WWUTT 1443 Among the Mature We Impart Wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:6)

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So, Paul said to the Corinthians that he did not come to them in superiority of word or of wisdom.

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But that doesn't mean Paul did not have wisdom to share. The wisdom that he taught them is the wisdom of God, when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's word, that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will.

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For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We're back to our study in 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

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I'll read the first eight verses here in the Legacy Standard Bible. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

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And when I came to you, brothers, I did not come with superiority of word or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the witness of God.

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For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.

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And my word and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power, so that your faith would not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

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Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

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But we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the wisdom which has been hidden, which

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God predestined before the ages to our glory, which none of the rulers of this age has understood.

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For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

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This is the word of the Lord. And we pick up today in verse 6 with Paul saying, we do speak wisdom among those who are mature.

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Remember, he starts the chapter by saying, I did not come to you with superiority of word or of wisdom.

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I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. But it's not as if Paul came to them with nothing to say.

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He did have something to say to them. But the power of the word that he said was not in his ability to convey it or in his superiority of intellect.

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It was the power of God, the Holy Spirit working through the words that were spoken.

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Because this is a word that comes not from man. It comes from God.

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So critically important for us to understand the words that Paul said here are the words of God.

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Hence why I finished reading these eight verses by saying, this is the word of the Lord.

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And anytime your pastor, if he is faithful to the teaching of the scriptures, when he will read the scriptures at the pulpit, he'll conclude by saying, thus sayeth the

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Lord. Or this is the Lord, whether it was written by a prophet or written by an apostle or whether the letters were in black or whether the letters were in red, whatever it is that we read there in the scripture, it comes from God.

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This is not Paul saying one thing and Jesus says something else. And I see this, this contrast made all the time or this conflict created between Paul and Christ.

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When a person does that, they commit the same error that Paul had to rebuke at the start of this letter.

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Some of you were saying, I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas and I of Christ. Has Christ been divided?

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So as Paul is confronting that error, that we see that same error committed by those who want to say, well, we should listen to Jesus and not the words of Paul.

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I saw a tweet from somebody recently, something said on Twitter where a person said, we need to focus on having

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Christ like marriages, not biblical marriages. I'm tired of seeing biblical marriages.

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Let's have a marriage that is modeled after Christ. It's the same thing.

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A biblical marriage is a Christ like marriage. If you are building your marriage from what the

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Bible says about marriage, then you're building your marriage on Christ. If you desire to have a

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Christ like marriage, then you're going to have a biblical marriage. You cannot separate Christ from his word.

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All of the Bible is the word of Christ. The words of the apostles were the words of Christ.

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When you read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you're not reading what Jesus wrote down. You're reading what an apostle wrote down that Jesus said, and then

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Jesus gives more teaching to the apostles to go out with. And what is said comes from God.

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Beth Moore has also made this error of separating the word of an apostle from the word of Christ.

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She said, I believe wholeheartedly that all scripture is inspired by God, authoritative truth.

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But the persons themselves, Paul and Jesus, are not equals.

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Notice the sleight of hand she uses here. I go on, quote, I know this is hard for some to swallow, but Paul is not our savior.

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Paul would be horrified, I believe, by the way he has been deified, unquote.

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That is a ridiculous statement. No one who takes the words of Paul as the words of Christ has deified

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Paul. Nobody does that. If a person takes Paul's word as Christ's word, it's because they fear

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God, not because they have deified the apostle Paul, because they witness what

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Paul is talking about here, that the word that has come from the apostles came in power, in demonstration of the spirit and of power, not by the lofty wisdom of man, not by the superiority of word or wisdom of the apostle

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Paul, but because the spirit of God has worked through him. I mentioned earlier that Paul was a genius, yes, smartest man on the planet during his time, most likely.

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As R .C. Sproul has said this about the apostle Paul and said the same of Jonathan Edwards, too. During his lifetime,

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Jonathan Edwards may well have been one of the smartest men, if not the smartest philosopher on the planet.

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So Paul was that during his age. And yet, despite how smart he was, he puts all of that aside to exalt

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Christ. He says to the Philippians, gives his autobiography to the Philippians and says,

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I count all of these things as rubbish for the surpassing greatness of Christ, that I may proclaim

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Christ and him crucified. And that is what Paul has to share with the

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Corinthians here, the word of Christ, not his word. So he wants them to see Christ even back in chapter one, where he was saying, you know, you guys in Corinth are saying,

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I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Cephas, I'm of Christ. You're dividing this thing. We are servants of Christ.

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All of us are pointing to Christ again, as he says at the end of chapter two, verse 16.

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We have the mind of Christ. That's what we should desire. We're submitting ourselves fully unto the

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Lord so that all of our thoughts, our actions, our words, everything we say and do may be a testament unto him and his power that has transformed our hearts from being

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God haters to God worshipers. This is all by the power of God in us.

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So Paul says, this is not my word, it is God's word. Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, verse six.

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So I decided, I determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified. That doesn't mean

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Paul has nothing to say. He does have a wisdom to share with them. It's just not the wisdom of man.

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It is the wisdom of God. We do speak wisdom among those who are mature.

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Now the interesting thing about this is we really don't resolve that statement until chapter three.

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We do speak wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

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Who is he referring to regarding the mature? It's not the Corinthians. When you get to chapter three, beginning in verse one, and I brothers was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ.

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So this is still part of his rebuke. And he's saying to them, you should be among the mature.

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You should be among that group who is now receiving deeper truths, but you can't be because you're still divided over superficial things.

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You're not probing the deep things of God. You're still fighting over surface superficial stuff.

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Consider Hebrews chapter five, starting in verse 11 concerning him. We have much to say, and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing for though by this time you ought to be teachers.

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You have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food for everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness for he is an infant.

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But solid food is for the mature who, because of practice, have their senses trained to discern both good and evil.

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So there is an expectation among us as Christians, not just that we would be converted and follow

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Christ, but we must mature in what we believe as well, that we may graduate into deeper truths.

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Now, let me be clear about this. You will never, never, never, never, never, never, never graduate from the gospel into anything else.

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Everything that you learn in Christ is going to flow from the gospel. That was the point of Paul's letter to Timothy.

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His first letter to Timothy is about holding fast to the gospel and make sure everything that is taught and everything that is practiced in the church flows from that, begins by saying, don't let anyone teach anything different, because any different doctrine is not going to guide people in the truth of God and therefore be sanctified in that truth, growing in holiness and righteousness in Christ likeness.

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That can only happen through the gospel. Now there are deeper levels of the gospel that we will get into as we mature.

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You don't graduate from the gospel, but you do move up in the gospel. Now later on here in chapter two,

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Paul says this, now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may know the depths graciously given to us by God, of which depths we also speak.

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So if Paul's analogy here is depths, do we really want to say we're moving up in the gospel? Shouldn't we want to say like we're probing deeper in the gospel?

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Well, moving up is deep. Like you're recognizing as you continue to ascend in the gospel, as you draw closer to God and you become more

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Christ -like, you're recognizing just how deep this thing is. I'm still going up. Boy, how deep, how vast is the knowledge of God?

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And that's the picture that Paul is painting here. So we're never going to come to the end of that in this lifetime. As I said to you earlier this week, how vast and how deep is the knowledge of God?

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Paul prayed for the Ephesians that they would come to recognize God's love in this way, how vast it truly is.

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So we're studying an infinite God here. How could you come to the end of the knowledge of an infinite

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God? Paul does say this wisdom that we speak, it is for the mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

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Now, we need to be careful with that word rulers. There are several different ways that this word rulers is used.

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A lot of times we think of rulers as being in a spiritual sort of a context. Ephesians 3 .10

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says that we preach the gospel so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

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Just as Paul will later say in Ephesians 6, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

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This is the ministry that we're doing when we evangelize. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but that this person that we are sharing the gospel with has been ensnared by the devil.

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So punching the guy in the face is not going to make him saved. We don't, through physical force, bring a person into salvation.

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It has to be the spiritual forces that are at work, warring for that person's heart that is going to transform them from someone ensnared by Satan to someone set free in Christ.

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And Paul talks about that with Timothy. You can look at 2 Timothy 2, verse 25 for more of that as well.

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So that's why our battle is not against flesh and blood, but we're battling against the snare of Satan that that person is in so that they would be set free by the power of the gospel of God.

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Paul will use a similar sort of language about rulers in Colossians. Colossians 1, 16, by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

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And then later on in chapter two, verse 15, he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.

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There's two letters of Paul where the word rulers is used to refer to spiritual powers,

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Ephesians three and six, Colossians one and two. So is that the usage here in first Corinthians chapter two?

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We do speak in wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished because isn't

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Jesus defeating his enemies? So he's defeating all of these spiritual rulers, right?

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The rulers in the heavenly places. No, we're really talking about rulers on earth here.

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Specifically, those who would rule in the synagogue, those who govern teaching now here as he's talking to the

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Corinthians, it may very well be talking about like the chief philosophers among the

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Greeks, as well as those who preside over the teaching in the synagogues. Anybody whom you would consider to be an intellectual authority,

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Paul refers to here as a ruler. And we have that word ruler used in that way in the scriptures as well, throughout the book of Acts, everywhere in Acts that the word ruler is used.

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It's in regards to somebody who is governing over teaching. Acts four, five, the rulers and elders and scribes gathered together in Jerusalem.

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Verse eight, then Peter filled with the Holy Spirit said to them, rulers of the people and elders.

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Even with regards to Corinth, when Paul was preaching to the Corinthians in Acts chapter 18, we have a reference to rulers in the synagogue.

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Verse eight, Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord together with his entire household.

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So we have this reference to rulers here with regards to earthly teachers. That's that's what we mean when we're reading here in First Corinthians, chapter two, verse six,

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Paul saying, we do speak wisdom among those who are mature. A wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

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We speak a wisdom of the age that is to come. That's what we have in the gospel of God.

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That's what we have. Understanding Christ and him crucified, who rose from the dead and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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He is ushering in the final age as this age is coming to an end.

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And we're looking forward to that eternal age where we will be with God forever in his perfect kingdom.

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So all of the things in the present age are coming to an end, not of this age, nor the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

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Earlier, where Paul talked about where is the wise man, where is the scribe, where is the debater of this age?

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Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? That's in First Corinthians one, verse 20, who

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Paul is describing there. That's the ruler of the age. Where's the wise man ruler of the age?

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Where's the scribe ruler of the age? Where is the debater of this age?

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Has not God made foolish the wisdom of these worldly rulers?

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And this is what God is bringing to an end. This is what is being abolished by the gospel.

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And as it is going out and it is spreading as more people are being added to the numbers of the kingdom of God, the old is going out.

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The new is coming in. The old is gone. The new has come. The rulers of this age and their teaching are being abolished.

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Verse seven, but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the wisdom which has been hidden, which

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God predestined before the ages to our glory. This thing that God is doing through Christ, this is not plan

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B. It's not God looking at all this going, oh, man, boy, I really messed up. Israel really messed up.

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I tried to do this thing with Israel. They didn't succeed. So you know what? We got to we got to be done with the thing with Israel.

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Let's start this new thing called the church. I'm going to bring the Savior through Israel. And then and then we're just going to have the church after that.

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Right. That's that's not how this works. God predestined that all of this would be exactly like this.

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As I read with my kids recently, Genesis chapter 50, we went through the story of Joseph from Genesis 37 to 50.

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And there in chapter 50, verse 20 is where Joseph says to his brothers, you did this for evil, but God meant it for good.

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You meant it for evil. God meant it for good. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. He ends up a ruler in Egypt, and he saves that part of the world from the famine that was coming upon them.

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God did this. He even worked through the evil that his brothers did so that he might save many persons through the wisdom of God that he ruled with while he was there in Egypt.

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This this was not something that God was trying to make the most of a bad situation. This was how

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God intended for this to be so that Judah would be saved in the midst of the famine and from his line would come

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David and from his line would come the Savior. I mean, that's that's really the ultimate picture that you're looking at there in the book of Genesis, the promised seed who was to come.

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All of this has been by the sovereign hand, the glorious decree of God from before the ages began.

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God is not winging it here. He has a plan decreed from before the foundation of the world.

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And man, I just have more to say about this. I really wanted to complete through verse eight today, but I want to say more about this because it's it's just so good.

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Continuing on in verses seven and eight. So let's save that until next week. We'll talk more about the wisdom of God, which has been hidden, but has since been revealed in Christ.

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And we even know how the story ends because of the revelation that was given by the father to the son and shared with John.

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That revelation is the last book of the Bible, all of that coming through Christ. Christ has revealed all of this to us that which once was hidden, which was a mystery

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God predestined before the ages to our glory, which none of the rulers of this age has understood.

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For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Let's pick up there next week.

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Heavenly Father, we thank you for this good word. And I pray that all that we do would be with heaven in mind.

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As we are told in Colossians chapter three, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

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When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

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Jesus saying in Matthew 6, 33, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the things that you need will be added to you as well.

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So all that we say and do, we do with eternity in mind. That's the mature mind that we need to have.

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That's the ascent of the knowledge that we possess through the spirit of God, that our minds would ascend to the throne of God, thinking with the mind of Christ.

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Forgive us our sins. Humble us before you. Help us to be humble to one another and show mercy as God has shown mercy to us.

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It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the

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Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study.

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Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book. On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers.