God’s Mysterious Message

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There’s a little museum in the old Choctaw Nation Capitol building. And the last time that the kids and I dropped in there, there was an exhibit about the Code Talkers. And some of you may be familiar with the story of the Code Talkers.

They made a movie a few years ago, maybe several years ago now, about the Navajo Code Talkers during World War II. That’s where most people are familiar with it. I didn’t realize that Choctaws were doing it back in 1917, 1918.

in the First World War. And there’s this exhibit that’s part of the museum talking about the Chalk Talk Code Talkers in the First and Second World War. And one of the things that I thought was really neat about it was you could pick up a handset.

It looks like, just looks like a telephone, but like they would use, and I’m, some of you military guys are going to, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t. I don’t know what you call it, but the little radio, it looks like a but it’s a radio, you know what I’m talking about.

You could pick that up and you could listen in, and they had a recording of what it sounded like to listen to these code talkers speaking Choctaw. And the idea behind the code talkers was they would take a language that the enemy already wasn’t familiar with, so you’ve got one level of encryption there already, no Germans were over here studying Choctaw. You would take a language they weren’t familiar with, and then you would further by developing a code in that language that even native speakers of that language wouldn’t be able to guess.

And the kids and I listened for a few minutes to this message, and the idea there is to see if you can figure out what they’re saying, and I couldn’t. I am nowhere near fluent in Choctaw. I’ve picked up a few words, and if they were talking slowly enough, I might pick up on, okay, they said the word turtle, okay, they said the word river.

Had no idea, though, even picking up on those words what they were talking about, that they were talking about such and such battalion moving to this sector of the battlefield. Had no idea. When they tell you at the end, even if I spoke Choctaw fluently, I never would have picked up on that from what they were saying.

And so the idea was that you would have multiple people from the same tribe and you would put them with various squadrons and train just them in that code. And they already spoke the language, but trained them in that code. And it made it into a code that the Germans were never able to crack.

Not only when the Choctaws did it, when the Navajos did it. Back-to-back world wars, we pulled that stunt. And you’d have thought if they knew they were ramping up to another world war, they would have sent some people over here to study the native languages.

But even people who are fluent in those native languages couldn’t pick out the code. So what chance did the Germans have? To somebody who was initiated, to somebody who had studied the code, it made perfect sense what they were talking about.

But to somebody who didn’t know the code, somebody who might have known the language, it made no sense. And what the Apostle Paul says about the gospel, as we come into 1 Corinthians 2 in our study of 1 Corinthians, what he says about the gospel in the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 2 me of that code. That to those of us who have experienced the gospel, to those of us who have experienced what Christ does in us and through us, it makes perfect sense.

That doesn’t mean we can that we can explain every detail of it. Can I explain to you in excruciating detail how the Trinity works? No, I can’t.

Can I explain to you even the truth behind that simple song they sang, Jesus loves me, this I know. Can I explain to you why Jesus loved me enough to go to the cross? Can I explain why Jesus would love any of us enough to go to the cross?

I can’t explain that. His love is far deeper than any of ours. I can’t explain that.

And yet the gospel, as he’s revealed it, we understand it. But to the world, to those who have not experienced the gospel yet, it sounds, as he said last week, as we studied last week, it sounds like foolishness. And so Paul, a couple of times in this passage and elsewhere throughout his writings refers to the gospel as a mystery, because to those who have not yet experienced its power, it’s mysterious.

It makes as much sense as that code. And so I want us to look this morning at why this is, why it’s important that we understand that, and how we’re supposed to respond to that. And so if you haven’t already, take out your Bibles and turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

1 Corinthians chapter 2. Once you find If you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. If you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible, it will be on the screen here for you so you can follow along.

We’re going to look at 1 Corinthians 2, the first nine verses of this chapter. There’s some overlap between this and what we talked about last week and what we’ll talk about next week, Lord willing. Because this wasn’t originally divided into chapters and verses.

That was something that came later for us to be able to find things more easily. So there’s a continuity throughout this. So there’ll be some overlap.

But this morning I want us to focus in on this idea of God’s mysterious message in these nine verses. It says, starting in verse 1, And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my message 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 rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. Yet we do not speak wisdom, I’m sorry, 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 passing away.

But we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood. For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 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 him.

And you may be seated. Paul is continuing with this theme that I shared with you last week about the foolishness of the gospel. When Paul calls the gospel foolish, he doesn’t mean that it’s actually foolish.

He’s saying that to the world it looks foolish. To the world it does not make sense. And we just sort of have to be okay with that.

There’s this idea that we have to retool the gospel periodically to make it palatable to the culture, to make it understandable. The gospel by its very nature looks to the world like foolishness. And we can either wring our hands about that and try to change the gospel and make it something that’s more respectable, or we can just accept that that’s the way God made it and go on.

And honestly, I’d rather stick with the latter, because if you change the gospel, it’s not the gospel anymore. But he’s acknowledging here that there is this sense in which the gospel does not make sense to the natural mind. It doesn’t fit with our society’s expectations of what a message from God or from the gods ought to be.

But Paul isn’t looking for something that makes sense to the human mind. He’s looking for something that makes sense to God. And he makes clear all throughout this passage that he’s not looking for human results, and so he doesn’t use the methods of ministry that humans would expect and that humans would invent.

As a matter of fact, I think the key to this passage is verse 5, where he says, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. Paul, as he’s preaching the gospel, as he’s ministering to people, is not trying to accomplish things in his own power, and he’s not trying to do what he can do. He’s being obedient to God and speaking the things God told him to say and preaching God’s message, whether it fits with anybody’s expectations or not, and trusting that God will do what God can do through that message.

And so we need to understand this morning that Paul’s standpoint on the gospel and changing the gospel and making the gospel more palatable is that you don’t look for a human message. You don’t look for, if you and I were going to sit down and develop a life-changing program, Something that would help people and transform people. What you and I would come up with from a human standpoint is very different from what God came up with.

But human methods can only produce human results. We can only accomplish so much. We can only bring about so much change in ourselves.

And even when we do change something, it’s not all that long-lasting usually. That’s why I had great success with Weight Watchers for about two years and then spent the next two years finding absolutely no motivation to do it anymore because I just want to eat stuff, you know. You can change for a little bit.

You can change something, but it’s hard to transform yourself. We’re humans. Human methods can only produce human results.

It’s even more true in spiritual things than it is in our practical everyday lives. And so Paul tells the church at Corinth about some of the things that he did not bring with him when he came to do ministry in their midst. If you’ll recall a couple weeks ago, in the middle of chapter 1, he talks about how he did not come to baptize. Meaning, not that he’s against baptism, but that wasn’t the focus of his ministry because he was not trying to build a following for himself.

It was all about building followers of Jesus. He wanted the people at Corinth baptized, but his goal was to preach the gospel and bring them to Jesus and let the church baptize and disciple them. So he says when he came preaching the gospel, it was not about how eloquent he was, how powerful a speaker he was, how dynamic he was.

He said, here are some of the things I did not come with, I didn’t bring with me when I came to preach the gospel in your midst. He said he didn’t come in verse 1 with superiority of speech. That word superiority means to come in a pompous way. He didn’t come and try to wow everybody with his eloquence.

I’ve been at conferences and conventions before where they’ve brought out speakers who were really well-polished speakers. Just flawless. It was like they were reading it, but with passion, and yet there was nothing there for them to have read it from.

You could tell that they had memorized and rehearsed, and not just their words, but every tone of voice, and every rise and fall of their voice, and every motion they made, it was all rehearsed. And I’ve left some of those thinking, I have no idea what he said, but he said it really well. I thought, I wish I could be that polished, that, you know, dream things that are possible.

But Paul’s saying, I didn’t come in that way. I didn’t come in with this grand persona of my eloquence, where I would just, by the power of my words and the power of my presentation, that I would just have people on the edge of their seats. Paul’s basically saying, people are not coming to Christ because I’m the greatest speaker out there.

And that was an important thing for the Corinthians to understand, because in their culture, they wanted to hear people who were excellent speakers. Somebody who could turn a phrase well. But he didn’t come trying to wow everybody with his eloquence and his charisma.

He also said in verse 1 that he didn’t come with superiority of wisdom. He didn’t try to blow everybody away with the novelty of his arguments. He didn’t try to come up with some new argument that was going to tickle their intellect and make them go, hmm.

And we see how important that was to the Greeks in Acts chapter 17, where Paul goes and presents the gospel. And some of the people say, we’ve never heard this before. We’d like to hear more because it was new and it was novel.

And when people hear the gospel for the first time, it is going to be novel, but it’s not the novelty of the gospel where its power lies. If Paul came in and preached the gospel to a group of people who’d heard that all their lives, it’s nothing new. I got dragged to church and heard that all my life growing up.

That’s the same old message. God could still use that. The Holy Spirit could still move because it’s not the novelty of the argument, it’s the truth in it.

So he says, I didn’t come with superiority of wisdom. He wasn’t trying to impress everybody by having something new to say. Instead, he says in verse one, that he came proclaiming the testimony of God.

And there’s some debate among scholars whether the appropriate word there, the appropriate translation is testimony or mystery. I tend to think that it’s mystery. However, whichever word is picked there, whichever word belongs there, the point of verse one is that he came speaking God’s message.

Whether it was the testimony of God, whether it’s the things that God revealed to him and Paul was testifying, or whether it’s the mystery of God, something only God could unlock, and then Paul went and told it. The effect is the same. Paul is going and proclaiming a message that came from God, and that’s where the power of the message lies, not in Paul’s presentation.

Paul is saying, I’m not coming to be the pied piper of some new religious movement. I’m just a mouthpiece. I just open up my mouth and say what God tells me to say.

Whether it fits with what the culture expects, whether it fits with what you’re looking for, whether it works for you or not, just sharing God’s message. So he came to explain things that used to be hidden that God had revealed in Jesus Christ, the plan of salvation. God foretold and God hinted at throughout the Old Testament, but only when it was time did God fully reveal the plan of salvation in Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ came, when he died on the cross, when he rose again from the dead, when he sent his followers out to proclaim that message, suddenly the veil was torn back and we could fully understand.

We could fully see, we could fully glimpse what God had been planning all along. So Paul didn’t see any need to invent his own material. He’s not saying, well, how do I keep it fresh? How do I come up with something new they’ve never heard?

How do I develop a following? How do I bring in more people to occupy the seats? How do I bring in more money?

How do I bring in all these things? He simply set out to tell what God had done. And that’s the power of the gospel.

You know, and we may have to approach it from different standpoints. I’ve talked about this before. Some people have absolutely no biblical background.

There’s a member of our church who some of you got a letter about. He’s planning to go on a mission trip to the Brazilian rainforest at the end of this year. He may be going into villages where people have never heard the gospel or heard any of God’s word.

As you talk to somebody in a far off village who’s never heard anything about God’s word, You may have to start with Genesis. I’m not saying you camp out there for six weeks, explain the Bible to them verse by verse, but you may have to go back to the creation and explaining that God created us for perfect harmony with Him. You have to explain the fall and where sin came from.

You have to go back and lay a biblical foundation. In our culture, there are people who are familiar with all of that, are familiar with the idea of sin, are familiar with the idea of God’s holiness. Their struggle is they think they have to work and earn it and do something to get the forgiveness.

And so dealing with somebody like that, you come at a different angle. You may adjust the approach, but we’re never changing the gospel. We don’t have to dress the gospel up.

We don’t have to build attractions around the gospel. Paul’s saying here his job is just to tell what God’s done. And by the way, if you’re ever scared to death to tell somebody about Jesus Christ, I get that.

I hope it doesn’t inspire a lack of confidence in me as your pastor to admit that. But I understand that, that knot in your stomach, that lump in your throat, when you step forward to tell somebody about Jesus because you don’t know how they’re going to react. I understand that better than you think.

You don’t have to have magic words. You don’t have to have the answer to every question they present. Your job, like the Apostle Paul, is just to tell what God’s done.

And then if a question comes up that you can’t answer, then we’ll deal with that because somebody can. There’s no question that somebody’s going to ask today that has not already been asked and answered. But Paul was determined to make the main thing the main thing, So he said, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

He said, let’s just stick to this, what he called in the previous chapter, a foolish message. Let’s just stick to this and let it do its work. Well, no, preacher, if I go tell people about Jesus, I’m going to have to know the answer to where Cain’s wife came from.

It’s what we call a red herring, right? That’s a distraction. Oh, yeah, well, what about genocide in the Old Testament?

That has nothing. We can deal with that, but that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, Christ and him crucified. Well, aren’t there, I don’t know, how would they fit that many animals on Noah’s Ark?

That has nothing to do with Christ and Him crucified. Now, I believe there are answers to all those questions. But you want to focus on preparing yourself to talk to somebody?

Focus on Christ and Him crucified. And then deal with the other stuff as it comes up. But so often, religious leaders, they do it today, they did it then, they were looking for something new and innovative to try to develop a following.

But the problem is, when you come up with human methods, you get human results. You get things that we can do, things that we can accomplish. And I know me, I can’t accomplish that much, especially when you compare it to what God can accomplish.

The good news there is that the gospel doesn’t depend on humanity’s methods. As a matter of fact, Paul says in verses 3 and 4, I was with you in weakness and fear and in much trembling. When Paul came to Corinth, he says, I was full of fear and full of weakness and full of much trembling.

He was scared. He was shaking. Paul had all the same anxieties that we do, and probably then some, because the worst we’re probably going to get is laughed at or called a name.

Paul could have been murdered. As a matter of fact, they tried on several occasions. Thank goodness the gospel wasn’t dependent on Paul because he admits that he was weak and fearful.

He had a lot of shortcomings, and if he was trying to start something on his own, the world would say he went about it the wrong way. He says, my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom. If he was trying to start something, he should have come with an eloquent speech, innovative presentation, he should have done all those things, but he just came with the simple message of Christ crucified.

The world would look at it and say, well, that’s not the way you do it, but that’s the way God told him to do it. He said he didn’t come with persuasive words of wisdom, verse 4 says, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. So despite Paul’s shortcomings, his work was effective, his ministry was effective, people came to Jesus Christ. When Paul did all the things the world said, that’s not how you do it, and Paul did it anyway, Paul did it in his weakness, in his fear, in his trembling.

He went and told people about Jesus, just that simple message of Christ crucified, and it set the world on fire. That was a demonstration of the power and the work of the Holy Spirit, because Paul couldn’t do that. And today, when we see lives change through the message of the gospel, it’s a demonstration of the power of God, because we can’t do that.

I can’t change you. This church can’t change you. The person that you’re worried about, that you wish you could change them, you cannot change them.

Only God can do that. And the good news is that God does. And when He does, it’s a demonstration of the power of the Spirit.

It’s a demonstration of the power of the message and the way the Spirit works with the message to transform people because only He can do that. And when we see something like that, we have to step back and give Him the credit and acknowledge that it had to have been him. And he says here in verse 5, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

So if we were converted by man’s effort, our faith would rest on man. If any transformation that took place was because I just made really good points all the time, and people were following my teachings, they’d be putting their faith and hope in me, and that’s a really bad idea. Even the Apostle Paul said, I don’t want your faith to rest on me or any other man.

I don’t want your hope to rest on what I can accomplish in you. I want your faith to rest on God and what He’s done, on the power of God. He’s the one who does the saving.

Each of us will stand before God one day. Each of us will stand before God one day and give an answer for our lives. Do you want to stand there and have your eternal destiny depend on yourself or somebody else, what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, what you tried to do?

Or would you rather come empty-handed before the God of this universe and plead the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? That it doesn’t depend on what the church did for me. It doesn’t depend on what this person did for me.

It doesn’t depend on what I could accomplish. It’s Christ crucified. It’s what Jesus accomplished.

Who’s able to do more, me or Jesus? Jesus, that was not a trick question. Who’s able to do more for your salvation, you or Jesus?

Who’s able to do more for your salvation, the church or Jesus? He said it’s about Christ crucified. Our faith is not to rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

This gospel that Paul talks about is mysterious. It’s not what man would dream up, and yet it’s incredibly profound. And I think it’s good each week to stop here and clarify what the gospel is, because we use that word, but we don’t want that word to be a mystery to the uninitiated.

The gospel is, very simply put, the message that Jesus Christ died for our sins, According to the Scriptures, he was buried, rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and now offers salvation because of God’s grace. Not anything that we’ve earned or deserved, but because of God’s grace, he offers it to us through faith. If we trust in the sacrifice that he made, that he paid for our sins on the cross, where we could never do anything to earn our way into God’s good graces, we could never do anything to earn our way into a relationship with God or eternal life or forgiveness, we could never earn any of these things.

But instead, we simply trust in what Jesus Christ did. And we have his promise that we’ll have forgiveness and eternal life. That’s the gospel.

And it’s very simple. It’s a message we don’t have to dress up, but it’s also a very profound message. Because coming out of this in verse 6, Paul says, Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature.

Just because the gospel is simple, don’t misunderstand and think it’s shallow. I heard somebody, not somebody I know, but somebody complaining on social media this week about their church being so shallow. They just, all they preach is the gospel.

Okay, well, I know some churches that aren’t even doing that, so let’s at least give thanks for where we are. And I think I get what they’re saying. They want the church to address other things.

There are other topics to address. We should address the whole counsel of God, and we try to do that. Should we address cultural issues?

Absolutely. Should we, and some of the things they were complaining about specifically, should we address the sanctity of marriage? Absolutely.

God created marriage to be a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. That’s biblical. And we say that, and we don’t shy away from that. Should we deal with the sanctity of life?

Absolutely, we’re created in the image of God. And to destroy that image of God in the unborn is a crime against God. Should we preach about gender?

Yes, God created male and female. And shame on us for letting these be recast as political issues. They’re not.

That’s a way to silence the church. These are cultural issues. And we do address those.

should we address practical issues in people’s lives how to have a good marriage yes we do and we try to deal with those as we go through the scriptures and we deal with those in in classes and bible studies should we deal with how to parent well should we should we deal with how to how to be a good a godly caretaker to aging parents should we should we deal with how to how to honor god with your finances absolutely we shouldn’t shy away from any of that but we also can’t act like those things are mutually exclusive with the gospel. Because here’s the thing. We can come and preach cultural issues all day, every day.

We can come and preach practical daily life stuff every day. And we can end up with people who believe the right things about the culture war issues. We can end up with people who have decent marriages and well-behaved kids and their finances are in order but they don’t know Jesus.

God forbid. If we get the gospel wrong as a church or as individuals in this room. If we get the gospel wrong, it does not matter that we get those other things right.

So we can’t treat it like it’s mutually exclusive. And folks, the gospel is the foundation of all those other things. We believe what we believe about life and about marriage and about gender.

We believe these things not because of our prejudices, but because of what we’re taught in God’s Word. Because they tie in with the foundations of the gospel. We believe in strong marriages and strong parenting and honoring God with our finances because of what Jesus Christ has done in us, in the gospel.

So I just want you to understand that the gospel has implications everywhere. That doesn’t mean everything is the gospel. I get tired of hearing national speakers say, well, adoption is a gospel issue.

It’s really not. The gospel has implications for it. It ties in with the gospel.

Immigration is a gospel issue. We’re watering down the gospel. The gospel is the gospel.

Just let the gospel be the gospel. But I’m saying the gospel ties in and affects everything else. If he has saved us and changed us, then we’re going to want to obey him in these other areas.

And he talks about maturity. We speak wisdom to those who are mature. He’s saying don’t misunderstand and think that the gospel, the message of salvation is all there is.

We continue to build on that message and we continue to speak wisdom. And yes, we’ve called it foolishness. That’s the way the world sees it, but it’s actually very deep.

And as we grow in maturity in Christ, there’s more for us to study and more for us to understand. You will never exhaust the truth of God’s Word on this side of eternity. And as we continue to preach the gospel over and over in this church, I hope that you don’t get tired of hearing it, because that indicates there’s something wrong with us.

I love the song that says, I love to tell the story. For those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. There’s something about hearing the gospel over and over in our church, in our Sunday school classes, in every venue that we can present it. There’s something about hearing the gospel that motivates us to go out and live according to the gospel.

There’s something about hearing the gospel over and over that encourages us and compels us to go deeper into God’s word on these other issues. There’s something about hearing the gospel that kills the legalistic streak within us that makes us think that we’re so good and we’re so righteous and we that we just hung the moon and reminds us of what Jesus Christ did for us that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us and that puts us in the right perspective to go out and serve him and serve others the gospel is deeper and more profound than we could ever imagine and we can hear the gospel presented every day and still be struck anew by what he’s done for us and he says this is a wisdom not of this age or the rulers age who are passing away. The truth and the wisdom of the gospel are timeless.

And he says, yes, there’s wisdom that we continue to speak, but it’s not the same as the world’s wisdom. It’s not the same as the experts. These things are temporary.

The things that our culture is so certain of are all new. I heard somebody talking about some of the major cultural issues yesterday on the radio, and they said, these ideas that everybody acts like these are set in stone, these are 70 years old at the oldest, where for thousands of years we’ve known something else to be true. Folks, the things that the culture seems so determined or true and so set in stone about are temporary.

Think how much things have changed in the last 10 years, and think of how much things will change in the next 10 years. Suddenly, the things that the world is so certain about today are going to be old and outdated in 10 years. But the truth is timeless.

The gospel is timeless. He says we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery. He said, we proclaim things that could only be revealed by God.

Because if we were going to invent truth, these are not the sorts of truths we would invent. Not me, because sometimes they’re way too inconvenient. I love Jesus, and I love his word, but sometimes there are things in this book that are hard t