God's provision of a means of salvation.
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We see the timing during the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, where there is a language that allows this message to go out all across the
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Roman Empire. We see the power of God in restraint when sinful men nail the
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Creator to a tree. The world sees weakness. We see
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God's power. The early church saw God's power because they saw that what happened in the crucifixion of Christ when they pray in Acts chapter 4, that which
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God's hand predestined to occur has taken place and even the power of Rome could not stop the building of the church.
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Christ, the power of God. Christ, the wisdom of God. The very one who created all things.
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The very one who holds all things together. We see the wisdom of God expressed in Him.
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Indeed, in comparison to Him, all the wisdom of man pales in insignificance.
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Why do we see that? And another who can hear with the same faculties, have very much the same background, the same language, for him or for her, is mere foolishness.
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That first phrase. But to those who are called. That call comes from God.
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That call is the demonstration of His grace. His mercy.
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That's why we can have confidence even in what seems to be a dark future. Because God has told us
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He will continue building His church. How does He continue building His church? He keeps calling His people into Himself.
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So when we look to the future, and we think of all the dangers that could be there, we have a
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God who has been accomplishing His purposes for many, many years.
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And He will continue to do so. And so I ask you to pray for the debate
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Thursday evening. I don't know who will be there. But sadly,
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I can tell you this. There is a high probability that very few of them who will be there have ever heard a thoroughly biblical defense of the faith.
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Oh, they've heard a lot of sub -biblical defenses of the faith. But it's highly probable they will expect me to do one thing and say, well,
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I can't do that. And so, it has been my experience.
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It's not the first time I've been on a college campus. Close to this story, one I may have told you before, maybe in Sunday school, but it's been a few years.
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It was also in Illinois. I was speaking at a church, and they asked me if I could one evening go to the local university campus and talk to some students there.
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And I said, I'll have you. What I didn't realize is they had something a little different in mind.
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When I got there, they showed me the flyer that they had distributed around campus. And the flyer said,
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Stump the Chum. And it said, Do you like to argue?
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You don't believe God exists? And here is the killer, free pizza. And then the time and the place.
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I thought I was going to talk to Christian college students about something.
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And right off the bat, a young man sitting sort of down this direction from me, blue hair and all red clothing, which
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I found somewhat ironic, stood up and started throwing all the common objections at me.
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We went back and forth. In fact, even after I got done with my talk, he pulled up a chair,
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I pulled up a chair. Guess who never got a bite of pizza in that whole meeting? And we talked for a long time.
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And in fact, I let him talk for a long time. I sort of kept giving him rope. Because you see, eventually, the person who's creating the image of God, they'll convict themselves.
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They live in God's world. They're still creating God's image. And they will give you evidence that they don't really believe the things they're saying.
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And it was cold out. I think it was in January, February. He had a leather jacket sitting on the chair.
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And at one point, I asked him, do you really even think that jacket exists?
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Do you have any basis for really believing that it exists? No, not really. How do you talk to someone when you can't even agree with them that their jacket is hanging on the chair?
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Well, I presented to him much of what I presented to you this evening in the sense of the centrality of the
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Christian world view, the fact that he is a creature of God and he lives in God's world.
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He's suppressing that knowledge. And then I closed with this. I said, now, when you leave, you're going to reach over and you're going to take your jacket because it's cold outside.
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And when you walk out of this building, you're going to walk on the certain side of the road.
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If you're going to drive a vehicle, you're not going to get in your vehicle and drive it down the left side of the road just in front of it. You're going to behave in a way that is inconsistent with what you've told me you believe about this world because you know better.
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And my prayer for you is every single time you borrow from my God's world, he will convict you that you're doing so.
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And he stood up and he looked at me and he said, no one's ever talked to you like that.
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Thanks. Everyone you talk to, they're created in the image of God.
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They've got a made -by -God stamp right on the underside. They may be hiding it all they can, but it's there. So we don't need to shave off the rough edges of the gospel.
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Proclaim the message of the cross. Those who are perishing, foolishness.
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God be praised. Those who are being saved, they're in power of God. Indeed, our
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Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have given to us the gospel, you have preserved it, and you use it by your spirit to draw men and women unto yourself.
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And you have been doing this in every language, tribe, tongue, people, nation.
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You continue to do it to this day. We ask that you would make us bold in glorifying you in the proclamation of the gospel this week.
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May you be glorified in what we do and what we say and do. Thank you for this day.
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Thank you for the opportunity you give to us to worship you and to know your truth.