One of my biggest fears is being in a situation where I don’t have any insight or information to provide. I think that’s why I read so much and have so many resources in my Logos Bible Software library; I never want to be unable to access an answer.
As you can imagine, this has come back to bite me on more occasions than I’d like to admit. I’ve given a response to a support question I was 90% sure was correct, only to find out that I was 100% wrong and should’ve asked for help.
With the advent of LLMs and more widely available artificial intelligence, I feel even more like I have no excuse to be found without something to add to a conversation. “Hmmm, let me ask Claude.” “Oh, I’ll ask Siri.” “Hey Chat, what’s….?”
You feel it too. You use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok like it’s your personal researcher, and you used Google before that. You want to get a full brief with interesting tidbits, or a link to share with your friends to prove your point, or just a grasp on a topic you haven’t looked up before that moment.
To take it one step further: maybe you do all of this not to contribute to a conversation, but to dominate, win, and make yourself look good. You’re not there to be part of the situation; you’re there to control it and be the conductor, dictating what everyone talks about.
But what if we were never meant to have all of the answers? What if the goal of our faith isn’t to know everything and be theological experts, but to know the right things really well and do something about it?
I’ve been reading 1 Corinthians the week prior to writing this, and couldn’t shake what I read towards the end of chapter 1:
17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its effect.
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved. 19 For it is written,
I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and I will set aside the intelligence of the intelligent.20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish? 21 For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached. 22 For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. 24 Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, 25 because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor. 17-25 CSB)
Because I care so much about getting it right when I write, teach, and converse, when Paul writes to the Corinthian church about how they use what they know, often to the detriment of their relationships, I feel deep conviction about how I wield the facts I’ve collected and ideas I’ve crafted. Instead of using it to spread the Gospel, I often weaponize it to build my ego and reputation (however futile it ends up being).
I love how Taylor frames this section: “The ensuing argument presumes that the message of the cross is antithetical to the status-seeking cultural expectations associated with wise speech.”1 In this vein, as Paul tackles one of the besetting issues in the church in Corinth, I see the section saying three clear things we should heed and internalize.
You can get it right, but still lose the plot. (vv. 17-19)
Your Bible most likely has a heading/pericope break between verse 17 and verse 18. It’s important to call this out because verse 17 serves as a transitional statement between Paul’s first point of the section and his second, providing a bridge that acts as both a closer and an opener.
Paul knew his purpose: preach the Gospel. He didn’t even want to get caught up in the insane divisions the Corinthians put in place. The voices in the congregation that stoked this problematic fire went wrong by putting more stock in how the message came to them than in the message itself. Akin summarizes both Paul’s intent in writing this sentence the way he does, as well as the idea he was trying to refute:
Paul knew it was better to speak truth poorly than to say nothing with flair. Paul certainly cared nothing about the delivery of the gospel. Paul would agree that what you say and how you say it are important, yet the point is the medium must not get in the way of the message. The power is in the message! The power is in the preaching of the cross! If an impressive delivery overshadows the preaching of the good news, then the cross will be emptied of its power. The power of salvation is never in the messenger. The power of salvation is always in the message, the gospel, the cross of Christ.2
For us, this is all too applicable. We strive for a polished version of whatever we say, making sure each paragraph and statement lands with the most impact. We stockpile facts from our chosen sources, package them for the biggest bang, and send them off without considering whether our words even mean anything.
When it comes to the Gospel, we care way more about getting the wording right than just trying. And in that internal decision, where we talk ourselves out of sharing our faith with someone we feel the pull to talk to, we elevate the “flair” that Akin mentions over simply being honest and making the attempt.
Thus, as Paul transitions to the next portion and then quotes Isaiah 29:14, he makes his point clear. What God does, in order to emphasize the message over the messenger, is invert the way of worldly wisdom and reason to demonstrate that what we think is logical isn’t always so. Fee comments, “[T]he message of the cross is not something to which one may add human wisdom, in any form, and thereby make it superior; rather, the cross stands in absolute, uncompromising contradiction to merely human wisdom.”3 The fact that Christ came, lived, died, and rose again, all in the place of black-hearted sinners like you and me who don’t deserve it, isn’t something that we could cook or scheme up ourselves. Humanly speaking, this just doesn’t make sense, and that’s exactly the point.
We weren’t meant to think our way to God. (vv. 20-23)
One thing we must understand about 1 Corinthians is that it’s a very literary book. Paul uses irony, sarcasm, rhetorical questions, alliteration, and other wordplay to meet his readers where they were culturally; in these verses, that approach is clearly driven by a dependence on, and emphasis on, mental fortitude.
After a series of aforementioned rhetorical questions, Paul drops the hammer on the very things those who are skeptical of God appeal to in order to see if He exists, all with the point that God found it “pleasing” to save people who believed despite the absence of logic, reason, and signs. After all, as Fee notes, “A God discovered by human wisdom will be both a projection of human fallenness and a source of human pride, and this constitutes the worship of the creature, not the Creator.”4
It stands to reason that, if this is the case, then we can’t just connect the dots mentally and come to the conclusion that there is a God and He’s done what we read about in Scripture. The Corinthians viewed wisdom as their salvation; God is the only Savior. Akin brings context to the moment: “The Jews rejected the message because they asked for signs—the miraculous… the Greeks lifted sophists (traveling teachers of wisdom), popular rhetoricians, and debaters as the celebrities of the day.”5 So we too view knowledge and proof as a life raft to cling to when life gets tough and feels out of control. We turn to the things we can look up, uncover, and digest by our own might, and it will always leave us high and dry.
This doesn’t work in God’s economy. Paul even calls the way God works “a stumbling block” and “foolishness.” It’s only through the things that don’t make sense that we can find, or rather be found by, God.
Even at your best, you already lost to God’s worst day. (vv. 24-25)
At first glance, that claim is discouraging. We read it and these verses with human eyes, forgetting that God doesn’t play by our rules. Comparing our highs and lows with someone else’s is daunting and exhausting; how much more when we use our finite minds to compare ourselves to God!
But this is where we have to remember what Paul’s pointing at. “God’s foolishness” and “God’s weakness” are more than just figures of speech. They point back to that fateful day, with a cross outside of Jerusalem on a Friday that held God’s son.
That truly is the worst day. The moment every human standard of wisdom and strength would mark as a total failure. But, subverting this notion, Paul says that this is wiser and stronger than anything we have at our disposal. It’s not a knock on us, and it’s not a comparison. God didn’t keep His distance and leave us to our own devices. Instead, He came down, went lower than the lowest low we could think of, and He won the battle against sin and death.
It’s a fitting way to close this section. The playing field is leveled, all means of pride are destroyed, and we’re left with one final piece of wisdom: the only power that can do anything of value is Christ’s power. Fee writes, “In the cross God ‘outsmarted’ his human creatures and thereby nullified their wisdom. In the same cross God also ‘overpowered’ his enemies, with lavish grace and forgiveness, and thereby divested them of their strength.”6
With all of this in mind, what can we do about the fact that what we bring to the table in our means, minds, and moments aren’t enough? Paul provides the answer in the next section:
26 Brothers and sisters, consider your calling: Not many were wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. 27 Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. 28 God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world—what is viewed as nothing—to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, 29 so that no one may boast in his presence. 30 It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom from God for us—our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption 31 —in order that, as it is written: Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. (1 Cor. 1:26-31)
Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Across major translations and commentaries, there’s consensus that Paul means bragging, glorying, or reveling in what God has done in Christ’s work on the cross.
This is the part where it's easy to rail against learning, knowledge, or studying. That’s not what Paul had in mind at all. We’re meant to grow in our learning, study the deeper things of Scripture, and be equipped to disciple others. But we must recognize that we are not the source or originator of what we know. It’s a gift from God that we can have wisdom!
Thus, we must use it appropriately.
So what does it look like to use our wisdom in the right way, when we’re in a conversation we didn’t see coming?
Most of the time, it looks like being okay with saying, “I don’t know.”
This is just as much for me as I hope it is for you, because that sentence scares me. I’ve positioned most of my life to avoid saying that, but it seems that Paul is writing to people like me (and you) in this closing section: “Not many of you were wise from a human perspective, not many of noble birth.” The qualification, not what’s missing, is what he’s hitting on.
The one thing that scares me most is where God prefers to work.
So keep reading. Keep digging. Care about getting things right. But lay down the need to arrive at every conversation armed to the teeth with something to share. The role of conductor you and I try to play has already been taken by someone who knows how to keep time better than we have, since He’s been doing it since before time began.
So use Logos. Use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to help you. But hold what you find loosely. Hold it with an open hand so that when you do get the question you can’t answer, you still have the one thing that you actually walked in with:
Christ crucified.
Mark Taylor, 1 Corinthians, ed. E. Ray Clendenen, vol. 28, The New American Commentary (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2014), 59–60.
Daniel L. Akin, “How Do You Divide and Nearly Destroy a Church? (1 Corinthians 1:10–17),” in Exalting Jesus in 1 Corinthians, ed. David Platt, Daniel L. Akin, and Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Brentwood, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 22.
Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse et al., Revised Edition, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 69.
Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 76.
Akin, “The Power of the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18–25),” in Exalting Jesus in 1 Corinthians, 30.
Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 81.