God’s Wisdom Revealed by the Spirit: 1 Corinthians 2:6–16✞
Passage
I’m going to tackle this passage slightly out of order, but you’ll still be able to follow it. You can always read the whole thing (in order) here✞.
In this passage Paul continues on the theme of the wisdom of the world as opposed to the wisdom of God. He’s talked a lot in the last couple of passages about how the wisdom of God sounds like foolishness to the people of this world, but in this passage he gets deeper into what that wisdom really is – as revealed by the Spirit.
To start, it’s important to note that this wisdom is something that is timeless, not confined to the current age.
6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
Why am I harping on that point? Partially because I think most people have an erroneous base assumption, that wisdom—the wisdom of the world, though obviously most people don’t think of it that way—is cumulative. Our parents had more wisdom than our grandparents, and we have more wisdom than our parents, and our kids will have more wisdom than us1. But this isn’t true; the wisdom of the world isn’t cumulative, it doesn’t get better and better with every age or generation, it’s cyclical. Let’s take the simple example of sex, from the point of view of someone who lives in the West (since that’s the only part of the world I can comfortably speak about):
- In Paul’s day, the Romans felt that sex was something you should be free with. Have sex with whoever you want, however you want, because inhibiting yourself would be unhealthy.
- Over the years, Europeans and North Americans got much more conservative about sex: influenced heavily by Christianity (though not only believed by Christians), the view was that sex should be within a marriage, and anything other than that would be dangerous. Literally dangerous (because of disease and pregnancy), but also morally dangerous because humans are more than just animals and should have self control.
- Because we’re hypocrites we were often gentler on men than we were on women—nobody should commit adultery, we thought, but for some reason we didn’t think it was quite as bad when a man did it as when a woman did it—but even for men, we thought adultery was a bad idea.
- As I wrote this in 2025, Western society was pretty much back to the view of things the Romans had had: sex is something you should be free with! Have sex with whoever you want, however you want, because inhibiting yourself would be unhealthy! We weren’t totally comfortable with adultery, but we also thought there were situations where it was fine for couples to have “open relationships” where adultery wasn’t a concern.
Ask someone today how society’s position on sex has evolved and they’d probably say it’s something we’ve learned over time, we’re now more enlightened than we were hundreds of years ago! But all we’ve really done is go back to how we felt thousands of years ago.
The wisdom of God, however, isn’t like that. It’s not a wisdom of this (or any) age; it’s not from the rulers of this (or any) age, it’s of God. Christians can—and should!—follow what the Bible says about sex regardless of what the people around us think. I heard one preacher put it that Christians should be conservative when it comes to sex (keeping it only for marriage), but promiscuous when it comes to money (distributing it freely to those who need it). On both of these points we go against my current society in the West, which feels we should be promiscuous when it comes to sex and conservative when it comes to money.
Paul keeps contrasting the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world, because it’s important that Christians seek out this wisdom – it’s hidden:
7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this verse, other than to say that Paul doesn’t mean what some people think he means by “secret” and “hidden.” If you’re poring through your Bible looking for secret messages from God, which He only dispenses to “elite” Christians, you’re on the wrong path: it doesn’t work that way. Paul just means that Christianity as a whole is a secret, hidden from the world. But through the Spirit we can read our Bibles and hear preaching, glean the wisdom of God, and become more like Him.
But the people of the world don’t understand it because the Spirit hasn’t revealed it to them:
8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
If I had been born before the time of Jesus and anyone had asked me how I expected God to save His people, I definitely wouldn’t have come up with His Son being born as a human—blasphemous!—let alone dying. Yes, sure, all of the sacrificial system I’m used to teaches me that sacrifice is required to atone for sins, but… God dying? Really? Does that make sense?
It does to me now, thanks to the Holy Spirit, but nobody before Jesus was predicting how God was going to solve the problem He had before him: He loves His people, He’s a Gracious God, but sin is an insurmountable problem, so His people can’t have a relationship with Him – what was He to do? (I speak as if this was a problem God had to “figure out,” whereas He knew from the beginning how He was going to solve it – but His people didn’t!)
At the end of the passage Paul hits this even harder:
14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
It’s not about how smart you are, or what your socio-economic background is, or who your family is, or how you were raised, or anything else; you won’t accept “the things of the Spirit of God”—you’ll consider them “folly”—unless we have “the mind of Christ” (which is revealed to us by the Spirit). (More on this below…)
But the Spirit was able to teach us how salvation works, because He searches everything, even the depths of God. In fact…
11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.
Put like that, it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? Nobody knows me better than I know myself, and nobody knows God better than God knows Himself, so it makes sense that His Spirit2 would be the best teacher when we’re striving to learn about Him!
Now, if we stopped here, we’d get an erroneous impression of how Christianity works – or, at the very least, how the wisdom of God is obtained. Because Paul keeps telling us it comes from the Spirit, so it would follow that all we have to do is pray for it and God’s Spirit will zap wisdom into our brains! But Paul dashes those hopes:
13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
What does Paul mean by saying he and other teachers impart this wisdom in words? Fortunately or unfortunately, he means something we view as very mundane: preaching and reading the Word. Paul, and other preachers like him throughout history, preached wisdom to his listeners, and those listeners also sought out God’s wisdom in the Scriptures – the Bible, for the modern-day Christian.
Sometimes, when we’re reading our Bibles or hearing a sermon being preached, the Spirit does “zap” us, and we get a sudden understanding of something. Those are the times Christians like to think about, when we think about getting wisdom from words taught by the Spirit. But that’s not the only way—or even the most common way—the Spirit works. It’s more typical that we spend a long time wrestling with various passages of Scripture, trying to understand them, and gradually, over the course of time, we start to understand things better. (Usually without an “aha” moment.)
There’s an even more powerful (yet less noticeable) effect for those who read through the entire Bible regularly, which I’ll mention below.
Thoughts
A couple of thoughts on this passage. (I say “a couple of thoughts,” but I’m wordy on this blog; a “thought” really means “a few paragraphs.”) Firstly, the idea that it’s only the Spirit who opens our eyes to God (regardless of geography) raises a concern, and second about the benefits of reading our Bibles over and over again.
It doesn’t matter where you were born (“but what about…”)
I said above that the only way someone becomes a Christian is through the Spirit. Not your socio-economic background, not your family, not how you were raised, it’s just the Spirit. “But that’s ridiculous,” some will say. “Obviously people born in some times and places are more likely to be one religion than another! If you were born in America in the 1950s you were Christian and if you were born in Israel in the 1950s you were Jewish and if you were born in Iran in the 1950s you were Muslim.3” And the thing is, I don’t disagree, in a sense.
There is a “negative” argument to be made, that not everyone who calls themself a Christian is a true Christian: just because you were born in America in 1956 and called yourself a Christian, didn’t mean you were actually a Christian. But… that doesn’t actually address the argument, does it? It’s true—not everyone who calls themself a Christian in any time or place is truly saved—but it misses the point of the argument. People aren’t waking up in a time and place where nobody has heard of Jesus and suddenly declaring, “I’m a Christian!4” Again, as mentioned above, the Spirit doesn’t typically work that way; He moves through words – we need to hear Christ preached, or read the Scriptures, and the Spirit moves through that. The argument being made is not whether all Christians are true Christians, it’s that someone won’t be a Christian in the first place—true or not—if they’re born in parts of the world where Christianity isn’t the religion that people follow.
The people making this argument are often using it as further evidence that Christianity is no more true than any other religion. I think the thinking is to approach things in a more scientific manner: if the truth isn’t something at anyone could discover, in any time or place, than can it be truth at all? Isn’t it just your own belief? Christians, on the other hand, would say, no, we don’t believe Christianity just because we inherited it from our parents, we believe it because it’s true – there is a God, He does have a Son named Jesus, who did die on the cross for our sins… we believe this is all true.
But… if it is true (which I say it is), then that leaves the Christian to grapple with the larger issue: does that make God unjust? Because… if someone is born in a time and place where the Gospel hasn’t been preached, then they’re not going to believe in Christ. Exceptions can be found—perhaps a missionary goes through a place at some point, or someone travels to another country where they can hear the Gospel be preached, or an out-and-out miracle happens and Christ appears to them in a vision—but those are exceptions, and for every exception where someone is able to come to Christ there are literally millions of others who never come to belief in something they’ve never heard of.
This means Christians have to do two things:
- Send missionaries to preach the Gospel, and
- Pray for wisdom and understanding
Christian missionaries have gotten a bad reputation—and for good reason, since there have been many instances where missionaries were preaching a particularly European outlook on life more than they were preaching the actual Gospel—we’re trying to learn from those mistakes—but, at the same time, how can someone believe if they haven’t heard? So for the Christian, who believes that Christianity isn’t just “a good idea” but actually true, it’s important to send missionaries to spread the Gospel. These days missionary work is more about helping locals spread the message to their own people, rather than thinking nobody can do it without a European presence—again, we’re trying to fix the mistakes of the past—but we’re still eagerly striving to bring the Gospel to people around the world.
But… even with that, nobody struggles with the “how can they be saved” question more than the Christian. For us, this isn’t a theoretical question around which we build arguments, it’s life and death. So the Christian has to ask: IS God unjust? HAS He created a world in which people are doomed because they’ll never hear the message in the first place? HAS He unfairly advantaged people in some times and places more than in others? And the true Christian believes that the answer to this question has to be “no” – we know He is not unjust. But we still don’t know how it works, either, and that makes us uncomfortable.
And that should make us uncomfortable! Christians have the wisdom of God, but not all of it. There are things we simply don’t understand – that we couldn’t understand (because we’re not God). But we also worship a God who is gracious; He doesn’t tell us to just shut up and stop thinking about it; He wants us to bring our concerns to Him. So… in a sense I’m not addressing the question, I’m just acknowledging that yes, these are difficult issues that we will continue to wrestle with.
Reading the Bible over and over
On a happier note, for the Christian, let’s talk about the benefits of not just reading the Bible, but reading it over and over again, end-to-end. Because I mentioned above that sometimes the Spirit “zaps” us as we’re reading the Scriptures, but often He doesn’t. We learn through hard work, wrestling with the Scriptures and praying about them.
Along those lines, however, there’s powerful (but less noticeable) effect that happens over the course of time for those of us with Bible reading plans that take us through the whole thing over and over again. (Often over the course of a year, though I’ve seen plans that take you through the New Testament in 6 months, or through the whole thing in 3 years, instead of 1, and there are lots of others.)
Let’s assume you have a reading plan that takes you through the whole Bible in a year.
- At the very beginning you’ll be reading Genesis and it will make a certain amount of sense.
- Then, months later, maybe you’ll be reading John, and it will also make a certain kind of sense – but it will make even more sense because you’ve read Genesis, for context.
- Then you’ll get to the end of the Bible and start over, and read Genesis again. This time it will make even more sense because you’ve already read it before – but you’ve also read the book of John.
- You’ll eventually get to John again and it will make more sense than it did the previous time—or, regardless of how much “sense” it makes, you’ll get more out of it—because this is your second time reading it, plus you’ve read Genesis a couple of times.
I’m using these two books as an example, but it applies to the entirety of the Bible; every time you read a passage of Scripture you’ve got all the other passages you’ve read as context, helping you understand it even better – which means you’ll understand it at an even deeper level the next time you read it.
Don’t make the mistake of treating the Bible as a collection of “information” that you “consume.” If you ever find yourself thinking, “I’ve read the Bible, so I get it – I don’t need to read it again,” you’re going down the wrong path. Yes, you should read it again—and again!—because every time you do you’ll understand it (and God) better and better.
No comments:
Post a Comment