The Foolishness Of The Cross

The mayor and other dignitaries were looking into the vast pit dug for the new hospital to

be built. The town half-wit came up and gazed into the pit, and asked the mayor what he was

going to do with this big hole. The mayor decided to humor him and said, "We are going to

round up all the fools in town and pile them in there." The half-wit thought a moment and

then said, "Whose gonna be left to cover um up?"

Even a half-wit knows that in some sense all men are fools, but I have to confess I never

really realized to what degree this is true until I studied what the Bible says about fools and

foolishness. The subject is so vast, and the evidence is so overwhelming that only a fool

would deny that all men are fools. This does not sound very nice, however, and so it is wise

for us to see there is a positive side to being a fool. So much so, that Paul in I Cor. 3:18

urges Christians to be fools, and in 4:10 he says, "We are fools for Christ."

To add to the paradox of being a Christian fool, Paul in this passage of I Cor. 1:18-31

glories in Christian folly, and links almost everything of Christian nobility to foolishness. He

writes of the foolishness of the cross; the foolishness of wisdom, and the foolishness of

preaching, and most shocking of all, for it seems to border on blasphemy, Paul even writes in

verse 25 of the foolishness of God. Then he says in verse 27 that God chose the foolish things

of the world to shame the wise. And the foolish things are the Christians.

So what it comes down to is this: All men are in some sense fools, but since all are not

fools in the same way, we have to make a distinction between worldly fools and wise fools.The

worldly fools are those who feel so wise they have no need of light from God. These fools say

in their hearts that there is no God. Man is the measure of all things, and He determines His

own destiny. They say science and human philosophy is all we need to produce a utopia. We

do not need the Bible or God to create our own heaven.

The wise fool, in contrast, recognizes that human wisdom is so limited, and so there is a

need for wisdom from above. They are seen as fools from the point of view of the worldly

fool. God, however, sees them as wise, and so the two perspectives make them wise fools

that is people who seem to choose foolishness and trust in foolishness, but because it is the

foolishness of God, they are wise. So what we have here is a study in relativity. The worldly

wise who reject God's revelation are, in relation to eternal truth, fools. Those, however, who

choose the way of God are seen as fools, in relation to the way of the world, but in fact, they

are the truly wise. Type one fools seem wise to men, but are fools to God. Type 2 fools seems

fools to men, but are wise to God. So wisdom and folly are relative to whose perspective you

are seeing them from.

Paul's whole battle with the Corinthians was to get them to stop being wise before the

world and fools before God, and to reverse that to being fools before the world, and wise

before God. The goal of the Christian is to become a wise fool. The Corinthians were

missing this mark because they came from a long tradition of philosophers who had all the

answers. As Greeks they were considered a wise people. The result was, the church was in

chaos because of all the pride of worldly wisdom. Some thought Paul was the best. Others

that it was Peter, and still others that Apollos was number one. Some said they were all

wrong, and we follow Jesus only. The church was divided because, in their pride, they were

deciding what was best. They were also picking and choosing the gifts they felt were best. In

pride Christians can set themselves up as the judge of what is wise and what is foolish, and in

so doing they make their human judgment, rather than God's revelation, the basis for their

value system, and this is folly.

If human reason is going to be the standard of judgment, then the whole plan of God is

nothing but foolishness, and nothing is more foolish than the foolishness of the cross. Just

look at the evidence of its folly.

1. The innocent dying for the guilty.

2. The folly of having a way out and not taking it.