THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD
Preached At Point Assembly of God on April 20, 2003
By Louis Bartet
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TITLE: The Foolishness of God
TEXT: 1 Cor. 1:18, 23-25
TOPIC: Trusting God is better than relying on our own powerless foolishness.
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18 For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
23 ¡Kwe preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness,
24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
In these four verses Paul makes two interesting references to God. He refers to the "foolishness of God" and the "weakness of God."
In his book The Attributes of God, Arthur W. Pink lists 17 divine attributes or traits belonging to God. He deals with such characteristics as¡K
1. The Knowledge of God. He says that God knows everything perfectly.
2. The Sovereignty of God. God is the supreme ruler of the universe.
3. The Holiness of God. He is the sum of all moral excellence in whom there is no imperfection or lack of wholeness.
4. The Power of God. He has the ability and strength to bring to pass whatsoever He pleases.
5. The Patience of God. He endures great injuries without reacting to avenge Himself.
6. The Grace of God. He joyfully gives us what we do not deserve.
7. The Mercy of God. He does not give us what we do deserve.
No where in his list of 17 attributes does Pink mention the foolishness of God or the weakness of God.
Somehow, foolishness and weakness do not seem to be terms that one would associate with the creator of the universe. In my judgment God is too wise to be foolish and too powerful to be weak.
When I think of foolishness.
ILLUS: I’m reminded of 19 year old Bowling Green, Ohio student Robert Ricketts, who had his head bloodied when he was struck by a Conrail train. He told police he was trying to see how close to the moving train he could place his head without getting hit. That’s foolish!
ILLUS: Larry¡¦s boyhood dream was to fly. But fate conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from being a pilot. After he was discharged from the military, he sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead.
He hatched his weather balloon scheme while sitting outside in his "extremely comfortable" Sears lawn chair. He purchased 45 weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawn chair dubbed the Inspiration I, and filled the 4¡¦ diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself into his lawn chair with some sandwiches, drinks, and a pellet rifle. He figured he would pop a few of the many balloons when it was time to descend.
Larry¡¦s plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about 30 feet above his back yard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. But things didn¡¦t work out quite as Larry planned.
When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawn chair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to 30 feet. Instead, he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by the lift of 42 helium balloons holding 33 cubic feet of helium each. He didn¡¦t level off at 100 feet, nor did he level off at 1000 feet. After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 16,000 feet.
At that height he felt he couldn¡¦t risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting cold and frightened with his beer and sandwiches, for more than 14 hours. He crossed the primary approach corridor of LAX, where Trans World Airlines and Delta Airlines pilots radioed in reports of the strange sight.
Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended. The hanging tethers tangled and caught in a power line, blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood for 20 minutes. Larry climbed to safety, where he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked him why he had done it. Larry replied nonchalantly, "A man can¡¦t just sit around."
ILLUS: Foolishness well describes the Seattle thief who attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street. When police arrived at the scene they found the ill thief curled up next to the motor home. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but said that he plugged his hose into the motor home¡¦s sewage tank by mistake and while attempting to siphon gas got a mouth full of sewage that made him sick.
Robert’s, Larry’s and the Seattle thief’s action were foolish, but the Psalmist David gives the fool award for first place to the man who says in his heart, "There is no God" (Ps. 53:1).
I find it difficult, no, impossible to place God in the same boat with Robert and Larry, but I must admit there are some things about God’s ways that I do not understand.
He calls the woman the weaker vessel, but imparts to her the painful job of bearing children.
When He brings His Son into the world¡K
„X He has him born in a stinky stable instead of a beautiful palace.
„X Instead of being born to royalty, He is birthed by a teenage peasant girl.
When God decides to send a messenger to the Jews, instead of sending Gamiel’s student, Paul, He sends Peter an ignorant fisherman and He sends Paul to the Gentiles. What a waste.
Even though God’s way of doing things is a bit puzzling, I cannot with conviction of heart say that God has ever exhibited a lack of good sense or judgment.
„X I cannot proclaim God to be stupid, silly or unwise.
„X I refuse to accuse Him of being intellectually inferior or irrational.
Neither do I see God as weak or deficient in strength or power.
All that exists is because God said "let there be."
Minor expressions of His power were the parting of the Red Sea, the preservation of the 3 Hebrews in the fiery furnace and protection of Daniel in the Lion’s Den.
Then one might justly ask, what’s this business about the foolishness of God and the weakness of God?
The Jewish View Of The Cross
The Jews were looking for a Messiah, but not one who would be a suffering Lamb. They were waiting for a Lion King who would roar out against Rome. The Messiah they were expecting would repeat the Exodus, but in greater splendor. A crucified Messiah was a scandalous idea. After all, crucifixion was reserved for criminals convicted of murder, rebellion or armed robbery, provided that they were also slaves, foreigners or other nonpersons . To suggest that Messiah would die on a cross was scandalous, offensive and unacceptable. A crucified Messiah had no place in their understanding of either God or scripture. To the Jews the cross was a "stumbling block." It was an offense.
The Cross was rejected by the Jews because it did not conform to their own prior view of how God would and should act. The God who had acted powerfully in their behalf historically would restore the former glory by acting powerfully again. They had God figured out and the "God who makes sense" would never act outside the boundaries they had set for Him.
QUOTE: C. K. Barrett says that their refusal to accept the Cross implied "¡Ka refusal to take God on trust" (p. 54).
QUOTE: Hans Conzelmann wrote: "¡Kthey set themselves up as an authority that can pass judgment upon God¡K.They expect God to submit himself to their criteria" (p.47).
Michael Yaconelli declared:
QUOTE: Predictability and faith cannot coexist. What characterized Jesus and His disciples was unpredictability. Jesus was always surprising the disciples by eating at the wrong houses (those of sinners), hanging around the wrong people (tax collectors, adulterers, prostitutes, lepers), and healing people on the wrong day (the Sabbath). There was no Day Timer, no strategic plan, no missions statement; there was only the eager anticipation of the present moment. The Pharisees wanted Jesus to be the same as they were. His truth should be the same truth that they had spent centuries taming. But truth is unpredictable. When Jesus is present, everyone is uncomfortable yet mysteriously glad at the same time. People do not like surprises¡Xeven church people¡Xand they don’t want to be uncomfortable. They want a nice, tame Jesus.
Take surprise out of faith and all that is left is dry and dead religion. Take away mystery from the gospel and all that is left is a frozen and petrified dogma. Lose your awe of God and you are left with an impotent deity. Abandon astonishment and you are left with meaningless piety. [p.28]
Could it be that like the Jews of Jesus’ day, we want a predictable God? A God who performs according to our criteria? If so, it may be the reason God passes among us and we do not perceive Him. He works and we fail to acknowledge His labors among us. We are so busy writing His job description and we are so committed to our preconceived notions of how He will act that we deny His cross events even when they happen in front of our noses. God must always function as the all-powerful One. When He acts it will always be in terms of our best interests. He will always heal us via acts of power. He will never ask us to carry a cross, but will always intervene to insure our comfort.
Don’t believe it. God calls us away from this kind of religious idolatry that insists God conform to our prior views of how "the God who makes sense" ought to do things. He calls us to anticipate divine surprises. He calls us to walk through the uncomfortable and the embrace the unpredictable. He calls us away from the predictable to the wide-eyed astonishment of walking with a God whose acts take our breath away.
ILLUS: Naman’s believed that God would heal his leprosy by waving his hand over the infected spot and thereby cure him. He was offended when told to go and dip in the Jordan.
The Gentile View of The Cross
If the Jews were rejecting Christ and His cross because He and it did not conform to their anemic theology, then the Gentiles rejected the message of "Christ crucified" because it was unreasonable or utter "foolishness." Tacitus, in 69 A.D., said that the message of the crucified Christ was "a perverse, extravagant superstition". The Gentiles of Paul’s day viewed the message of the cross as utter "madness."
QUOTE: Fee says, "It is hard for those in the Christianized West, where the cross for almost nineteen centuries has been the primary symbol of the faith, to appreciate how utterly mad the message of a God who got himself crucified by his enemies must have seemed to the first-century Greek or Roman. But it is precisely the depth of this scandal and folly that we must appreciate if we are to understand both why the Corinthians were moving away from it toward wisdom and why it was well over a century before the cross appears among Christians as a symbol of faith."
What would you think of a new religion that used a gallows or an electric chair as a symbol of its belief? From a human perspective, the message of a crucified Christ was foolishness.
QUOTE: Gordon MacDonald admits: "I used to struggle with [overconfident intelligentsia] while living in Boston. I would leave the town of Lexington, where my family and I lived, and I would drive past the towers of Harvard University. Another mile down the road, on the left, sits the campus of MIT, and to the right, the campus of Boston University. Straight ahead were the towering headquarters of many great multinational corporations.
There were moments when I was tempted to be intimidated by these unmitigated, unadulterated symbols of power. Here were great world leaders being trained in the business school at Harvard. Over at MIT, signals bounced off Mars every 30 seconds. In those towers, decisions were being made that created and destroyed economies all over the world. And who was I? What was our congregation with this Christian gospel trying to preach?
Citation: Gordon MacDonald, "The Centerpiece of the Gospel," Preaching Today, Tape No. 137.
That’s what was happening in the Corinthian church. They were being intimidated by all the talk of so-called intelligent people who said the Cross was silliness. It was a dumb idea that intelligent men must reject as unreasonable. The cross is grievously offensive to human pride. Human wisdom would provide itself with a ladder on which man could climb into the presence of God and boast of his achievement, but "the world through its wisdom did not come to know God" (1Cor. 1:21). Human wisdom is merely a projection of man’s fallenness.
God took the matter out of man’s hands and placed it on the cross. He was and is "well-pleased" to save those who believe the message of the Cross¡K
„X Christ Crucified
„X Christ the power of God
„X Christ the wisdom of God
The Christ of the Cross becomes God’s means of salvation to those who believe. He becomes righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1:30).
„X By means of the Cross God does for man what man cannot do for himself.
„X By means of the Cross God disarmed the powers.
„X By means of the Cross God brought deliverance to humanity.
„X By means of the Cross God buys man’s freedom from sin.
God is calling us to abandon our powerless foolishness and accept what He has provided.
It is not God who is foolish or weak, but man. In the end God is going to show the wisdom of men and women to be powerless foolishness. For the wise, the Cross is both the wisdom of God and the power of God.
Conclusion
For many, God is their goal and objective. Others are not seeking God, but to be God. Instead of relying totally upon Him, they/we would construct our own method of deliverance and ask God to partner with us.
Don’t ask God for His license before you cash the check He has given you.
Don’t reject God’s plan just because it does not seem reasonable or because it does not agree with your plan.
The Sovereign Lord of the universe may not be doing it the way you think it ought to be done, but that doesn’t mean He’s not at work. His method of operation may not be acceptable to human reason, but that doesn’t mean it’s foolish.
God’s way is the best way! Trust Him!
