What do you think was the most popular name
for newborn girls in 2013? It is Sophia. I wonder how many of those parents
know that Sophia is a Greek word that means wisdom. The Apostle Paul wrote
about Sophia in the words of our second lesson.
Paul wrote to the Greek believers in Achaia
who were well acquainted with the wisdom of their age. They heard it daily from
the mouths of thinkers and philosophers in places like Corinth and nearby
Athens. The wisdom of their age centered
of course on man and the false notion that he can find spiritual truth from
inside himself.
The Apostle and others had shared a greater
wisdom with the Corinthians when he had established their church on his second
missionary journey; Jesus Christ and him crucified. Now, he wrote to them on
his third journey to remind them of that greater, genuine wisdom the Holy
Spirit had revealed through his preaching.
Listen as Paul describes The Essence of Genuine Wisdom. The Holy Spirit reveals it. It
results in our salvation.
The greater and genuine wisdom we all need is
the wisdom of God not the wisdom of this age. The wisdom of God is Jesus
Christ’s crucifixion. On the cross, the holy eternal Son of God bore our sin
and guilt. There Jesus redeemed us from sin, death, and the power of the devil
with his holy precious blood and his innocent suffering and death. This wisdom
is both unalterable by time, and unknowable to natural man. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no
mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”
The essence of genuine wisdom is that the
Holy Spirit reveals it. He reveals it only in the Word, only in the gospel. “But
God has revealed it by the Holy Spirit.” This makes genuine wisdom
spiritual not material. It is the wisdom of God revealed by God for saving
faith in God.
This wisdom stands in stark contrast with the
wisdom of the age that wrongly believed, as many do today, that spiritual truth
comes from inside a person’s heart rather than from an outside revelation. This
is the operating delusion of those who claim they are not religious but
spiritual. The mature, as the Apostle
names them, were the believers who saw through the changing “wisdom of the
age and of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.” They
recognized genuine wisdom as coming from the Holy Spirit.
This source makes God’s “secret wisdom, a
wisdom that has been hidden” until the Spirit reveals it reliable. You may
have heard someone say, “Consider the source,” as a reason to
believe or not to believe something you have heard. If the source knows
of what he speaks, the information is good. If not, it is not.
We have genuine wisdom that is reliable
because it is true. Consider the Source, the Holy Spirit. Just as my spirit
knows what it is like to be a man, so the Spirit of God knows all things, “even
the deep things of God.”
The Holy Spirit is God. He knows all of God’s
attributes, his every will, and his every plan. The Holy Spirit knows the
thoughts of God. He reveals them to us in the Word. Paul wrote, “We have not
received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may
understand what God has freely given us.”
What God has freely given us is Jesus Christ
through our saving knowledge and trust in him for the forgiveness of our sins.
The essence of genuine wisdom results in our salvation.
Genuine wisdom results in our salvation
because it does not come “in words taught us by human wisdom but in words
taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.”
Human wisdom they teach in human words, that is, words that come from the human
spirit, are subject to change, subject to error, subject to the subjectivity of
the one who chooses the words. Not very reliable. Such wisdom comes and goes. Such
human wisdom is temporary and unstable at best.
On the other hand, the wisdom of God comes
from the Holy Spirit. He teaches us spiritual words, words that have their
source in him and have power to work on our spirits. These words convey
spiritual things like redemption, forgiveness, salvation, justification,
sanctification, conversion and the like; all the building blocks of our
salvation. He has revealed these spiritual words through the verbal inspiration
of Scripture. Faith comes from hearing that message.
Because these words result in our salvation,
there is no need to dress them up. One commentator used the comparison of
trying to dress up
a gold bar with cheap tinsel. Paul
earlier had reminded the Corinthians as we heard last week, that he had not
come to them with eloquence or superior wisdom, not with wise and persuasive
words but “but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power so that your faith
might not rest on man’s wisdom but on God’s power.”
We rely on the power of the gospel in Word
and sacrament, the means of grace to bring our salvation. We do not need
rhetorical tricks, or gimmicky window dressing in order for Jesus Christ and
him crucified to make more sense and be more attractive to unbelievers.
This was not God’s plan. God established his
plan of salvation for the world in Christ. It is hidden from natural man until
the Spirit reveals it in the plain and simple truth of Jesus Christ and him
crucified. The Spirit reveals this wisdom of God because it is a wisdom “destined
for our glory before time began.”
God determined our salvation before time
began. The Holy Spirit revealed that wisdom in time. The essence of genuine
wisdom brings about our understanding of what God has freely given us which
leads to our glory and joy for all eternity after time ceases. Amen.
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