“We Have the Mind of Christ”: 1 Corinthians 2

 As he continues the letter in chapter 2, Paul reminds the Corinthians that he had visited them earlier not as a great orator or philosopher, but merely someone proclaiming testimony about God (vv. 1-5):

“¹ And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ² For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³ I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. ⁴ My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵ so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

We find the account of Paul’s earlier visit to Corinth in Acts 18:

“¹ After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. ² There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, ³ and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them. ⁴ Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks…¹¹ So Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God.”

Paul stayed in Corinth on that first visit for about 18 months. While he was there, his preaching resulted in many conversions to Christ, including two of the chief rabbis in the synagogue of Corinth who accepted Christ as their Savior. Aquila and Pricilla were a married couple who, like Paul, made their living as tent-makers, and the three worked together while Paul was in the city. Paul asked them to accompany him to help him in the ministry when he left Corinth.

Paul never claims in all his epistles to be a great orator or man of superior wisdom, but he had authority as an apostle and exerted it during his visits to Corinth. His main focus, however, was preaching to the unsaved and teaching the people in the church accurate doctrine and how they should live as a result of their commitment to Christ.

Paul was performing the same functions required of preachers and teachers today, just as they were needed in the early church. Reading about Paul’s ministry in the book of Acts and in Paul’s epistles provides a good outline of the role of the modern preacher and teacher. In the pages of the New Testament, we find Paul sought to know God and His will, lived a life worthy of being an example to other Christians, and “…proclaimed to you the testimony about God” (v.1). He reminds us of what motivated him in v. 2: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” and noted in vv. 3-4 that he had no special speaking abilities but relied on God’s power in his ministry efforts.

To Paul, his leadership, preaching, and teaching all were done in submission to the Spirit of God and with determination to reveal God’s word will to others. His purpose was not to draw attention to himself or impress his audiences. Paul’s devotion in ministry reminds me of the example set by the Old Testament prophet Ezra, who “…devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the LORD, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel” (Ezra 7:10), a text memorized by just about every student preparing for ministry.

In our discussion last session, we talked about how people from Gentile Jewish backgrounds viewed the idea of a savior such as Jesus. Jewish people looked for miraculous signs and did not expect a Messiah who would die for them. Gentiles, on the other hand, saw no need for a savior at all, believed philosophy and reason were the way to improve the human condition, and rejected the idea of a Messiah, especially a crucified Messiah.

Facing an audience with such diverse expectations, Paul chose merely to teach God’s word and demonstrate to them holiness in his own way of life. He in fact made it clear to them he was more concerned with living a blameless life than with impressing them with superior wisdom miraculous signs:

“³ I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. ⁴ My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power…” (vv.3-4).

Then in v. 5 he reveals the crucial reason he sought not to persuade them, but merely to teach them the principles of God: “… so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

Preaching and teaching today, as in Paul’s time, has to rely on the dynamic word of God and its power to convict if we are to be effective and not on emotion, entertainment, or dynamic presentation skills. Paul is presents a good example for preachers and teachers today, because he did not rely on theatrics to manipulate people, as he explained iv vv. 6-10:

“⁶ We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. ⁷ No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. ⁸ None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’—the things God has prepared for those who love him—¹⁰ these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.’”

While Paul did not emphasize human philosophy in his preaching and teaching,   that does not mean his message lacked wisdom. Mature Christians recognized the wisdom of his message, while less-mature believers were learning to better understand the faith. A nonbeliever, however, would reject Paul’s reasoning out of hand, however, as Paul noted in the previous chapter:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1:18).

According to Paul, the gospel involves a wisdom discernible by those who are spiritually mature (v. 6). Some commentators understand “…the mature…” in v. 6 to mean Christians who have superior spiritual understanding. However, it is more likely from the context of the passage that Paul refers merely to the saved as “…the mature…” because they are enlightened by the Holy Spirit, compared to the unsaved, who have not. That interpretation is based on Paul's argument that the unsaved believe the Gospel is foolish (see 1:21-23) and do not receive the things of the Spirit of God (see v. 14).

In v. 7, he adds to his description of God's wisdom, saying that it is a wisdom that is part of a mystery, which has not been fully revealed, but which originated in God's mind. God’s wisdom is foolishness to those without faith in Christ but understood by the redeemed more and more as their faith matures.

None of the rulers among the people understood the wisdom that brought Christ’s offer of redemption (v. 8). They failed to recognize God's wisdom because it could only be known by revelation. By “…rulers…,” Paul means the Jewish authorities (Sadducees, Pharisees, and teachers of the law), as well as secular authorities (Herod Antipas and Pilate). Had they understood “…they would not have crucified the Lord of glory…” In using “…Lord of Glory…” to refer to Christ, Paul emphasized His divinity alongside His humanity as the Son of God, incarnate in a human being, who died on the cross.

The failure to discern God’s wisdom by unredeemed people still holds true today, at a time when the existence of God and humanity’s need for redemption is foolish, with society’s focus on humanism and secular philosophy as the only means of understanding people.

In v. 9, Paul was thinking of Isaiah 64:4 when he wrote, “…What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things God has prepared for those who love him…,” although Paul does not quote Isaiah verbatim. (Isaiah 64:4: “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.”) Understanding the wisdom of God and Christ’s redemptive purpose cannot be known through objective, empirical evidence or rational conclusions on of the unsaved mind. Rather, Paul reminds us in v. 10, “…these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.” God has revealed “…to us...” (to Paul and his companions) the spiritual wisdom that world’s rulers of this world could not understand, because what the Holy Spirit reveals cannot be known by the unregenerate human mind or through human reasoning.

Paul approaches the same truth slightly differently in vv. 11-16, emphasizing that people can know the spiritual wisdom and truths of God only through the Holy Spirit, just as human wisdom needs the human spirit to understand it:

“¹¹ For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹² What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. ¹³ This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. ¹⁴ The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. ¹⁵ The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, ¹⁶ for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’”

Paul and his companions speak “…not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit…” (v.13) as they convey real spiritual truth. He is still thinking of the contrast between human wisdom and wisdom from God. “The person without the Spirit…” (v. 14; this is rendered more familiarly “…the natural man…” in the KJV, from the Greek term ψυχικός, psuchikos, which is defined as “carnal, animalistic, natural, or  sensuous”) simply cannot understand, and spiritual truth is foolishness to him.

The fact is, we can demonstrate our faith to the unsaved, we can talk about it and be witness to what God has done for us, but as long as the person hearing our testimony remains unsaved, he or she cannot understand or experience spiritual truth. The truth is that while the world may feel competent to judge our faith and our spiritual understanding, it is not, because it is not equipped to do so. The unsaved cannot know the mind of the Lord and cannot instruct the Christian in spiritual truth.

The Christian’s gift of understanding carries with it great responsibility: we must think and act with the spiritual understanding and maturity and never revert to seeing things as the rest of mankind sees them.