Preaching the Gospel Message (Parts 1 & 2) John MacArthur

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Preaching the Gospel Message (Part 1)

by

John MacArthur

General Session #2

SC1003

 

In the two nights that I have opportunity to speak to you, I am going to follow the same theme.  I don’t exactly know how far I’ll get tonight, but whatever we don’t finish tonight we’ll finish on Friday.

 

Perhaps the dominate myth in the evangelical church today is the myth that the kingdom of God and the glory of Christ somehow advance on the back of public favor.  This is the fantasy that the path for gospel influence is paved with popular acceptance of the Christian message.  

 

This goes way back; I remember reading, in the second volume of Martin Lloyd-Jones biography (by Ian Murray), a quote from Edward John Carnel in the formative years of Fuller Seminary.  E .J. Carnel, an apologist who later died a tragic death, said (for evangelicalism, from his perspective), “We need prestige desperately.”  

 

Christians have sought to position themselves within the culture in places of power and places of influence—academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, you name it—in hopes of gaining mass media exposure.  And then when they gain that widest possible exposure—sometimes mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they will then craft a message—a reinvented, designer, pop gospel—that will subtly remove all of the offense of the gospel and sort of pull people into the kingdom along an easy path.  The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty cultural perches of power and influence, or, if we can take out the sting of the gospel and develop a message that’s much more acceptable.  

 

Of course, local church pastors are seduced into this pop gospel, this designer gospel, this message crafted to somehow fit the sinner’s desire, edited to overcome consumer resistance, you might say—church meetings stylized to look, sound, feel, and smell like the world-so that again the sinner’s resistance is removed and they can be lured into the kingdom down an easy and somewhat familiar path.  

 

The idea is to make it easy to believe.  And what we saw in the session this morning is that is actually hard to believe; in fact, it is absolutely impossible—if the sinner is left to himself.  

 

I think the philosophy is sort of like: if they like us in our meeting, they’ll like Jesus.  It seems to be a sort of underlying mantra.  Obviously, this whole scheme works superficially, but only if the truth is compromised to maintain these positions of power and influence—whether politically or academically or socially or economically or religiously or wherever.  To maintain this kind of tenuous alliance with the world in the name of love, in the name of attractiveness, in the name of tolerance, and to keep the unconverted happy coming to church, the truth must be reduced to the level of being inoffensive. In fact, as some Calvinist said, “Sometimes we don’t present the gospel well enough for the non-elect to reject it.”  I would never say that, but somebody said that.

 

Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood on this: I am committed to impacting society.  That is not only a commitment; that’s a calling.  I am committed to reach as far as possible here and around the world and to spread the gospel.  I prefer righteousness to prevail over sin.  I prefer righteous people to be elevated and sin to be exposed for what it really is, in all of its destructiveness.  I would long to see the glory of God extend to the end of the earth.  I long to have the kingdom of darkness flooded with divine light.  

 

No loyal child of God is ever content with sin or immorality or unrighteousness or error or unbelief.  The reproach that falls on the Lord falls on me and zeal for His house eats me up as it did David and as it did Jesus.  I hate the churches of the world that have become havens for heretics.  I resent the TV church that, in many cases, has become a den of thieves.  I would love to see the divine Lord take a whip and have at it, in the religion of our time.  I occasionally pray imprecatory psalms directly on the heads of certain people.  But, mostly I pray for the kingdom to come, mostly I pray for the gospel to penetrate the hearts of the lost.  

 

I understand why John Knox said, “Give me Scotland or I die; what else do I live for?”  I understand why Henry Martin ran out of that Hindu temple and said, “I cannot endure existence if Jesus is to be so dishonored.”  I’ve made no truce with the way the world is.  If I were in that group, I too would be among the saints under the altar saying, “How long, O Lord, how long?  Isn’t there ever going to be end to this disrespect?”  

 

I resent evil; I resent everything that dishonors the Lord.  I’m against everything He’s against and for everything He’s for.  I long to see people brought to saving faith in Jesus Christ.  I hate that sinners die without any hope.  I’m committed to the proclamation to the gospel.  I’m not narrow in that sense: I want to be a little part of fulfilling the Great Commission.  I want to preach the gospel—at least, my little part—to every living creature.  It’s not that I’m not interested in the lost of the world.  It’s not that I have made an easy truce with a wretched, sinful world that dishonors my God and Christ.  

 

The only question for me is: how do I go about that?  What is my responsibility?      And it certainly can’t be by compromising the message!  The message, after all, is not mine; it’s from God, and it is by that message that He saves.  

 

Not only can I not compromise the message; I can’t compromise the cost.  I can’t change the terms!  As we saw in Luke 9:23, Jesus said, “If you want to come after me, deny yourself.”  It’s the end of you.  You’re done.  This is not the gospel of self-fulfillment; this is the gospel of self-denial.  And to what extent do you deny yourself?  “Take up your cross all the way to death if that’s what I ask.”  

 

I can’t help it if that gospel offends a society awash in self-love. And I know this: the world is influenced truly and changes genuinely one soul at a time under the preaching of the truth—and that only by the life-giving, light-sending, soul-transforming power of the Holy Spirit, in perfect fulfillment of the eternal plan of God.  

 

The kingdom does not advance by human cleverness.  It does not advance because we have gained positions of power and influence in the culture.  It doesn’t advance because we’re in the media.  It doesn’t advance because somehow we have become popular in the community.  In fact, the kingdom of God does not advance on the back of public favor; it advances by the power of God in spite of public hostility!  

 

When truly proclaimed in its fullness the saving message of Jesus Christ is, frankly, outrageously offensive.  It’s outrageously offensive.  We proclaim a scandalous message.  The message of the cross is, from the perspective of the world, shameful.  It is so shameful, so antagonizing, so offensive, that even faithful Christians struggle to proclaim it because they will be resented and ridiculed!  

 

I’ve noticed—just in my own experience, and I’m sure you have too—how hard it is for many Christians, even well-known, evangelical leaders, who get in the public media, to get out the word “Jesus”.  Have you noticed that?  To say nothing of “the cross”! Or “sin”!  Or “hell”!  They talk a lot about “faith”, sort of unattached.

 

Paul made a remarkable statement in Romans 1: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes: to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For, in it, the righteousness of God is revealed, from faith to faith, as it is written: ‘the righteous shall live by faith.’”

 

Now, why would Paul say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel”?  That just seems, on the surface, to be such a strange statement.  Who would ever introduce the idea of shame into such good news?  Would a person, for example, who had found the cure for aids, have to overcome immense shame to proclaim it?  Would a person who had discovered a cure for cancer have to get over this terrible shame to be able to open his mouth?  Would he get on the media and say, “Well, I-I-I-I-I…” or would he just say it?  Why is there something about the cross that is so hard to say?

 

In fact, Martin Lloyd-Jones said, “If you have never felt shame in proclaiming the gospel, it’s probably because you don’t understand the gospel.”  People who call themselves Christians, amazingly, are ashamed.  We have all, at some points or other in our Christian lives, been ashamed; we’ve kept our mouth closed when we should have opened it.  And I’m not talking about the “Jesus loves you and wants to make you happy” message.  Why can’t the Christian professor in the university stand up before the whole faculty and proclaim, overtly, the gospel?  

 

Well, we want to be accepted—and we know we have a message that will be rejected.  And the stronger we hold to that message, and the more we declare that message, the more hostile those around us become.  And, so, we begin to feel the shame.  Paul rises above that, by the grace of God and the power of the Spirit, and says, “I’m not ashamed… I’m not ashamed.”  It’s an example for us—because he knew the price, didn’t he?  Public rejection, imprisonment, and ultimately execution.  

 

I want to talk tonight and Friday night about the shameful cross.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last couple of months and been stimulated by a lot of things that I’ve read and just perused in the text; and just sort of [want to] unfold for you a little bit, a reminder that we have a message that will be rejected.  Just like Isaiah 6: nobody’s going to listen to you—preach it anyway.  

 

Shame was a big deal in the first century.  Honor was a big deal in the first century.  In fact, the Greek and Roman world was a world where men sought honor and shunned shame.  Those were issues of high concern.  Homer wrote: the chief good was to be well spoken of, the chief evil to be badly spoken of (by one’s society).  People tried to avoid shame; they tried to pursue honor.

 

The apostle Paul ministered; I suppose you could say, in a shame-sensitive, honor-seeking culture.  And there he was, shamelessly preaching what people thought was a shameful message about a publicly shamed person.  So, the message was offensive.  It was scandalous.  It was stupid.  It was foolish.  It was moronic.  Turn to I Corinthians 1, and let’s go where were going to park for the next couple of times.

 

I Corinthians 1:21—and I just want to pick it up at the second half of the verse—“God was well pleased, through the foolishness of the message preached, to save those who believe.”  It was the scandalous, offensive, foolish, ridiculous, bizarre, absurd message of the cross preached, that God used to save those who believe.  

 

Now, this one verse invites us into a rich and instructive section of scripture—and I will confess to you that I am already feeling the pressure to get through this.  I was saying, a little earlier, I could preach six, probably eight, maybe ten messages on this passage.  I’m going to try to crunch tonight and next Friday/this Friday.  So, let me jump into the outline.

 

Let me tell you why we preach such a shameful message when we preach the cross.

 

Number one: there is the shameful stigma of the cross.

 

There is the shameful stigma of the cross.  The world, looking at the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ, runs right into this first of all.  While it is much more lost to the world of our time because we don’t have people being crucified, in the first century, they knew exactly what crucifixion was.  

 

So, let me just draw you back to verse 18, “The word of the cross is, to those who are perishing, foolishness,”—and than down to verses 22 and 23, “For indeed Jews ask for signs, Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: to Jews, a stumbling block, and to Gentiles, foolishness.”  “Foolishness” (‘moria’—from which we get “moron”—“insane”): this message, the word of the cross.  

 

By the way, the repeated article there, “the word of the cross,” turns that second article into a demonstrative pronoun: “the word of that cross.”  “That cross,” which is at the heart of the gospel—the cross of Jesus Christ—was “nonsense” to Jews and Greeks who are “perishing” (‘apollumenoiv’: who are “ruined”, “lost”), designating them as under the damnation of God.

 

Now, going over to verses 22 and 23 (just kind of capturing the main idea): the Jews looked for a sign—“You’re the Messiah, give us a sign”—and, by that sign, there would be the indication of some great supernatural wonder by which they would be attracted to their Messiah.  Satan knew how they thought; that’s why he told Jesus, “If you want to be accepted by them, jump off this tower,” right, “jump of this parapet, this high point, and come down to a soft landing and they’ll all fall at your feet.”  They were looking for a supernatural sign—that’s what the Jews wanted.  They wanted a wonder.  Even though Jesus had given them many in His miraculous ministry, they wanted, yet, one sort of super miracle that they could all look at and say, “That’s the sign, that’s the proof that He’s the Messiah.”

 

The Greeks, on the other hand, weren’t so much interested in the miraculous, they weren’t looking for the supernatural sign—they were looking for wisdom.  They wanted to validate a true religion, some transcendental insight, some elevated idea, some esoteric knowledge, some sort of spiritual experience—maybe an out of body experience—or some other imaginary emotional event.  

 

Greeks wanted wisdom; they got foolishness.  The Jews wanted a sign; they got a stumbling block.  God designed to give them exactly what was opposite of what they wanted.  The Jews were given a ‘skandalon’; a crucified Messiah was scandalous, blasphemous, bizarre, offensive, unbelievable.  And, for the Greeks, who were looking for esoteric knowledge—elevated knowledge, something high and noble and lofty—the nonsense about the eternal Creator God of the universe being crucified was idiotic.  From both sides, the stigma of crucifixion made the whole notion of the gospel an absolute absurdity.

 

All you have to do is look a little bit into the history of crucifixion in the first century Roman Empire to know how they viewed it.  It was a horrific form of capital punishment originated most likely in the Persian Empire (used by other barbarians as well).  It was used for the execution of individuals and it was also used for the execution of groups.  Darius crucified 3000 Babylonians, Alexander the Great crucified 2000 from the city of Tyre—they really irritated Alexander in Tyre. You know, they kind of got off shore on their little island and said, “Na, na, na, na, na,” you know, “you can’t get us!  You don’t have a navy!”  So he took the rubble of the city, threw it in the water between the island and the shore, marched over, and wiped them out—and in the process, crucified 2000 of them.  

 

Alexander Janius (just 102-76 BC) crucified 800 Pharisees while their wives and children were slaughtered at their feet—while they, hanging on a cross, watched the slaughter of their families.  This sealed the horror of crucifixion in the Jewish mind.  

 

Romans came to power in 63 BC and used crucifixion extensively.  Some writers say there were as many as 30,000 people crucified around that time.  Felix, the procurator of Judea from AD 52-58, crucified many criminals.  Titus Vespasian crucified so many Jews in AD 70 that the soldiers had no room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies.  It wasn’t until 337, when Constantine abolished crucifixion, that is disappeared after a millennium of cruelty in the world.  

 

A survey like that indicates the horror with which people viewed this.  The idea that anybody who died on the cross was, in any sense, an exceptional, elevated, noble, important person was absolutely bizarre.  Roman citizens, generally, were exempt from crucifixion, unless they committed treason.  The cross was reserved for rebellious slaves and conquered people and for notorious robbers and assassins.  The Roman Empire policies on crucifixion led Romans to view any crucified person as absolutely contemptible.  It was reserved for the scum, the most humiliated, the lowest of the low.  

 

There was, first, flogging, and then there was the carrying of the cross beam; then there was a sign around the neck indicating the crime—and they were stark naked; then they were tied or nailed to the cross bar, it was hoisted into an upright post, and they were suspended there in nakedness.  Death could be hurried if they shattered their legs, because they would push themselves up in order to fill their lungs with air.  If the legs weren’t broken, the death could be prolonged for days.  The final indignity was leaving the corpse up there until the carrion ate it.

 

Josephus describes multiple tortures and positions of crucifixion during the siege of Jerusalem, in every possible angle and through every possible part of the body, even unmentionable parts.  Gentiles viewed anyone crucified with the most contempt.  It was a virtual obscenity; crucifixion wasn’t discussed in polite company.  Nobody talked about crucifixion.  It just conjured up the grossest imagery.  In cultured company, no one would speak of it.  Cicero wrote, this very word “cross” should be removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.  So horrific!

 

And, here comes Paul and all he ever talks about is, what?  The cross!  The deep contempt the Gentiles had for anybody crucified is seen in some of the pagan statements about Christ.  Graffiti scratched on a stone in a guard room on Palatine Hill, near Circus Maximus in Rome (we were just there a few months ago) shows the figure of a man—with the head of an !—hanging on a cross.  Below is a man in a gesture of adoration and the inscription says: ‘alexa manos’—“worships his God”—depicting Jesus as an on a cross.  Idiocy!  Ludicrous!—that the God of the universe, the great Creator God, would end up on a cross.

 

Such a depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ—so repulsive to believers—vividly illustrates pagan contempt for anybody crucified—and particularly a crucified God.  Justin’s first apology in AD 152 summarized the Gentile view.  It says this: “They proclaim our madness to consist in this: that we give, to a crucified man, a place equal to the unchangeable eternal God.”  Nonsense!

 

And if the Gentile attitude was bad, the Jewish attitude was worse.  It was even more hostile.  They detested the Roman practice, despised it, held it in more contempt than the Romans did.  By the way, the Jews did crucify, just in case you are ever studying history, but never a living person.  To display the shame of a person whom they believed had felt the curse of God, they would nail a corpse to a cross and take it down the same day.

 

But anybody who ever ended up on a cross, in their view, fulfilled Deuteronomy 21:23: “Whoever hangs on a cross is”—what? “Is cursed.”  A cursed God?  You mean the eternal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?  The Lord himself is cursed?  How could God curse God?  It’s absolutely unthinkable!  The Messiah cursed by God?  Impossible!

 

The Jews saw crucifixion not only as a social pariah, but as a divine curse.  So, the stigma went beyond social disgrace, all the way to divine condemnation. Second century mishal indicates that blasphemers and idolaters alone were to be crucified…  And they would then hang their bodies up after they were dead.  How could Messiah be a blasphemer?  How could God be a blasphemer of God?  They gagged on the idea of a crucified Christ.  It made the gospel unbelievable.  Massive obstacle!  You think you’ve got problems getting the gospel across today?  Massive obstacle.  Insane, scandalous, scurrilous, blasphemous…  It’s unbelievable.  

 

So, Paul was not an easy-believism preacher.  It’s absolutely impossible to believe.  The very one who was sent that we might believe is, himself, the obstacle to faith.  The gospel called them to surrender to the very one they considered “smitten by God and afflicted,” to borrow the words of Isaiah.  And, frankly, to me it doesn’t seem that God could have put a more formidable barrier to faith in the first century.  I couldn’t think of a worse way to market the gospel then to preach that!  The Gentiles called the Christian gospel a “perverse and extravagant superstition” and a “sick delusion.”  One writer says, “It is a madness!”  

 

Hengel, in his wonderful book Crucifixion—if you can find it, get it and read it—says, “To believe that the one preexistent Son of the one true God—the Mediator at creation and the Redeemer of the world—had appeared in very recent times in out-of-the-way Galilee as a member of the obscure people of the Jews and, even worse, had died the death of a common criminal on a cross, could only be regarded as a sign of madness.”  The real gods of Greece and Rome could be distinguished from mortal men by very fact that they were immortal, that they absolutely had nothing in common with the one who was bound in the most ignominious fashion and executed in such a shameful way.

 

So, the gospel starts out in an environment where it’s just frankly unbelievable.  If you think its tough to get the gospel across today, just look at Paul.  What obstacles!  No wonder the Jews hated his message.  No wonder the Gentiles hated his message.  It was a message that was beyond human belief.  No seeker-friendly message, that; it was either an absurdity or an obscenity.  The gospel, then, was hindered by the shameful stigma of the cross.

 

Secondly (and I’ll try to get through a couple of these), the gospel was hindered by the shameful simplicity of the cross.  

 

If it wasn’t enough that it bore the stigma of what crucifixion was, there was also that shameful simplicity of the cross.  Look at verses 19-21: “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.  Where is the wise man, where is the scribe, where is the debater of this age?  Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom didn’t come to know God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.”

 

Both Jew and Gentile were into complexities—especially the Greeks with their philosophical systems.  They loved mental gymnastics and intellectual labyrinths.  They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds (it later became known as Gnosticism): the people, who by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, could move beyond the hoi polloi and ascend to the level of enlightenment.  

 

Their philosophical systems were embedded into their lives as a part of the fabric of everyday interaction.  There were, at the time of Paul, we could trace at least 50 different philosophies banging around in the Roman and Greek world.  And the gospel comes along and says, “None of it matters.  None of it matters.  We’ll destroy it all.  Take all the wisdom of the wise; get the best; get the elite, the most educated, the most capable, the smartest; get the clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic; get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts; get the people who are the good debaters—and they’re all going to be designated fools!”

 

The gospel had no sensitivity to that whatsoever.  It disdains all of that.   In fact, for Paul to even say this, in verse 19, (quoting out of Isaiah 29)—“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside”—that has got to be an offensive statement.  He is just basically saying, “I’m going to trash all you philosophers and all your philosophies.”  

 

There is nothing subtle about him.  There’s nothing vague.  There’s nothing ambiguous.  In fact, that’s not Paul; he says, “For it is written”—literally, “it stands written”—it “stands” as divinely revealed truth that the gospel of the cross makes no concession to human wisdom.  We don’t need it.  It plays no role in the redemptive purpose of God.  

 

And in verse 20, “So where is the wise man?  What do you have to offer?”  It’s as if he says, “What do you think you have to offer?  Where is the scribe?  What contribution does this legal expert make?  Where is the debater?  What does he have to offer?  They’re all fools.  They’re all fools.”

 

So, not only does the gospel collide with our emotional sensibilities, it collides with our rational sensibilities.  The cross is emotionally unacceptable; it is rationally unacceptable.  

 

This is a comprehensive denunciation, by the way, in verse 20; he just says, “Take it all—whatever form of philosophy it is—just take it all, and it’s foolish.” And again, he uses a form of the root verb ‘moriano’, from which we get the English word “moron”.  All accumulated insight, all understanding, all the wisdom of all the elite—take all the human geniuses and lesser lights through all the years, add up all the complexities of their systems, and you get nonsense as far as salvation is concerned, as far as eternal truth is concerned.

 

Over in 2:14, “The natural man does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.”  This is the problem: an unconverted person may have great reasoning power, great intellect, he may bring to bare upon issues in life great practical wisdom and insight, he may have great experience which lends to his ability to assist people to make life a little better, but when it comes to that which relates to spiritual reality and the life of God and eternity, he makes no contribution.

 

Whether it’s Athens or whether it’s Rome or whether it’s Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Princeton or wherever else, take all that wisdom that is outside the scripture and the revelation of the gospel and it all adds up to foolishness.  Romans 1 says, they give themselves degrees for it, “Professing themselves to be wise, they are however”—what?  “Fools.”  

 

Verse 21: “For sense, in the wisdom of God, the world through its own wisdom didn’t come to know God…”  God made the wisest determination.  God wisely established it this way: that no one could ever come to know Him by human wisdom.  Do you see that?  That has tremendous implications.  The only way you will ever come to know God is by divine revelation and through the Holy Spirit.   You cannot come to know God by human wisdom.

 

That has a lot to say to this new natural theology movement where the assumption is that, by whatever degree of enlightenment the unconverted man has, he can find his way to some idea about God, which God will accept as sufficient to save him if he hasn’t heard the gospel.

 

So, this is the final word on human wisdom: nonsense.  Nonsense, when it comes to that which is eternal, cannot lead to the knowledge of God.  Man, by wisdom, cannot know God…  Cannot know God.  Well, how can he know God?  “Through the foolishness of the message preached.”  You want people to know God, then just preach the message.  

 

Jeremiah 8:9 says, “The wise men are put to shame, they are dismayed and caught; behold they have rejected the word of the Lord and what kind of wisdom do they have?”  If you reject the scripture, you don’t have any wisdom.  The wisest of the wise, the elite in human philosophy, the debaters, the scholars, the greatest thinkers who can best argue their systems logically all add up to foolishness.  Who are the most important people in the world?  We are—those of us who preach this foolish message faithfully.  In fact, it’s hidden from the wise and revealed, Jesus said, “unto babes.”  

 

The cross is shameful, it really is.  It assaults the refined sensibilities and emotions of people.  The idea that the God of the universe is executed on a cross is ridiculous.  The idea that God in human flesh or that God the Messiah is executed on a cross by God and cursed by God is absolutely scandalous.  And, if that’s not bad enough, it not only assaults our sensibilities, it assaults our rational minds, the pride that we carry for being different than the animals: having reason.  It’s all nonsense.

 

And then there’s a third shameful element of the cross (just skipping a few thoughts here): the shameful stigma of the cross, the shameful simplicity of the cross and the shameful singularity of the cross.

 

I just want you to look back at this, the shameful singularity of the cross, verse 18, again, “The cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.”

 

Verse 21, again, “It is through the foolishness of that very message preached to save those who believe.”  

 

Verse 23: “We preached Christ crucified…  It may be a stumbling block and foolishness, but to those who are called, it is Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

 

Now, all of that simply to say, there’s only one message.  That’s it!  Anybody who’s being saved is being saved by the power of God through the word of the cross (verse 18).  Anybody who is being saved is being saved by the message preached (in verse 21).  Anybody called by God unto salvation is realizing that call (verse 24) by the power of God and the wisdom of God presented in Christ—and this is the only message we have.  Absolutely the only message.  And the more we say that, the more scandalous it becomes.  

 

Somebody might say, “Well, you know, OK, you’re into this cross thing, you’re into this ‘Jesus died on a cross,’ and that’s your truth.  Good for you!  We are a tolerant people.  That’s good for you. OK, OK, you have your foolish view of religion, your foolish perspective, your simple silly story—story of a crucified Jew—that’s OK if that’s your truth.  If you want to, as Celcus put it, have your symposium with the frogs who crawled up out of the muck and are stupid enough to believe that, you’re entitled to that.  But, that’s not my truth.”  Well, here’s the rub: that’s the only truth.  

 

It’s the only truth.  It is the only power of God by which He saves.  It is only those who believe in that gospel, that message preached, who are saved.  There is no wider mercy.  There is no transdispensationalizing people into salvation through some other imaginary means.  Salvation is only by believing the gospel; no gospel, no salvation.  

 

The absolute exclusivity has always been a shameful message to a pluralistic world of sinners.  Islam is a damning system, Buddhism is a damning system, Hinduism is a damning system, and just not believing the Gospel is a damning system!

 

The things the Gentiles sacrifice (I Corinthians 10), they sacrifice to demons. Do you remember that?  People in some religions somewhere aren’t in their own way, under their own terms, like the book, The Christ of Hinduism.  They’re not sacrificing to the true God and the true Christ. They’re sacrificing to demons. That’s another message.

 

There is no salvation without the gospel.  This is a shameful thing.  This compounds the shame of the gospel.  When I was on Larry King (I don’t know if you remember), that question was asked to one of the people, “Is God a Christian?” to which this evangelical said, “No, He’s the God of everybody.”  And I almost fell off my chair!  God is not a Christian?  God is Christ!  What do you mean?  I wanted to evangelize that guy—forget Larry King!  What are you talking about?  I guess the shame of saying that was too much.  This is a message that’s unacceptable. It’s absolutely unacceptable.

 

I’ve been thinking about that, you know.  You think about our President: people who know him say that his Christianity is genuine and I certainly trust that’s so.  But, can you imagine for a moment if, in one of his State of the Union addresses, he just said, “I’m a Christian and if you’re not, you’re going to hell”?  He would be cooked, over, and impeached, right?  No way could he survive that. And if he said, “All the Muslims and all the people who believe in works-righteousness and all the Mormons and all the Jehovah’s Witnesses, you’re all going to eternal hell and I care about you so much I want to give you the gospel of  Jesus.  Forget Iraq, forget terrorism, and I’m going to give you the gospel.”  Yikes!  I can just see Dan Rather, “Oh, oh, oh—can’t say that!  And if you want to believe it, fine, just don’t say it’s the singular truth—it’s the singularity of the Gospel on top of the stigma and the simplicity that bothers people.

 

Well, it’s just so hard.  You cant be faithful and popular, so decide.  Take your pick.  How come you get to go back so many times, Al?  Cause you’re so straight on there.  I think you’ve been on Larry King 25 times?  Praise God, you always speak the truth—and I’m sure you get the heat.  We can understand—if we hear what Paul is saying here—that the gospel collides with our emotions, it collides with our minds, it collides with our relationships.  It smashes into our sensibilities, our rational thinking, our tolerances.  It’s just really hard to believe; in fact, it’s impossible.  And this is why people compromise it, sadly.  And when they do that, they become useless, because God saves through this truth!  

 

You say, “Well, since we got such a hard message, what we really need, we’ve got to get some really famous people spouting this.  We can overcome consumer resistance if we can get some people in lofty places, if we can get the high and the mighty and the powerful and the influential.  Then, even though the message is hard, even though it is bizarre and nonsense, etc., etc.  If we can posture ourselves in places of influence and get famous people—” and so forth.  Got news for you: we not only have the shameful stigma of the cross to deal with and the shameful simplicity of the cross to deal with and the shameful singularity of the cross to deal with, but we have got the shameful society of the cross to deal with—and there are not many noble and there are not many mighty and we’re just a bunch of nobodies.  And that might seem like the worst strategy, since the message is so hard to start with, but that’s for next time, and you’ll be here.

 

 

Father, we thank you for leading us tonight, at least into the beginning of, grasping these great reminders out of this text.  We don’t want to put ourselves in a place to try to avoid persecution and be like the Judaizers who compelled people to be circumcised simply to avoid Jewish hostility.  We know that when we preach the true gospel there will be shame heaped upon us, but we just want to be faithful to that.  Help us to understand that you’ve given us a shameful message, a message that is so shameful, that brings such resistance, that it even makes us ashamed!  And even the best of us, like Timothy, to whom Paul says, “Do not be ashamed of the Lord or of me as prisoner”!  Lord, help us to rise above that natural fear of man that makes us ashamed and to proclaim the truth, and open our minds in the rest of these days even until we bring this to a conclusion and we’ll wait on the complete unfolding of the wonder of this text with anticipation.  In Christ’s name, Amen.

 

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "Shepherds' Conference Collection" by:

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http://www.biblebb.com/files/MAC/SC03-1008.htm

Preaching the Gospel Message (Part 2)

by

John MacArthur

General Session #6

SC1008

 

It is a very difficult task to be preached to and then, instantaneously, turn around and preach, because my mind is no longer on my passage.  Furthermore, can you imagine how difficult it is for me to cope with the reality of a man actually covering 73 verses in one message?  For me, that is two years worth of preaching—just trying to figure out how to get through it!  I love those kinds of overviews: sweeping through the text at the pace that the events occurred.  For me, that discussion took two years, although we know it didn’t.  But anyway.  Where am I and what’s going on here?

 

Open up your Bible to I Corinthians 1.  It does amaze me how God—always amazes me—how God orchestrates everything, strengthening us and giving us fortitude—I love that word—for the task that is at hand for us.  Strengthening our commitment and our resolve to be faithful and true to the purity of the gospel has become the sort of unplanned theme of this conference.  And we are intersecting at all points; the Spirit of God is blending all of this together in wonderful ways.  What has been on my heart in the messages that you’ve already heard from me is this matter of how hard it is to believe, that it is impossible to believe if one is left to himself or herself.  We saw in the first message that the invitation itself is, from the human viewpoint, impossible because it calls for total self-denial, the taking up of the cross daily, and a life of obedience from the heart.  The demand that Jesus made is just very hard.  For a person to deny all dreams, all hopes, all ambitions, all desires, all longings, all wants, all possessions, all relationships—all everything that constitute the whole of human life—and to be willing to give it all up for Christ, is as hard as it can possibly be made.  Then we are finding that compounding the difficulty of the invitation is the difficulty of the message, and that shameful cross that we started talking about a couple of nights ago.

 

I want to take us back to that.  We remember the words of Isaiah, that first glimpse of the suffering Servant on the cross in Isaiah 51, and Isaiah says, “There is no beauty that we should,” what?  “Desire him.”  There’s nothing about the crucifixion that draws out normal desire.  There’s no beauty there.  There’s nothing attractive there.  So, we began to look at I Corinthians 1 and the unattractiveness or the shame of the cross.  We talked about the shameful stigma of the cross, as we started out in verse 18, that “the cross”—preaching about the cross—“is, to those who are perishing, foolishness.”  We noted over in verses 22 and 23, “the Jews want a sign, the Greeks want wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, which is to the Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness.”  We talked about the fact that the cross itself—crucifixion itself—had such a stigma in the first century that nobody rationally could come to the conclusion that you could have a crucified God.  Neither Jew nor Gentile.

 

So, there was the shameful stigma of the cross, that acted as an almost impossible barrier to belief in the gospel, and then there was the shameful simplicity of the cross.  And we talked about that a little bit, how that “the cross, in its foolishness, destroys the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever.”  The question then, in verse 20, is asked, “Where is the wise man?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  They bring nothing to bear on this.”  The questions, of course, are rhetorical.  What do they have to offer?  They have nothing to offer.  God has rendered all of their most erudite musings as absolute folly.  God has determined that by means of human wisdom, man cannot come to know Him.

 

So you have this shameful stigma, compounded by a shameful simplicity, and then there is that shameful singularity of the cross.  That is to say that the cross is the only way that anyone can be saved.  Those who are being saved, according to verse 18, are being saved by the power of God, through the Word of the cross.  Paul says we only have one message, in verse 23 again, and that is “we preach Christ crucified.”  That is the only message that can save; there is no other saving message.

 

We could even add to the stigma and the simplicity and the singularity—I won’t take too much time with this, but just the comment struck me—we could even add the shameful sentence of the cross.  That sentence is indicated back in verse 18: “The Word of the cross comes to those that are perishing.”  It rescues the perishing.  The perishing are the damned, they are the doomed, they are the ruined, they are the destroyed, they are the lost, having been rendered so under the judgment of God for endless violations of his holy law.  The cross, in itself, proclaims a verdict on fallen man, does it not?  The cross says that God requires death for sin.  While it proclaims to us the glory of substitution, on the other side of that it proclaims the necessity of death for sin, and if one doesn’t embrace the substitute then one bears that death himself or herself, and that is an undying death that lasts forever.  So, there is that shameful sentence of the cross that exposes the true condition of the sinner.  “Christ crucified” was Paul’s message.  When he said, “We preach Christ crucified” in verse 23, that was simply a summary statement; there was a whole message to go with that!  Why He was crucified, of course, would be at the heart of that message.  The message of the cross is not about felt needs.  It is not about Jesus loving you so much, He wants to make you happy.  It is about rescuing you from damnation, because that is the sentence that rests upon the head of every human being.

 

So, the gospel is an offense every way you look at it.  There’s nothing about the cross that fits in comfortably with how man views himself or his condition.  The gospel confronts man and exposes him for what he really is.  It ignores the superficiality of life.  It ignores the disappointments that he feels.  It offers him no relief from the struggles of being human.  It, rather, goes to the profound and eternal issue of the fact that he is damned and desperately needs to be rescued, and it is a rescue that can only be accomplished through death, and God, in his mercy, has provided a substitute.  The indictment of the sinner then, adds another component to the barrier of believing in this cross, therein the sinner must come to the attitude of the publican in Luke 18 and pound his breast and cry out for mercy.  So, we’re just trying to paint the picture a little bit that it doesn’t matter how lofty and elevated and powerful and influential in the culture the preachers of the gospel are; posturing ourselves for positions of prestige cannot mitigate the distastefulness of this message.

 

But somebody might, at this point, say, “Well, it would certainly help if we had people like that.”  Well, that takes us to the next point—and I gave it to you a little bit last time, I’ll just reiterate it and we’ll look at it: we have to compound this dilemma of the shame of the message itself by adding the shameful society of the cross.  Let’s go to verse 26, “For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble.  But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong; and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen—the things that are not—that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God.”

 

For all those who feel the only hope of this very difficult message, the only way that it could possibly advance, was to somehow get it in the mouth of the rich and the famous and the powerful and the influential, and maybe they could somehow be more believable, and therefore cause people to somehow get across the barrier—for those of you who are hoping for that, that is not the plan.  Not the plan.

 

I just want you to look at the language here, “Consider your calling, brethren…”

 

“Not many WISE” (sophos; not many “intellectuals”).

 

“Not many MIGHTY” (not many dunatos; not many “wielding power”).

 

“Not many NOBLE” (eugenes; that is, “aristocratic”).

 

In 178, Celsus wrote that Christians were “the vulgarest and most uneducated.”  Not many intellectuals, not many wielding cultural power, not many aristocrats…  In fact, verse 27 says just the opposite:

“God has chosen the FOOLISH” (“the non-intellectuals”) “to shame the wise.”

 

“God has chosen the WEAK” (asthenes; “void of strength, void of power”).

 

And then, I love this one.  Verse 28, “He has chosen the BASE” (agenes; “people of no birth, without any significance”).  I always think of the most insignificant person I ever heard of being born—and I read this somewhere years ago—was a baby, and the mother wrote on the birth certificate his name, “Nosmoking.”  And somebody said, “Where did you get a name like that?”  Well, it turned out the mother was illiterate, so she just copied down the “No Smoking” sign.  Nos-mo-king.  There is a nothing person, named after a “No Smoking” sign.  This is the nobodies.  And if that’s not bad enough, I mean, we’re the foolish, we’re the weak, we’re the people of no birth (that is, with no significance).

 

He adds, in verse 28, “the DESPISED” (exoutheneo is the verb; it means “to consider as nothing”—we’re going deeper here—this Perfect Passive Participle: “those who were and continue to be nothing”).

 

Well, I mean, we’re just sinking here.  You say, “We can’t get any lower!”  Oh, yes we can.  Verse 28: “THE THINGS THAT ARE NOT”—that’s a great phrase (tamaonta?; “the nonexistent ones”).  You’ve got to understand, in the first century, being somebody was a really important thing!  Still is, isn’t it?  So the Lord said, “Well, I’m just going to do it a different way: the non-intellectual, impotent nobodies who are considered as nothing because they are nothing.”

 

You say, “Well, wouldn’t God want to choose the somebodies?”  I mean, you’ve got enough to get over with just the message and the invitation; wouldn’t it help if there were just some really important people?” and I’ve heard this through the years, you know, “If just this famous person could get saved, just think about their testimony, what it would be like” or, “If this famous person in athletics or the media or the arts or politics or whatever could just be a Christian, just imagine the power of their testimony!”  Well, occasionally—it doesn’t say, “There aren’t any”; there’re just not many—occasionally, though, such people are converted by the grace of God, but the gospel has never moved, through history, fulfilling the redemptive plan on the back of influential people.  It moves with us.  And here we are: the non-intellectual, impotent, nothing nobodies.

 

Why does God do this?  Well, to shame the wise, to shame the strong, to nullify them (end of verse 28, katargeo; “to neutralize them; to render them inoperative”).  The gospel is taken away from the world’s somebodies and given to the nobodies so that, in the end, verse 29, “The advancement of the gospel can be credited to no person.”  There will never be any human credit for the advancement of the gospel.

 

I think last year, at the end of the conference, I addressed this passage on Sunday a little bit, and somebody suggested I might touch on it again, so turn to II Corinthians 4 if we can digress…  This is really good for us to relate to this.  II Corinthians 4:5, Paul says, “We do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bondservants for Jesus’ sake, for God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God and the face of Christ.  But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves.”  If I signed a book or something for you this week, you’ll notice that I put that passage under my name.

 

I just want to pick out one little term there: ostrakinos  (in the Greek).  It’s in verse 7, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”  “Earthen vessel” is, frankly, too dignified a term.  It’s not very dignified, but it’s too dignified to translate the word ostrakinos.  It’s a clay pot is what it is!  It’s a clay pot!  Baked clay.  Cheap, unrefined, ugly, breakable, replaceable, valueless.  It’s that pot that a plant comes in.  That’s it.  And the contrast is staggering!  “We have this treasure”—what treasure?  The treasure of the glorious light of the gospel, the one shining in our hearts: “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God and the face of Christ.”  I mean, he’s picking up all the brilliance, all the glory of the Shekinah, of the true revelation of the glorious light of the essence of the nature of God, manifest in Christ.  He’s trying to describe what is most indescribably and inexplicably beautiful, and saying, “This treasure, the treasure of this glorious reality of the gospel is carried around in clay pots.”  We’re baked dirt.  That’s what we are.  Baked dirt.

 

Paul was scorned for his unimpressive persona, wasn’t he?  His presence was unimpressive and his speech was absolutely contemptible.  He had a bodily condition that was repulsive.  Some scholars think he had some terrible stuff oozing out of his eyes.  I mean, he would not have had the look that you sort of have to have to be the slick entrepreneurial guy today.  He was just baked clay, but that was okay with him because that was the way God had designed it, and that made it very evident where the power was.

 

I’ve been reading David Daniels’ book on William Tyndale.  I read it and then I go back and read it again.  Then I go back and read it again.  It’s just cathartic for me!  Thomas Moore was a great defender of Roman Catholicism in England, and he felt himself the servant of God in taking on William Tyndale and doing everything he could to destroy his work.  William Tyndale did the horrible thing, an absolutely horrible thing: he determined that the Bible ought to be in a language people could read.  And so, that’s what he did—in exile, in Antwerp—because he knew if he went back to England, he’d be killed, because the people who read his New Testament were being killed.

 

Well, Thomas Moore not only attacked William Tyndale, but he was very good at attacking Martin Luther.  Part of the condemnation of Tyndale was that he was a Lutheran, that he followed Luther (“Now Lutheran” in the sense of what it would have been then, not now).  So, Thomas Moore came up with a title for Luther.  He called him a “privy-pot.”  Do I need exegete that?  He called Luther a privy-pot!  Thomas Moore wrote things of a scatological nature, the likes of which I will not speak.  He said things that are absolutely beyond belief, demeaning Luther.  But, you know something?  He was close to being right.

 

If you would look, for just a moment, at II Timothy 2:20, we can take this brief excursus into scatology one step further, if not any more than that.  In II Timothy 2:20, “In a large house, you’ve got to have some containers!  You have some containers in a large house that are gold and silver, but you also have other containers that are wood and clay pots.  The ones that are gold and silver have honorable purposes, and the ones that are wood and clay have dishonorable purposes.”  Now, just use your imagination.  The food came in on the gold and silver, and it went out on the earth and wooden.  Paul knew what he said here—go back to II Corinthians—he knew what he was saying here.  We’re privy pots—baked clay—so that the explanation of the advance of the gospel is never going to be us, is it?

 

You know, none of the early preachers, among the apostles, was important.  I just wrote that book—I think you got it, didn’t you—Twelve Ordinary Men.  I mean, they were so ordinary; it was painful to go through those guys.  Not one priest, not one rabbi, not one scribe, not one Pharisee, not one Sadducee—not one anything!  Not even an archon!  Not even a synagogue ruler!  Nobody!  Half of them or so were fisherman; the rest of them worked with their hands; one was a terrorist who went around with a little knife trying to spear Romans (Simon the Zealot); then there was Judas, the loser of all losers.  What was the Lord doing?

 

He picked people with absolutely no influence.  There aren’t any of the great intellects from Egypt or Greece or Rome or Israel.  During the New Testament time, the greatest scholars, we understand, were very likely in Egypt.  The greatest library was in Alexandria, the most distinguished philosophers were in Athens, the powerful were in Rome, the biblical scholars were in Jerusalem—God disdained all of them and just picked clay pots.  And He’s still doing it.  He passed by Herodotus the historian, He passed by Socrates the great thinker, He passed by the father of medicine, Hippocrates, Herodotus the historian, Socrates the great thinker. He passed by Plato the philosopher, Aristotle the wise, Euclid the mathematician, Archimedes the father of mechanics, Hyparcus the astronomer, Cicero the orator, Virgil the poet…  Do we need more?  He didn’t pay any attention to any of those people, and He’s still in the business of picking up clay pots.

 

Now, just to kind of take this another step, turn to I Corinthians 4.  If you don’t feel bad already, I’m going to make you feel worse.  If you came to try to find your self-esteem, you’re in some trouble here.  Verse 6, I Corinthians 4, “These things, brethren, I figuratively applied to myself…”  He’s been talking about the fact that he doesn’t want anybody to consider him as anything.  Verse 1, you know, “Let a man regard us as servants of Christ, stewards of the mystery of God.”  Don’t make anything out of me.  Don’t name cathedrals after me in cities in Minnesota or any of that stuff.  I’m just a servant of Christ.  I’m a steward of the mysteries of God.  I’m an under-rower, a third level galley slave; I pulled my oar, that’s enough.  It doesn’t matter what you think about me (verse 3).  It doesn’t matter what human court says about me.  I don’t even care what I say about myself.  You don’t know the truth, and I’m biased in my favor, and neither one of us is likely to be accurate.  Don’t pass judgment; let the Lord do that.  Verse 6, he says, “These things, brethren, I figuratively applied to myself and Apollos for your sake, that in us you might learn not to exceed what is written, in order that no one of you might become arrogant in behalf of one against the other.”  We can’t be thinking about each other with regard to who’s more important that the next person; we’re just clay pots!

 

Verse 7, “For who regards you as superior?  What do you have that you didn’t receive?  And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?”  He’s starting to get a little sarcastic here: “You are already filled, you’ve already become rich”—you’re really something, aren’t you?—“you’ve become kings without us; I would, indeed, that you had become kings, so that we also might reign with you.”

 

And then he says this in verse 9—an amazing statement—“I think, God has exhibited us apostles last of all, lowest of the low, like criminals on death row; we have become a spectacle to the world.”  They would drag the criminals through the streets in a parade on the way to the execution in the arena, headed for death.  We’re viewed as the lowest of the lowest of the low.

 

In fact, just skipping over to verse 13, he says, “We have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now.”  Scum…dregs…really interesting words.  Perikatharma is the word for “scum.”  Katharma, related to catharsis, is “to cleanse.”  Peri is “around,” right?  What that word means is scum—the perikatharma is “that which is removed by thorough cleansing.”  It’s the scum that sticks to the bottom of the pot.  Used metaphorically in the ancient world, it was describing criminals—the lowest class of criminals, who were offered as human sacrifices to appease the deities.  If you wanted to get your god off your back because you had a famine or you had a plague or you lost a war, you found some scum in your society, something filthy that you wanted eliminated, and you put him on an altar as a sacrifice to your deity.  Paul says that’s who we are.  We’re the scum.

 

And then he says we’re the “dregs” (peripsoma).  This even goes down deeper.  I mean, Paul—he’s at the bottom.  The perikatharma is what was removed by cleaning thoroughly; the peripsoma was what didn’t come off until you scraped it.  The caked crud.  Feeling better about yourself?  I mean, this is really amazing, isn’t it?  It’s the last of the refuse to cling!  I mean, are you beginning to feel the hopelessness of this task?

 

We are offering an invitation to people that makes them literally commit suicide, with all their dreams, ambitions, desires, felt needs, all…you name it—it’s all gone.  And then we’re presenting them a gospel of salvation that is absolutely against the grain of every normal human impulse.  And to compound our problem, the people who are offering this are the scum of the world!  If I were planning a plan to do this, this would not be my plan: to come up with an impossible message, an impossible invitation, and we’ll spread it around with the most despicable people in the world, the ones that are most likely to be hated and vilified and belittled and demeaned.

 

Well, go back to II Corinthians 4, from the “scum,” to the “clay pot.”  II Corinthians 4.  Let’s just pick this up, and I just want to bounce through this really quick here.  Paul says, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”  At this particular point, you might say to yourself, “You know, we’ve got to figure out a strategy here.  We’ve got to overcome these obstacles.  I mean, this is really pretty disastrous.  We need somehow to be able to survive in this kind of environment.  What could we do?”  Well, I want you to hear Paul.  Here are the things he will not do, right here.

 

One: we will not surrender in cowardice.  Verse 1, “Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we received mercy”—we have this ministry by mercy—“we do not lose heart.”  What does that assume?  It assumes rejection.  It assumes hostility.  It assumes hatred.  We will not enkakoumen (?).  We will not [literally means “to] give in to evil.”  To lose courage.  We will not become faint-hearted.  We will not crumble under this—and in our crumbling, of course, we are useless.  False teachers in Corinth were market-savvy.  False teachers in Corinth were selling their image, packaging their message with what the people wanted to hear.  The people want their religion a little metaphysical, a little oratorical, a little philosophical, a little transcendental, a little allegorical, and a little legalistic, and they wanted it in the mouths of the slick.  Paul says, “I will not be a coward.  We will not lose heart.”

 

Two: we will not tamper with the message.  Verse 2, “We have renounced the things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the Word of God, but by manifestation of truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”  It is tough, it is impossible, it is hard, it is painful…  One: we will not become cowards.  Two: we will not tamper with the truth.  We will not walk in panourgia.  We will not walk in trickery, adulterating the Word of God, tampering with the gospel to be commended to men.  But we will be faithful to the gospel, manifesting the truth, in order to commend ourselves to every man’s conscience with God watching.

 

We will not surrender.  We will not change the message.

 

Thirdly, we will not manipulate the results, verse 3 and 4, because we know this: “If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.”  The problem—listen—is not the seed; the problem is the what?  The soil, isn’t it?  It’s the condition of the human heart.  “If it is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing,” in whose case “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  Paul says, “We will not manipulate the results because we understand if they don’t believe, they don’t believe because they are perishing and blinded by Satan.”  Our gospel, if it is veiled, it is veiled because they are unable to understand.  In the language that we heard in the last message, it “has not been granted” to them to understand.  There’s nothing wrong with the message.

 

We will not become cowards.  We will not change the message.  We will not manipulate the results.

 

If they don’t hear, cool music won’t help.  If they don’t hear, PowerPoint won’t help.  If they don’t hear, drama won’t help and video won’t help.  They’re blind—and dead.  So we just go on preaching—not ourselves, not our manipulated message—but Christ Jesus as Lord.  The message never changes.  We have this supernatural message, we’re nothing more but privy-pots, but we will not surrender that message, we will not lose heart, we will not manipulate results (number four) because we will not seek popularity.

 

[Fourth], we will not seek popularity.  Verse 8, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.  Always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.  For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, in order that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.  So death works in us, but, as a result, life works in you.”  And here’s the key, verse 13: “We have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written”—back in Psalm 1:16 ‘I believed; therefore, I spoke’—“we also believe; therefore, we also speak.”  We don’t expect popularity!  What do we expect?  He gave you the list: affliction, crushing, persecution, being struck down, always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus—that doesn’t mean some spiritual thing; it simply means that he’s always on the brink of death, always ready to die, always being delivered over by some plot to death.  He knew every day that he awakened that it could be the day he died.  Death was working in him as a daily experience, in anticipating it.  I know what he means by that.  He had to live through his own funeral every day, because it could have happened any day.  But, this never changed: “I believed; therefore, I spoke.”  That’s it, men.  If you believe, you speak.

 

One more commitment: we will not look at earthly success.  We will not look at earthly success.  Why do we do this?  Verse 14, “Because we know that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will present us with you.  For all things are for your sakes, that the grace, which is spreading to more and more people, may cause the giving of thanks to abound to the glory of God.  Therefore we do not lose heart.  But though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.  For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory, far beyond all comparison.  While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen.  For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are”—what?  “Eternal.”  We’re not into the temporal.

 

What standards for ministry!  We will not lose heart.  We will not alter the message.  We will not manipulate the results, because we understand that there is a profound spiritual reality at work in those who do not believe.  We will not expect popularity; therefore, we will not be disappointed.  And we will not look at earthly success, but at that which is unseen.

 

Then, back to verse 6 and 7, “The light shines, the glory of God and the face of Jesus Christ, and we have this treasure in earthen vessels” and I love this, the end of verse 7, “that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves,” and then we’re right back where we have been all along in these messages.  At the end of the day, there is no human explanation for us, is there?  The world thinks we’re odd and bizarre, as Dr. Mohler was saying.  They think we’re strange, and yet the church moves with immense power through the history of the world.  Not to be explained by us.  If we brought the elite university professors of Los Angeles into this room, they’d look at us and laugh.  “These people can’t change the world!”  No, but God is changing it through us.

 

Well, I have to take you back for one final note to I Corinthians 1—and this is a good place to sort of wrap up in the next couple of minutes.

 

We have been dealing with all the shameful elements of the cross—the shameful stigma of the cross, the shameful simplicity of the cross, the shameful singularity of the cross, the shameful sentence of the cross, the shameful society of the cross—I just want to give you one more.

 

There’s one more thing that stands in the way, that’s really offensive, and it’s the shameful sovereignty of the cross.  You know, I used to hear, years ago, people say, “Don’t ever preach the doctrine of the sovereignty of God when you have nonbelievers there.”  I was literally warned against that!  But here is another offense to tell the unbeliever: salvation is limited.  So, how is it limited?

 

Well, go back to verse 18.  It’s limited to those who are “being saved.”  Okay, “being saved”…  Go down to verse 21.  Those who are being saved, according to verse 21, are those who “believe.”  Those who believe—go down to verse 24—are those who are the “called” (efficacious call; always, in the epistles of the New Testament, the call is efficacious).  This salvation is only for those who are being saved, because they are believing, because they are called—go to verse 27—“because God has”—what’s the next word?—“chosen.”  That’s the second time, in verse 27 (“because God has chosen”). Third time, in verse 28 (“because God has chosen”).  Eklegomai: “picked out for Himself.”

 

Do you mean to tell me…this gospel assaults everything about me.  It assaults my emotions with the stigma of the cross; it assaults my intellect with the simplicity of the cross; it assaults my human affections with the singularity of the cross, by attacking my tolerances; it assaults my sense of well-being and dignity with the sentence of the cross; it assaults my nobility with this mucky, scummy society of the cross; and now, all I have left is my autonomy, and now you’re telling me it doesn’t have anything to do with me!  Well, that’s an overstatement, in a sense.  “Him that comes to Me, I will in no way”—what?  “Cast out.”

 

But, it’s really true.  I love this, verse 30…  How could anybody get saved?  How could anybody get saved under those terms?  You’ve got nothing left; you’re absolutely stripped of everything.  Verse 30, “But, by His doing, you are in Christ Jesus.”  What else can be said?  So, if it’s His doing anyway, why would I tamper with the message?  Why would I manipulate the results?  And to seal that, verse 29, “That no man should boast before God,” verse 31, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”  It is by his doing that you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness from God and sanctification from God and redemption from God.

 

R.C. Sproul said that God’s favorite doctrine is sovereignty, and if you were God, it would be yours.  I’ll tell you something, it’s my favorite!  I just get a sick feeling when I hear contemporary people within evangelicalism attack the sovereignty of God—his elective purpose in salvation—because if God isn’t saving people, they can’t get saved!

 

This is a quote from a very famous evangelical: “To suggest that the merciful, longsuffering, gracious, and loving God of the Bible would invent a dreadful doctrine like election, which would have us believe it is an act of grace to select only certain people for heaven, comes perilously close to blasphemy.”  He’s saying that God sovereignly saving people by his power is close to blasphemy!  How else are they going to get saved?

 

Another head of a national ministry writes, “The flawed theology of pre-selection,” as he calls it, “is an attempt to eliminate man’s capacity to exercise his free will, which reduces God’s sovereign love to an act of a mere dictator.”

 

Another writer says, “Election makes our heavenly Father look like the worst of despots!”

 

Another says, “This is the most unreasonable, incongruous, self-contradictory, man-belittling, God-dishonoring scheme of theology that ever appeared in Christian thought!  No one can accept its contradictory, mutually exclusive propositions without intellectual self-debasement.  It holds up a self-centered, selfish, heartless, remorseless tyrant for God and bids us to worship Him.”

What a twisted understanding of God.

 

Another says, “It makes God a monster.”  These are evangelicals; some, pastors.  Another says, “It makes God a monster, who eternally tortures innocent…removes the hope of conciliation from the gospel…limits the atoning work of Christ…resists evangelism…stirs up argumentation and division…promotes a small, angry, judgmental God.”

 

I’d be worried to be saying things like that.

 

“To say that God sovereignly chooses”—here’s another one—“who will be saved is the most twisted thing I have ever read, making God into a monster, no better than a pagan idol.”

 

Well, I don’t need to read any more of that, but that’s the kind of stuff that I found in the flyleaf of Dave Hunt’s book What Love Is This?

 

What in the world is going on here?  The gospel is impossible for the unregenerated man, until he has been regenerated.  The gospel is impossible for the blind man, until he’s been given sight.  There’s nothing about it that’s attractive; there’s “no beauty in Christ that we should desire him.”  The invitation is impossible.  It’s self-suicide.  Believing in this cross gospel is just fraught with shame.  It’s just unreasonable, illogical.  It assaults everything that is human about us, everything we love about our fallenness.  And then, to make things worse, it is espoused by the scum and the dregs and the nobodies.

 

So, what do we do?  What are we left to do, with this impossibility?  Look at chapter 2: “When I came to you, brethren, I didn’t come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God.  In spite of all of that, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling.  And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men but on the power of God.”  And that’s where Paul landed.  He said, “Look, I’m not looking for a popular position, from which to proclaim this message, somehow thinking it can ride and advance on the back of public favor.  I preach the shameful cross, because that’s what I’ve been told to preach, and I leave it to the sovereign power of God to work through that message to produce a faith that rests, not on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.”

 

I’ll just close with one more comment.  Mark 12:13-14.  This is one of those just marvelous moments with Jesus and the Pharisees and Herodians, and the Pharisees and Herodians came to Him and the idea was to catch Him in his words, as always.  Listen to what they said to Jesus, Mark 12:13-14, “And they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Him, in order to trap Him or catch Him in his words.  And they came to Him and said”—I love this—“‘Teacher, we know that you are truthful and defer to no one, for You are not partial to anyone, but teach the way of God in truth.’”  What a commendation!  Write that somewhere in your Bible, and follow in the footsteps of Christ.  They killed him for it, and God overruled and provided salvation.

 

 

Prayer:

 

Father, we do thank You for these wonderful days together and this glorious evening that we have shared.  We have been taught and we have been inspired and we have been convicted and we have been motivated and we have gone through the cleansing of the Word as it prunes us—and we’ve also rejoiced and celebrated.  We are so full of your truth and we are enjoying so richly the sweetness of this fellowship.  Lord, somehow, we know that it can’t continue, but somehow, Lord, conserve this in us and translate it into power, as we live and preach to the glory of our Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.

 

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "Shepherds' Conference Collection" by:

Tony Capoccia
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