“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #11
“For ye see your calling, brethren, how that no many wise men after the flesh, not many might, not many noble, are called: 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: that no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor. 1:26-29).
Paul has just taught us that the wisdom of God is foolishness to man, and that yet, the folly of God is wiser than the wisdom of man. We take a statement like this and, if we believe it, we render it safe and unobjectionable by relegating it to some seventeenth dimension in the heavenly places somewhere. Somewhere up there, or way out there, God is thinking thoughts that would be incomprehensible to us if we heard them, and we might be tempted to write it off as folly.
But God’s wisdom, that which looks like folly to us, comes down. Just as Christ was Immanuel, God with us, so also He was the wisdom of God—a wisdom that did not look like it (Is. 53:2). And then, on top of that, when God commissions the messengers of His wisdom, He picks out the unlikeliest ones. And just when we think we have it dialed in—He always picks the losers, we say—He surprises us again. Not many wise and mighty, Paul says, not “not any.”
We measure whether God is at work in the preaching of the cross this way by whether or not the Establishment is confounded. God uses anything at hand—fishermen like James and John, scholars like Saul of Tarsus, ambitious climbers like Augustine, municipal authorities like Ambrose, slave traders like Newton, Anglican priests like Whitefield, and Oxford dons like Lewis. We measure the work by the result. Is flesh abashed? Have we arrived at the result of no flesh trying to glory in the presence of God? Do we preach a flayed Christ, the wisdom of God, nailed to a cross for the sins of the world? Or do we try to make this folly acceptable to the faith’s cultured despisers?