Trinity 18
1
Cor 1:4-9
10/3/21
You have
been called by God. That is a theme the
resounds throughout the first nine verses of 1 Corinthians, and on into the
rest of the chapter. The apostle opens
this letter by writing: “Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of
Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,
To
the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ
Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every
place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and
ours.”
You will notice that first, Paul
acknowledges that he has been called by God to be an apostle of Jesus
Christ. This is certainly not something
that Paul ever expected. It is not something that he wanted. He told the Galatians, “For you have heard
of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God
violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond
many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I
for the traditions of my fathers.”
Paul was entirely satisfied in his
life as an enemy of Jesus Christ. He had
purpose, meaning, and he was having success in his career. But God had called
Paul by his grace and revealed his Son to him.
The apostle speaks about this in chapter fifteen of this letter as he
recounts the many people who had seen the risen Lord. Finally he adds, “Last of
all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”
Paul’s calling was not only to believe
in Christ, but also to the unique position of being an apostle of Jesus Christ
– his authorized representative charged with speaking the Gospel to
others. But at the same time, the
apostle stresses that each of the Corinthians - and each of you – have been
called by God. In verse two he describes
the Corinthians as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be
saints.”
Then, in the last verse of our text he
writes, “God is faithful, by whom you
were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” The
apostle highlights the faithfulness of God, and reminds the Corinthians that it
was God who called them into their present status – those who share in the
fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ.
Now in our text, Paul thanks God for how he has blessed the
Corinthians. He writes, “I give thanks to
my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ
Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech
and all knowledge-- even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed
among you-- so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift.” But things are not as simple here as they
look, because these are actually all issues that Paul is going to address in
the letter – problems that were present in the Corinthian congregation.
Corinth was teh “problem child”
congregation. Though Paul was the one who had first proclaimed the Gospel to
them, they were now critical of the apostle. They recognized that Paul’s speech
was not up to the standards that were expected of Greco-Roman rhetoric. They thought they had knowledge that enabled
them to take part in eating at pagan temples.
They were fixated on spiritual gifts and prideful about the status they
believed were provided by them.
Among these topics, I want to focus today
on what Paul calls “speech,” because it is the very thing that he goes on to
discuss in chapter one. The apostle
tells the Corinthians that the Lord sent him to “preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent
wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” Later he adds, “And I, when I came to
you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God
with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you
except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
Paul’s speech was not something that
the world would recognize as wise or sophisticated. Instead he had proclaimed the cross of Christ
– Christ crucified. We are so used to
the cross, that it is very difficult for us to understand how the message of
Christ crucified was perceived in Judaism and the Greco-Roman world. After all, we have crosses and crucifixes in
our churches, in our homes and on our bodies as jewelry.
Among Jews, crucifixion meant that a person had been cursed
by God, because the book of Deuteronomy said, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” Of course, it meant that person could not
possibly the Messiah – the Christ, because the Messiah was going to be the
victorious and mighty one. For the
Greco-Roman world, the cross was the most shameful and humiliating form of
death. Criminals died on the cross. They
died powerless, and in a manner meant to cause such great public suffering and
shame that polite society didn’t even talk about the cross.
That is why
Paul says in this chapter, “For the word of the cross is folly
to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it
is the power of God.” The apostle
admits that to those who are perishing – to those who reject the Gospel – the
world of the cross is folly. To put the
Greek into more colloquial English you could say that it is moronic.
And so Paul
goes on to add, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we
preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to
Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the
foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than
men.” Notice again our word “called.”
Yes, the crucified Christ was a stumbling block to Jews. Yes, the crucified Lord was folly to
Gentiles. But to those who are called –
to you – Christ is the power and the wisdom of God. He is God’s way of salvation that sounds
foolish and weak, but is actually God’s wisdom and strength.
God has called you. And only God could call you. To be sure, we sin in thought, word, and
deed. But the deeper problem of humanity
is that on our own we don’t even recognize that our sin has cut us off from God
and turned us against him. Paul says in
chapter two, “Now we have received not the spirit of the
world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things
freely given us by God.” It is only the
Spirit of God who can do this. Paul says
in this letter, “no one can say
‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” By contrast the apostle tells us that as
fallen people are conceived and born in this world, they are unable to
understand God and his salvation. He
says, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for
they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because
they are spiritually discerned.”
The cross sounds like folly.
It sounds moronic. But through
God’s calling by the Spirit, we instead recognize that it is the power and
wisdom of God for our salvation. We do because we are now able to perceive our
sinfulness. We understand that our
angry words, selfish actions, and lustful thoughts are sins against the holy
God. We confess these as sin, as we
turn in faith to the crucified Christ.
In our text, Paul says of the Corinthians, “you wait for
the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the
end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul says that the Corinthians – and you -
will be guiltless. He has already
described them – and us - as “sanctified
in Christ Jesus.” This means that we
have been made holy through Christ. Now
we know that in ourselves this is not what we are. But in the cross God
acted to change this.
In chapter
fifteen Paul provides a summary of the Gospel he shared with the Corinthians as
he says, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the
Scriptures.” Jesus’ death on the cross was not just another person dying at the
hands of the Roman Empire. Instead, it
was God acting once and for all time in order remove those sins and give us
forgiveness. In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “For our sake he made him to be
sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness
of God.” Jesus Christ the sinless One
took our sins as if they were his own, and received God’s judgment in our
place.
Jesus
Christ was crucified and buried, just like so many others across the scope and
history of the Roman Empire. And if that
were it – if that was then end of the story – then Christ crucified would be
nothing more than folly. But as Paul
says in our text: “you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of
our Lord Jesus Christ.” You don’t wait
for someone who is dead to be revealed.
But the apostle Paul, the Corinthians, and we wait for it because Jesus did
not stay dead. Instead, on the third day God raised him from the dead.
In chapter fifteen Paul says of the resurrection: “For I
delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ
died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was
buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the
twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time,
most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he
appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” And of course, he also appeared
to Paul on the road to Damascus.
Paul and the apostles went forth to proclaim Christ
crucified. They went forth to proclaim a
message that they knew was a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles – it
sounded moronic to the Greco-Roman world.
But they knew it was God’s wisdom for salvation because Jesus Christ has
risen from the dead. They struggled, and suffered, and even died in order to
proclaim this Gospel because they knew that the risen Lord has conquered
sin and death.
God has called you to faith in the crucified and risen Lord
through the work of his Spirit. He has called to into the fellowship of his
Son. In baptism “you were
washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” When you stumble in sin, that same baptism
remains, ready to be grasped in faith, for through it you continue to receive
forgiveness and the work of the Spirit who strengthens you.
Like the
Corinthians, we wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our risen Lord has ascended into heaven. He has been exalted to the right hand of
God. He intercedes for us. And he will
return in glory in the Last Day – the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. On that day he will raise our bodies from the
dead and transform them to be like his own. This is the hope that we have
because Christ was crucified and then rose from the dead. This
is the hope that we have because God is faithful, and he has called us into
the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment