Verses 18-31
The Preaching of the Cross
What is termed a whole body of theology might be gathered from this first chapter. Here we find God, Christ, the Church, the mystery of the Cross, and the fact of redemption. Why does the Apostle gather all these great doctrines around him, so compendiously and so severally? What is his business? We have not seen him in this urgent mood before; usually he has taken time to his work, but he is in it before we imagine he has begun it. He is excited. The excitement of love is upon him, and that is the keenest excitement of all. His charity is offended, his excellence of heart is annoyed, his sense of right is assailed. He has heard that the people in the Church at Corinth are setting up parties, cultivating small bigotries, multiplying contemptible sects. This the Apostle will never consent to. He says, This is wrong, this is contrary to the spirit of the Cross; sectarianism and Christ cannot live together; party spirit and the Crucifixion are as opposed to one another as darkness is to light. So he gathers all his thunders and lightnings, all his majestic conceptions of God, humanity, truth, destiny; he will not attempt to overthrow this by some wind of contempt, he will come down upon it as from eternity and destroy it in the name of the Lord. There must somewhere be a point of rest There must be some fixed quantities in this stupendous universe, else what is to become of it? We are saved by the points of rest, by the centres of tranquillity. Foolish mariner he, who says he will take a ship over the Atlantic by the help of the moon. Yet the moon is a fair orb, the moon has been praised to her face by audacious yet reverent poetry; hardly a boy but has said something sweet to the moon and about the moon; the moon has been called a banner of silver hung out in the sky; classical names have been attached to her; yet no mariner ever took his course across the water by that banner of silver. Not that he has any objection to the orb itself; there is nothing objectionable in the moon. It is not aggressive, but it is changeable. That is the reason. Yonder in the north is a point of light you can always rely upon; the captain lays hold of it, and gets home. That is what men will not do. They will run after any moon; they call its changeableness variety: whereas when the soul is interested it is treachery. I suppose there will be moon-worshippers until the end of time. When the Apostle has any great argument to state and apply he stands upon a rock, he puts out his hands towards the north star, to the quiet eternal planets, and then things may swing around him as they like, but he will not swing in them, except in so far as he has hold of the things that abide. He has such a conception of Christ that he will not be disturbed by partisanship and party quarrels at Corinth or anywhere else. He will cling to Christ; he will say, "What does Christ mean? what is the meaning of the Cross? what is the purpose of God in the gift of his Son? and thus he will fix his attention upon things polar, immutable. Thus, unless we have a right conception of eternity we can never make a proper use of time. Time is nothing by itself; there is no sense or reason or rhythm in it: the whole value of it is in its relation to something greater than itself, and something which it dimly and feebly typifies. If we do not know eternity we do not know time. If we do not know astronomy we do not know geography, except as an invention in the painting of lines and sections and circles, and distributions of properties which may be changed tomorrow by some sudden battle. Dean Alford tells of a quaint old Cambridge preacher who said in his pulpit, his throne of power, "Eternity is like a great clock, the pendulum of which says 'tick' in one century, and 'tack' in another: now, said he," erecting himself and facing the scholars of Cambridge, "go home and calculate the length of the pendulum." What are our little calculations about if they do not come out of eternity and return to eternity, and if they do not bring to bear things abiding upon things transient? This is the wise philosophy of life: the one thing that abides amid all the party creations and controversies is the Cross of Christ. That will keep us all steady, solid, right.
The Apostle refers to certain people, with a little tone of sarcasm in his voice. Sometimes he could be very ruthless in criticism and crushing in condemnation. The old Saul would occasionally revive in him. Once he was writing so carefully and quietly, and suddenly the old Saul of Tarsus flamed up in him, and he said to his young correspondent, "There are certain people that are going about talking nonsense in the Church, whose mouths must be stopped." That was Saul; that was an old plan of his! So now he says, "Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world?" Where are these men when you want them most. You do not know, and they do not know. They are of no use. Yet how the wise man can shake his head and look as if he knew a great deal! He will be of no service to you in the hour and article of death. He will be wise enough then to get out of the way. Yet some young minds are victimised by the "wise," who live upon their own consciousness, who keep their manufactories of nonsense within themselves, and turn it out in endless rolls, men who never risked anything for the world's bettering; men who never did anything but talk, so as to prove how little they had to talk about. They had no text. What is the sermon if it be not the text magnified, amplified, and in a sense illuminated? But these men have no text; therefore what they say has no authority; it issues from no throne, and returns to no tribunal; it is an empty noisy wind. "Where is the scribe?" the man of the inkhorn, the grammarian, the letter-monger, the man who will discourse vehemently, so vehemently at least as the infinite coldness of his little nature will permit him, about a semicolon. The poor little scribe loses his rest because he cannot settle whether the comma should be before the word or after the word, or whether there should not be an apostrophe before the s in some cases. How his mind is troubled about that! how grave he looks! how wrinkled he is! how he stoops about the shoulders! Why? Because he is a scribe, a grammarian, a man of syntax; a great parser, but nothing at poetry. "Where is the disputer of this world?" the man of controversy, the man who loves an argument, the man who is always looking round to see whom he can argue with: where is he, in view of the Cross, in view of the great necessities of life, in view of the solemn, impending, inevitable future? Where are they? Nowhere. These men are troublers of society. It is easy to ask questions, to suggest difficulties, to multiply the stumbling-blocks that lie in the way of honest progress. The mind, when it is most truly and Divinely excited, may easily be turned aside by some temptations, shot upon it so quickly that there is no time to reason with it; but the turning aside is but for a moment; because the excitement is Divine it will return, pursue its way, and complete its purpose. The Apostle had to deal, let us see carefully, with the wise, with the scribe, and with the disputer of this world. These classes still live. They will live to the end of time, and to the end of time they will be unblessed by men whose hunger they cannot feed and whose thirst they cannot assuage.
See how the Apostle describes the whole method and economy of God in regard to this matter. How will the Lord God proceed? First, "by the foolishness of preaching." We all know this to be a misrepresentation of the Apostle's meaning. The foolishness is not in the preaching as an art or practice; the foolishness is in the thing that is preached, by the foolishness of the preaching of Christ, by the foolish way of proceeding, by setting up a Cross as the answer to human sin: such stupendous folly was never seen by man before, that God should die, that God should make an atonement to himself, that God should through weakness find the way to power, and through distress and trouble infinite find the way to rest and peace. This is like the Lord's way of proceeding in everything. Given a certain set of circumstances to know how God will act, and we have to draw up the course of his action. Now, when we have written with the patience and criticism of the scribe, compare what we have written with what we should see in Providence: what could be more different, more contrastive, more mutually annihilative? This is the way of the Lord. It is not seen only in the Cross of Christ, in the foolishness of the thing that is preached; it is seen everywhere, in all history, in all providence, in every day's history. We should proceed straightly, we should proceed promptly: by our very littleness we have a trick of energy. We want everything settled before sundown. So does the Lord, only his sundown is a long way off. There is no sundown; what we call sundown is but a momentary expression of convenience; the sun goes on his beaming way even after we think the sun has set. God has a day to work in, and before the day ends his purpose will be completed in righteousness. Let us wait; let us learn that patience is often the best prayer, that longsuffering is often the only theology we want. Then God proceeds by the disappointment of prejudice; because the wise ought to have some little word in this matter; the scribe really ought to be asked to dip his pen if it were only once; the disputer ought to have a little space created for him that he might enter into his argument with some degree and show of pomp. And yet the Lord sweeps them aside, and will have none of them. This was the way with the Lord Jesus Christ. He never allowed a scribe to open his mouth, except that he might have an opportunity of rebuking him, and showing him how little title he had to be described as a writer of the mysteries of the kingdom of God. No Pharisee would Jesus Christ call so long as he remained a Pharisee; no disputer would he permit to enter into his ministry. Men who are in the ministry of Christ have simply to repeat their lesson; to tell what their Lord told them, but to tell it in the language of the day. The liberty is not to change the message, but to vary its delivery. God proceeds by way of rebuking vanity: "For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called." Can God do without them? He can do without us all. The darkness and the light are both alike to him. He does not need any one of us.
The Apostle proceeds to a very suggestive climax: "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise: and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are." "Hath God chosen"; then we should omit the word "and," and read "things which are not": he does not introduce this as another element, but he sums up the whole policy of God in these words "things which are not"; base things, things which are despised, hath God chosen things which are not, to bring to nought things that are. His providence is a continual miracle. If we could see a battering-ram, and see the wall that was to be shaken down, we should begin a process of calculation for we are all scribes and say, The instrument is equal to the occasion; the wall is so high, so broad; the instrument is so large, and so energetic, and the momentum is calculable in mathematical terms: now proceed. This is not God's way. We see the thing to be shattered, but we do not see the energy that shatters it; but down goes the wall, away goes the mighty rampart, the stubborn bastion all down! What did it? A breath from eternity. What saith the Apostle? "Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble." Then there are some wise, mighty, noble. Circumstances do not always go against the aristocratic and the eminent; men should not necessarily condemn them because they are great, after the pattern of this world's greatness. Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, one of the greatest workers in the Christian field in her day, said with characteristic sweetness, "I owe my salvation to the letter 'm'; blessed be God," said that sweet soul, "It does not say, 'any' mighty, 'any' noble; it says 'many' mighty, 'many' noble: I owe my salvation to the letter 'm.'" If it had been "not any noble" where would the Countess have been? Yet how differently we act towards those who are wise and mighty and noble! How we fawn upon them; how we call upon them, even if we have to go to the side door! We have lost our Christian dignity. This spirit was well rebuked by one illustrious clergyman in his day. He was the son of a peer. He could not help that; do not blame him; his consent was not asked. But the lady parishioner upon whom he called would hear of his ancestry and pedigree and birth and advantages. Said the truly great man when the palaver was over, "Madam, I am surprised that you should talk about such frivolities: I have come to speak to you upon matters of eternity." There he was wise, there he was mighty, there he was noble. There is a nobility which men cannot help having, nor are they to be condemned because they possess it; it may be only a nobility of name, or it may be a nobility of name justified by nobility of character, and if not so justified, then the nobility becomes, not a decoration, but a disgrace Let every man justify his nobility, and the world will not withhold from him the palm which is due to faithfulness, integrity, and industry. Thus Paul will drive off the wise, the scribe the disputer, the mighty, the noble, all nominal claimants, patrons and dividers, and he will have nothing seen but Christ; for, said he, as long as the Church looks at Christ it will be unable to see those distributions of rank or power, and take part in those mean controversies, which are characteristic of earth and time and sense. There is a beautiful scene. What you look upon is a silver lake, not a ripple on its smooth face, and the light that is in it is the sun; see how the sun lies in the depths of the lake as in an under sky: does the lake create the sun, or only reflect it? That is what the Church does: it does not create the Cross, it reflects it; it does not originate the Atonement, it accepts it; it does not invent Christ, it receives him and adores him. What a wondrous landscape is that on the canvas! what hill and dale, and wood and water, and light and shade! what painted music! what poetry! Did the artist create the landscape, or only paint it? He only painted it. That is what the Church does. All that is beautiful in the Church is but a transcript, a writing, a transference of something heavenly into an earthly image and symbol and visibility. Does the husbandman create the harvest, or only reap it? Does the seedman create the seed, or only sow it? What does the preacher make? The sermon, not the text. Why this suppression of human vanity? why this snubbing of the wise, the scribe, the disputer, the mighty, the noble? The reason is given in these words, "that no flesh should glory in his presence." The moment we begin to glory we begin to weaken. Self-consciousness lives upon its disease, and eats up its own vitals. Let a man live in himself, for himself, upon himself, and he will consume himself. We were made truly for one another. Call upon the Eternal Father, the Eternal Christ, the Eternal Spirit. In God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost we find what alone can satisfy our appetences, if those appetences are allowed to express themselves in their natural destined aspiration. If we are living upon anything else, then we have ill-treated our organism. If aught but God can satisfy the human heart, the human heart has played traitor to God, and has abandoned the fountain and origin of life and grace. There is an argument in this distaste for God; there is a whole history in this aversion from the Holy One. Let men dispute as they may, whether Adam fell or did not fall, every man knows that he himself has fallen low enough. The self-fall can never be denied.
Paul says in one word you have everything you want in Christ "of him" that is, of God "are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption": word upon word to express the redundance of the provision which is made in Christ for the education, the progress, and the sanctification of the human heart. Do you want wisdom? It is in Christ. Righteousness? It is in Christ. Sanctification? It is in Christ Redemption full, complete, involving the overthrow of the last enemy and the inheritance of immortality? It is in Christ, "That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." We have no need to go to the wise, because we have wisdom in Christ; we have no need to go the scribe, because we have righteousness in the Cross; we have no need to go to the disputer of this world, because we have sanctification and redemption in the Cross. Everything we want is there. Why should men roam in quest of the true riches? Here they are, here at the Cross, here in the wounded Lamb of God. Let us abide here. Let us risk our all on Christ. Lord, abide with us!
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