And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God.  (2)for I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  (3) I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling.  (4) And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, (5) that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

The Apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians because of the divided and contentious state of the Christian church in Corinth.  He took pains to present the cross of Christ not as a philosophy preached by fancy rhetoric but he taught the bare facts, not theory about these facts.  He presented Christ crucified as the wisdom of God.  Paul preached  the significance of Christ’s redemptive death and declared that Christianity is for all men.

Paul declared hat he was not a skilled orator but simply a witness.  He preached that  the true foundation of faith is not man’s reason but the testimony of God.   What made God known is the cross of Christ.  This might seem lunacy to some and indeed was a “stumbling block to the Jews, and foolishness to the Greek”,  but to those who are called this is the power and wisdom of God.  It is God who chooses and calls men and in the power of the cross Christ is made to us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

The verses we study today contrast what reason teaches and what God teaches.   There is always the contrast of the wisdom of the gospels revealed by God to the foolishness of these gospels to unbelieving man – to the unrenewed, “the wise” of this world.   The contrast was between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God – when God calls, the world’s standards are turned upside down.  God’s plan of salvation accomplished by the crucified Christ was hidden from the wise of this world – the learned, influential of this world –  but was revealed to simple believers.

We see God’s wisdom in all of the Bible – it is His story.    Appearances are deceiving.  God knows what is in a man’s heart.   As i was writing this i kept thinking of Martin Luther King’s great speech when he dreamed that one day his grandchildren would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  His dream was that man know and embrace the wisdom and the truth of God.