WWUTT 1441 Nothing but Christ and Him Crucified (1 Corinthians 2:1-2)

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Paul told the Corinthians that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. And indeed, the

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Corinthians were puffing themselves up with their knowledge. He said, I decided to know nothing among you but Christ and Him crucified, when we understand the text.

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Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it.

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Visit our website at www .wutt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. In our study of 1 Corinthians, we are up to chapter 2. If you want to open up your

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Bible and join with me there, it's not a very long chapter. I'm going to go ahead and read through all 16 verses out of the

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Legacy Standard Bible. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. And when

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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

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

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But just as it is written, things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love

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Him. But to us God revealed them through the Spirit, for the

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Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the depths of a man except the

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Spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the depths of God no one knows except the

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Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the

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Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the depths graciously given to us by God, of which depths we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the

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Spirit, combining spiritual depths with spiritual words.

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But a natural man does not accept the depths of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually examined.

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But he who is spiritual examines all things, yet he himself is examined by no one.

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For who has known the mind of the Lord that he will direct him? But we have the mind of Christ.

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So beautiful, is it not? This is one of my favorite chapters of the Bible. It really is, especially when

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I was in high school, well, more college, when I was in college and trying to understand why my atheist friends didn't understand what

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I understood. How is it that I can read the Bible and I can see the power of God, but when they read the

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Bible, they see foolishness? And it was 1 Corinthians 2 that really answered all of those questions for me.

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And as I've grown in maturity and understanding this, humbles me that I not boast in myself and in my knowledge.

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Look at the research that I have done and come to this conclusion, but I boast in the Lord. Paul says when he comes to the

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Corinthians, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

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So he doesn't come in superiority of word or of wisdom when he proclaimed the witness of God.

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That's simply what he's saying here in these first two verses. So we've gone through 1 Corinthians 1, where Paul is confronted immediately some things that are going on there in Corinth.

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He expresses thanks for the Corinthians, despite the fact that, I would say in light of the fact that he has to confront some of these things that are going on in this church.

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It's not, I love you, but you know, no, he really loves them.

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And it's because he loves this church that he's confronting some of the problems that are going on in this church.

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So right away, here's the divisions that are going on among you. And these divisions are very superficial things.

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And they're based on Corinthians, putting their faith and trust on who they think is smarter and more knowledgeable.

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Because again, you've got Paul, Apollos, Cephas, Christ. And it's not that the

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Corinthians are following each one of these persons because they point them to the gospel. It's that I think Apollos is better because this.

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I think Peter is better because this reason. I think Paul is stronger in word because of this.

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But then Paul points out to them, has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?

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Were you baptized in the name of Paul? And then pointing out to the Corinthians, if you're going to go about this way of thinking that superiority of knowledge is what's going to win people to the gospel, well, the world is just going to call you foolishness because the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

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But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. It's not about winning people with intellect. It's not about winning people with the most persuasive words that we can use.

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Now, understand me, though, this does not mean that we can be lazy in our sharing of biblical truths.

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Like, hey, if it's God by his spirit that transforms people, then all I got to do is go out and say

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A, B, C, and D, and then that's it. And then the spirit will do his work. I think that there is a time and a place where we need to be real simple.

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And I think there's a time and a place where we need to be more complex. But no matter the situation, 1

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Peter 3 .15 tells us, be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you, but do this with gentleness and respect.

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That passage, in fact, begins with saying, in your heart, set apart Christ as holy, exalting

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Christ with all your heart, and then ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you for the hope that you have.

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Ready to give an answer means that we need to be prepared and we need to study hard truths and we need to go in depth with some of the finer points of doctrine that the

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Bible expounds upon. And when I say finer points, I don't just mean like second tier and third tier issues.

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I mean, there are essential truths that we need to understand in the Bible that go way, way deep.

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And as we mature in our understanding of those things, we get deeper and deeper into this truth.

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You look back on some of the finest theologians that the church has ever had, and they spend decades studying scripture to their dying day.

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They would say that they did not know all that there was to know about the word of God. We've got volumes of stuff that has been written more than the church has ever had in its history.

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And by the way, I mean, it's funny to say, because tomorrow there's going to be more stuff than there was today written about the

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Bible, written about the church every day that continues in the history of the church. We add more commentary, more exploration to the

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Bible. So you could do this your whole life long and you will never come to the end of it. I believe that when we get to heaven and we stand in the presence of God, we will be glorifying him for things that we did not know here on this earth, of course, because as it says in first John chapter two, we will see him as he is because we will be made to be like him in that moment.

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We will know fully just as we are fully known. That's coming up in first Corinthians chapter 13.

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But in the meantime, we make a pursuit of Christ, of coming to a knowledge and an understanding of him.

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And we we get deep into the word, deep into the scriptures. Now, maybe you're not gifted with a teaching ability.

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The scriptures are clear. And in fact, we'll get to this when we get to first Corinthians 12, that some have that gift of teaching and others do not.

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Maybe you just don't have a quick wit, so you can't debate. You're not that kind of person that people are going to come to you in a

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Q &A like, hey, tell me the answers to this and whatever, and then you can just spout off the answer. You just don't have a mind that works that way.

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We all still have a responsibility to study the word and know it deeply because we love

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God. That's the reason why we love God and we want to know him and we we want to learn from him and his word and grow in Christ.

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We grow in Christ. We grow in the knowledge of Christ. That all comes through reading the Bible. So we have a responsibility to study deep truths and listen to what other teachers have said about these deep truths.

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Commentaries are not scripture, but they can certainly help us understand the scriptures.

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So there is still this this responsibility that we all have to grow in the knowledge of God.

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We can't become lazy in this. We can't just sit back and go, hey, God's going to do his work. So it doesn't matter how much

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I know or whatever. I can just share these little basic things and then God's going to do more than that. You need to come to an understanding of who he is, according to what his word says.

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And this further equips you to be able to give an answer for the hope that lies within you when somebody asks you for an answer for the hope that you have.

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And our hope is Christ and everything that's wrapped up in Christ, understanding that he is

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God, that he was in the beginning with God, that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, that he is

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God incarnate, that he lived a perfect life, that he died on the cross for our sins as an atoning sacrifice, taking upon himself the wrath of God that we deserve because of our sin against God.

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He rose again from the grave, crucified for our trespasses and raised for our justification, as it says in Romans 425.

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What does that mean? So you learn about that when you study more in the scriptures. He appeared to his disciples for 40 days, showing that he had bodily risen from the dead and then ascended before their very eyes into heaven, where he is seated at the right hand of the throne of God, where the father is reconciling all things to himself through the person and work of Christ, making peace by the blood of his cross, is putting all of his enemies under his feet.

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And then a day is coming in which Christ is going to return with judgment in his hand and he will judge the living and the dead.

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Those who are in Christ Jesus will live forever in glory. Those who did not follow

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Christ but disobeyed the gospel will perish forever in eternal torment.

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There's there's the basic thing of the gospel right there. And yet there's so much more to it than that. Right. There's there's so many ways that we can go deeper into those things.

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And so we study this because we love God and we want to know more about about God and about his word.

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David, in Psalm 119, saying, Lord, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.

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Sometimes we have this aversion to the law because, hey, doesn't it say in Romans chapter six that we're no longer under the law, but we're under grace?

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And yet David says, I love your law. Paul says in First Timothy chapter one that the law is good.

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We read that also in Romans seven. It's the word of God. It reveals to us the righteous character of God. So it's good for us even to study the law.

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One of the reasons why we have an aversion to the law is because we don't study it. One of the reasons we make errors with a lot of prophecy that's even in the

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New Testament is because we don't study prophecy in the Old Testament. All of this stuff is relevant. It's all important.

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It all reveals to us something about God. So we need to invest ourselves in studying those things.

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But when it comes down to giving an answer for the hope that we have, this is not about proclaiming our superiority over somebody else.

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Paul makes that plane with the Corinthians. He's he's telling them they need to be humble. And he models himself as a picture of humility to the

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Corinthians. There's nothing wrong with that. When Paul says, hey, I'm humble, follow me.

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There's nothing proud in that statement. As he'll say later on in first Corinthians 11, one imitate me as I am of Christ.

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So it's not about Paul going, hey, I'm better than you guys. It's you need to you need to follow

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Jesus. So you need to look for those examples of Christ that you may imitate.

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And the apostles were all those examples. So Peter or Paul could appointed any one of the apostles and said and say, imitate them because they are of Christ.

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And he says that of himself, not boasting, but pointing to Christ. Imitate me because I am of Christ. So he comes to these

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Corinthians who are all kind of puffing themselves up in whatever knowledge that they can possess.

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And Paul says to them, when I came to you, it was not in superiority of word. I was not lording myself over you and showing what

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I know. And Paul was probably the smartest man on the planet at this particular time.

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I just recently listened to kind of a half hour biography on the

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Apostle Paul delivered by R .C. Sproul recently on renewing your mind. They've been taking messages from Sproul where he's done like these biographical messages on various characters of the

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Bible. There's been David, there's been Deborah. And recently, I think it was just this past week, he did the

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Apostle Paul. Incredibly fascinating. One of the things that Sproul points out is that Paul was a student of Gamaliel.

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I've talked with you about that before as well. Gamaliel was the pristine teacher in Israel at that time in among the

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Jews. Everybody who wanted to be anybody wanted to study under Gamaliel.

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And Paul did. And he was a rising star among the Pharisees. There was no one who knew more than Paul did.

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Everybody was looking at Paul for the knowledge that he possessed. And as I've shared with you before, it's very likely that Paul had the entire

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Old Testament memorized. That's just how good this guy was in his studies of the

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Jewish scriptures. And yet when he comes and he teaches to the Corinthians, as smart as this man was and all that this man had gone through, as debate savvy as he was, he doesn't come into Corinth with superiority of wisdom.

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Let me show up all these philosophers. I'm about to blow your minds. OK, that's not the way Paul came presenting himself in Corinth.

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He did not come with superiority of word or of wisdom. Proclaiming to you the witness of God, this is what he came doing, proclaiming the witness of God.

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

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This is not Paul admitting that he was stupid, that he was a fool or an idiot here.

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He was very, very smart. He knew that about himself, but he doesn't come exalting himself.

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He comes exalting Christ. That's what he means here. I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ.

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And him crucified, every word that Paul spoke and he taught to that church in Corinth was to point them to Christ, that they would be more like Christ, that they would grow in the knowledge of Christ, that they would have the mind of Christ.

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That's exactly the way we end chapter two here. Who is known the mind of the Lord? Who can direct him?

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We have the mind of Christ who is constantly directing us when we are filled with his spirit, when we are knowledgeable of his word, we are directed by Christ.

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We we submit to Christ. His authority is over our entire lives. May he govern our hearts.

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May he govern our thinking, our behaviors, all that we say and do. May it all be a testimony.

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May it all be glorifying of Jesus Christ, our savior. That's what

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Paul came doing with every word that he preached. So don't think too highly of yourselves. Make much of Christ.

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Some of you know that I used to be a big fan of the Bible answer, man, I've shared this before on this podcast several years ago when

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Hank Hanegraaff made his transition to Eastern Orthodox, he converted to to Eastern Orthodoxy.

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He left sound doctrinal teaching. And he went to Eastern Orthodoxy now,

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I mean, you can argue, well, he did that beforehand. Sure, sure, OK, but but without getting into the nuance and everything, you had this conversion that took place when

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Hank Hanegraaff became Eastern Orthodox. And I only learned from James White recently that this was because of Rod Dreher who had who had compelled

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Hank Hanegraaff toward Eastern Orthodoxy. And at that point, when we covered that on this program and on the

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Friday edition of when we understand the text, I said that Hank Hanegraaff is no longer the Bible answer, man.

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He's the he's the Eastern Orthodox Bible answer, man. Everything that he says now is going to flow from the doctrine of Eastern Orthodoxy and it's going to get further and further into Greek Orthodoxy or Eastern Orthodoxy.

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It will not be biblical Orthodoxy anymore. Now, I've stopped listening, listening to the

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Bible answer, man. I haven't listened to him now in years since his conversion. I've listened to maybe a half dozen episodes since then, but really not many.

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He's not in my podcast rotation anymore. I have not even followed what has been going on with Hank Hanegraaff. But every once in a while, somebody will send me something from him because they know that I used to be a listener.

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He used to be one of the most popular Bible programs on the radio in the world was the

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Bible answer, man broadcast. So just recently, I received something from somebody who said, have you seen this?

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That Hank Hanegraaff is now saying he's now teaching the perpetual virginity of Mary.

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And he recently was on his program saying, I repent, I apologize for forever teaching that Mary had other children other than Christ.

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I was wrong and I led people astray in this. I cover this in my book, 25

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Christmas Myths and what the Bible says. So if you want deeper teaching on this particular subject, even what's been taught in the history of the church, you can you can pick up that book, 25

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Christmas Myths and what the Bible says. Anyway, Hanegraaff cannot justify this with biblical teaching.

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It's nothing but Eastern Orthodox tradition. Catholic tradition is really where it originates from, the

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Roman Catholic Church. But it's from a a certain vein of heterodox tradition that Hanegraaff has latched onto.

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So once again, he's not the Bible answer man here. He's the Eastern Orthodox answer man.

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But as I was reflecting on this, as I was thinking about it, I listened to Hanegraaff's, you know, kind of change on the on the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

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And as I was thinking about that, I just thought to myself, how humbling. That this man who had this label that I would never want to call myself, that's quite a burden to place on yourself, the

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Bible answer man. So this guy who has called himself the

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Bible answer man has been humbled by God because he actually does not have all the answers.

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And it's it should be quite concerning to a lot of us, the direction that he's gone on a number of these doctrines, including the doctrine of justification by faith alone, because the

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Eastern Orthodox do not believe that we are justified by faith alone, but rather there are works that we do for our justification.

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And the humbling thing in that there is that I cannot think too highly of myself. If I ever get to a point where I think that I can come about this knowledge and these answers through this tradition of man or through my own ability or whatever name

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I give myself or anything like that, I'm going to find myself humbled by God very, very quickly because it is not about what

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I know. It is about Christ. It's not about making much of me.

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It's about making much of Christ. And what I'm proclaiming to you here is is not about how smart or great

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Gabe can be and what a great radio voice he has. I likewise want to have first Corinthians two to written on my heart in all that I do in preaching and teaching that I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified, pointing to the

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Savior. Now, again, that doesn't mean I get lazy in my preparation, in preaching and teaching.

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I have a responsibility to study this word and know it well that I may guide the people of Christ in the word of Christ, that they may be made in the image of Christ and may glorify

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Christ. We can't get there any other way but through the word of Christ.

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And so may this be our desire in our churches that we would make much of Christ and his word, that this would be our desire in our families.

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We're raising our children according to the word of Christ spouses, encouraging one another in Christ, that this would be our desire in our fellowships, in our relationships, sharing

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Christ with one another, that they may know the gospel of our God and so turn from worldly ways and become spiritual people through faith in the gospel.

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And so be saved. God bless us with this. Give us this desire that we may make much of you in all that we say and do.

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Though the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

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So help us to cling to it and share it because we know it's the power of God. In Jesus name we pray.

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Amen. For more about our ministry, visit us online at www .utt .com.