Sermon Tone Analysis

Children’s Message:

Snake Man vs. the super-strong Hero

Who wins?

What happens in a battle?

The loser gets beaten up or killed, right?

There was a snake in the Garden of Eden too.

The snake was a nasty trickster and he tricked Eve into disobeying God.

He brought sin, and death, and sadness into the world.

He is God’s enemy.

God promised to send a hero into the world to defeat the snake!!

A long time ago that hero came to earth to fix the brokenness, and take away the sting of death, and to crush the head of that snake!

What happened in that battle?

Who won?

The snake or the Hero?

One of them got beaten up and died.

It was the hero.

WHAT!?

Did everything go wrong?

Did God lose?

Did the snake win?

Victory in defeat.

Pause and look up at sound man

Text: 1 Corinthians

Title of Sermon: “The Foolishness of God”

Three main points:

1.

The Foolishness of the Cross

2. The Foolishness of Preaching

3. The Foolishness of God

Introduction

1.

The Foolishness of the Word of the Cross (vv.18-19)

A. The Cross seems like losing

i. Worldly wisdom would say, “The Hero wouldn’t die.”

ii.

This would empty the Cross of it’s power.

In other words there would be no atonement for sins without the death of Jesus, no forgiveness of sins, no reconciliation with God, no eternal life.

Sin and death would still reign.

B. BUT the Cross is actually winning!

“to us who are being saved it is the POWER of God”

i. to the ones who ARE and CONTINUE to be save

ii.

iii.

* “the WORD of the Cross...”

a. not just the Cross, but also the Word of the Cross “the power of God to us who are being saved.”

b.

This “Word” contains everything from Christ’s sacrificial death on the Cross and it offers it, and gives it.

C. God’s War on Wisdom:

“FOR It stands written, ‘

Quoted from...

Context of the Quote:

In Isaiah’s day—when faced with the approaching Assyrian army—the common wisdom was to form an alliance with Egypt (30:1–3), to rely on their horses, the multitude of their chariots, and in the great strength of their horsemen (31:1).

In the days of King Hezekiah, God declares in regard to the political cunning and the secret, tricky plans of this king’s advisers, by which they hoped to escape the Assyrian danger, that he would deal wondrously with his people by at last saving it by his own great deeds so that the wisdom of the wise would perish and be forced to hide itself.

Transition: God promised to destroy wisdom.

Now we see that He has done it… in the most peculiar, no, foolish way… through preaching.

2. The Foolishness of Preaching the Word of the Cross (vv.20-22)

A. But first, A taunt:

i. “Where is the one who is wise?”

Paul here alludes to

In Isa.

19:12 the prophet asks concerning Pharaoh’s supposedly wise counselors: “Where are thy wise men?”

The very question implies that they have been made fools.

ii.

“Where is the scribe?”

Paul alludes to

In Isa.

33:18 the prophet describes the peace which shall follow after the terrors of the Assyrian danger are past.

Men will then ask in astonishment, “What has become of the scribe, γραμματεύς, who was to tabulate the tribute that had been forced from the Jews?”

They will also ask what has become of the man who was to weigh the money, and of the man who was to count the towers of the walls which the Assyrians had planned to capture: “Where are all of them!” Isaiah says, “All of them will be gone.”

iii.

“Where is the debater of this age?”

The Greek people of that day wanted to be experts in philosophy, great debaters, and known for their eloquence and fine arguments.

He is addressing all who think that they are wiser than God, all who think they have mastered God’s Word, those who think they can pick and choose what is right and good from what God has said.

None of these work.

“For since, in” (sphere) “the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom...”

A commentator named Lenski says,

God placed men, the whole world of men, into this sphere which was entirely filled with his wisdom, and yet despite all this they did not know him.

Here is a grand universe of wisdom spread out before the eyes and the hearts of men and surrounding them on every side: all the wonderful, incomprehensible thoughts of God in the whole round of nature, the works of his creation and his providence, the whole course of history, the wondrous constitution of man himself, and, in the case of the Jews, even the Old Testament revelation in addition.

All this substance of divine wisdom lay before the world of men and normally should have had the effect that they should know the true God who was thus gloriously revealed, Acts 14:15–17.

But the very opposite resulted, Acts 17:23, etc. Why?

Because men applied their own foolish, worldly wisdom to this wondrous sphere of divine wisdom.

Even the Jews read the Old Testament, not in its own light, but in the light of their own notions and their own desires and thus failed utterly to see the God of grace.

… In our day we have those who mock the Gospel, and those who point in another direction.

I think of

Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and those who say only a fool would believe in God.

And those like the Dalai Lama and others who claim some spiritual truths that God has not spoken.

And supposed “christian” movements like the Word Faith Movement, the Prosperity Gospel, and any who prefer power, glory, and “your best life now” to the Word of the Cross.

The astronomer gazes at the miracle of the stars for years and then tells us with an air of finality that he has found no God.

The natural scientist announces that the brutes are his ancestors and declares that all life has evolved from a tiny cell that was found in the primordeal slime.

Pantheism proclaims: “God is all, and all is God.”

The world did not and does not, and will never be able to know God through this worldly wisdom.

How foolish is that?

This was all a part of God’s wisdom.

He destroyed their wisdom by showing it to be complete and utter foolishness.

He exposed it for what it truly is, rubbish.

“it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”

B. God chooses to work through weakness:

Clay pots/earthen vessels

Instead of great shows of power, instead of just attacking His foes and conquering them in battle, instead of working through really good and pious people, instead of glory, He chose Message of the Cross, a story about a humble man who was shamefully killed.

God chose to speak this message not by continuing to send terrifying angels, or flashes of light and earthshaking thunder, or by splitting open the clouds and yelling down at you, but through a bunch of simple fisherman, uneducated simpletons, social rejects, dirty sinners, and weaklings.

C. Worldly wisdom would say, “Show me incredible signs and reasonable things.

I will only believe if I see it with my own eyes or if it seems good to me.”