Verse of the day · September 7
Is Paul calling God foolish in 1 Corinthians 1:25?
Men looked at the fishermen God had sent and concluded the weakness was his.
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1:25
The men heading the faction against Paul at Corinth seem to have been recommended by their polish — the flourish of oratory, the accuracies of philosophical language the Greeks prided themselves on. Paul had been bred up in Jewish learning himself, and in preaching the cross he laid it aside, lest the success be ascribed to the force of art rather than of truth. He told them in plain language that the Jesus crucified at Jerusalem was the Son of God and the Saviour of men. It needed no artificial dress.
The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. The Jews require miracles and the Greeks arguments, the Geneva Notes say — arguments they may comprehend by their intellect and wisdom — and so neither believes the Gospel, and both mock it. The Jews expected a great temporal prince and would never own for deliverer and king a man who died so accursed a death; Matthew Henry has them looking on him as execrable because he was hanged on a tree, and because he did not gratify them with a sign to their mind. The Greeks had been, for some ages, in a manner the very mint of knowledge, and there was nothing in the plain doctrine of the cross to suit their taste or gratify a curious and wrangling temper. They laughed at the story of a crucified Saviour: hope to be saved by one that could not save himself, and trust in one condemned and crucified as a malefactor, cut off by so vile a death.
The manner of preaching it was foolishness to them too. None of the famous men for wisdom or eloquence were employed to plant the church; a few fishermen were called out and sent on the errand. The proud pretenders to learning despised the doctrine for the sake of the men who dispensed it. The instruments were feeble, Albert Barnes writes, and men judged that this was owing to weakness, or want of power, in the God who appointed them.
The verse takes its two words from that judgment. There is no such thing as foolishness in God, John Gill writes, nor the least degree of weakness in him; the apostle means what the men of the world esteem so, and by an ironical concession calls it by their names for it. Barnes sets the same guard on the second half, and reads the phrase as the things of his appointment which appear weak and insufficient. The examples run like this: that God should undertake to save the world by a Jesus of Nazareth who was supposed unable to save himself, and to save men by preachers without learning, eloquence, wealth or power.
Christ crucified is counted foolishness, and is wiser than men. In redemption by the blood of his cross, reckoned such an egregious instance of folly, there is a display of wisdom surpassing all the wisdom of men and angels. Esteemed as the weakness of God, he is in that same respect stronger than men, having brought salvation for his people by his own arm, which neither men nor angels could ever have done. JFB gloss each half in turn: the first is God's plan of salvation, which men deem foolishness; the second is Christ crucified through weakness, yet living by the power of God.
The phrases look proverbial. Whatever in things divine and spiritual has the appearance of folly and weakness, or is judged to be so by carnal men, is wiser and stronger not only than the wisdom and strength of men, but than men themselves with all their wisdom and strength. Gill sets a Jewish parallel beside them: the young men's advice to Rehoboam, which the Targum paraphrases as my weakness is stronger than the strength of my father — very near, he says, to the last clause of the verse.
What makes it wiser, for Barnes, is that it is better adapted to accomplish important ends than the schemes of human wisdom. Those schemes have accomplished nothing towards men's salvation; this accomplishes everything. All the boasted science of the heathen world did not and could not effectually bring the world home to God, and in spite of all their wisdom ignorance still prevailed and iniquity still abounded.
God shows it most plainly, the Geneva Notes say: even when mad men think him most foolish he is far wiser than they are, and he surmounts all their might and power when he uses the most vile and abject things.
The men of wit and reading had a word for the cross, and Paul used their word in his own sentence. Then he set it beside them — beside their learning, and beside the men themselves with all of it in their hands. The thing they were laughing at had a crucified man at the centre of it and fishermen carrying it, and it was doing what none of their learning had ever done.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, the Geneva Bible notes and Albert Barnes.
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