And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom, declaring to you the testimony of God.
For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory,
which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
But as it is written:
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
nor has entered into the heart of man
the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.
For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.
For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
From its very inception, the church has been plagued with problems—problems from the outside and problems from the inside. As we take a close look at the history of what God has been doing in the church, we find that the most debilitating problems have not come from the outside, but from the inside.
Most of the hindrances to what God has wanted to do in the fulfillment of His purpose seem to me more related to those who are on the inside, a part of it, than to those on the outside who would seek to hinder it.
Paul, seemingly being very aware of this, in writing to the Corinthian church begins, I believe, to explain some very important matters to these Corinthian believers. I trust that, as we look at these verses in 1 Corinthians 2, the Spirit of God will be pleased to speak some things to our hearts that will be helpful to us as we seek to be faithful to the Lord in this age, in this generation.
I have to admit to you, brothers and sisters, that for a number of months now, inwardly at least, I have been quite concerned and burdened regarding the work of God among those with whom we have fellowship.
As I have given consideration to this, it seems to me again, as we said a moment ago, that the explanation is not from the outside, but from the inside. Something is not right among us as the people of God.
Certainly, if we had opportunity to testify, every one of us could stand and give wonderful reports of the things that God is doing in our lives personally and among us in fellowships. But if we stand a little further back than the immediate and take a bigger look at what is going on, it would seem to me that there is much more that God is interested in accomplishing than He has been able to do, and than He is presently able to do.
I believe it is directly related to those of us who are already on the inside, who are already a part of what is going on. It is not because people on the outside are throwing so many accusations at us, and we are under such severe persecution, that we are not free to give ourselves to the things of God. Somehow, that is just not the case.
So it seems to me that the thing the Lord is really wanting to put His finger on and call our attention to is this: there is something going on among us that is, in a sense, stifling and hindering that which God is really wanting to bring about.
When Paul begins 1 Corinthians 2, he tells them that when he came among them, he did not come with excellency of speech or wisdom, but came declaring what this version calls “the testimony of God.”
My Bible has a little footnote indicating that the word in other versions is translated “the mystery of God.” I wonder if possibly one of the things happening among us is that we are not allowing this mystery that has been revealed to really be worked out, first of all in our own personal lives, and then in our lives together in our various localities.
God, in His great mercy, has been pleased to reveal the secrets of this mystery to most of us who are in this place this morning, who are simply representatives of various fellowships of God’s people here on the East Coast.
We have been greatly blessed of God. He has been very merciful to us. Are we aware, brothers and sisters, that there are those who have longed with the deepest longing of their being to see what we have been privileged to see?
There are people who would have given—I do not know what phrase to use, but we used to say “given their right arm”—just to have a glimpse of that which we have been honored and blessed to receive and see.
I wonder if part of the difficulty that seemingly is taking place among us—our seeming weakness in terms of really affecting the communities in which we live, our weakness in terms of there really being a strong testimony, something that the Lord is evidently using as a way to penetrate the communities in which we live—is because this which God has been so pleased to give us an insight into has somehow lost its hold on us.
So I thought this morning that we could fellowship together around this portion of Scripture as a way of the Lord, in a sense, bringing us back to a place of looking with fresh eyes at that which God has been pleased to show us.
First of all, I feel it might be important if we could look at this word mystery. Paul uses it again in 1 Corinthians 2:7:
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery,
the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory.
When we talk about this matter of mystery, we are not talking about something mysterious. It is a mystery in the sense that it is something hidden. It is something not open to the eyes of everyone.
God has taken something and hidden it in Himself. Then, of His own sovereign choosing, He has been willing to unveil that and allow various ones to see.
I think it is important that we understand that even in that act God has acted righteously. If you remember, for instance, in the Gospels—in Mark 4 and Matthew 13—when the Lord Jesus began to share about the kingdom of God, He talked about the mysteries of the kingdom.
You recall the parable of the sower: the sower went out to sow seed, and the seed fell on various kinds of soil and produced various results. But after He shared that parable, His disciples came to Him privately and said, “Lord, we do not understand. Why are You speaking in parables?”
He said to them, “It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but it has not been given unto them.” Therefore, He spoke in parables.
He goes on to explain that it is necessary for it to be given to us. In the same way, those two men on the road to Emmaus encountered the Lord Jesus and walked with Him for some distance, yet their eyes were closed for a period. But when they were breaking bread together, the Lord opened their eyes and they saw Him.
The Lord has had things that have been hidden. There have been those who have longed to look into them, to understand them, to glean the truth of them; but in God’s sovereignty, He has chosen to keep some of it hidden and veiled until a certain time.
With the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the institution of the church, God has chosen to take these hidden things, pull back the veil, and begin to show them to the likes of us—to human beings, to mere creatures.
I do not mean that, not until New Testament times, were any of the secrets of God known. No, that is not true. But the secret of all secrets, in a real sense, has been hidden until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He becomes the One who explains the deepest things in the heart of God—the things that are deepest in God’s heart, the things that He wants more than anything else. Our Lord Jesus Christ has come to explain them.
It might be helpful if we look at some other places in the Scriptures where Paul uses this word mystery. He uses it some twenty times in his writings. We will not look at all of them this morning, but let us look at a few.
In Ephesians 1, beginning with verse 7, Paul says:
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace, which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will.
Here Paul is talking in terms of the mystery of the will of God. He has made it known to us—not just one aspect of what God’s will is, but He has, in a sense, gotten down to the very essence of what God’s will is. In His Son, God has been pleased to reveal and unveil the mystery of His will.
Then look in Ephesians 3. Paul says that by revelation God made known to him the mystery, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets.
That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel.
Here the mystery Paul refers to is the fact that God is eliminating, as he talked about in Ephesians 2, the distinction between Jew and Gentile. The barrier wall has been broken down, and God has constituted in Christ one new man.
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. All those distinctions have been broken down, and God has constituted one new man.
Then look in Ephesians 5. In the latter part of that chapter, the apostle makes application of these wonderful truths that God has revealed to him to the husband-and-wife relationship.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery, but