“God has intentionally reached to the bottom of the barrel,” said Lawson. “We didn’t make the ‘Who’s Who’ list, or even the ‘Who’s Not.’ We are God’s first round lottery picks … God has passed over the kings and mighty of this world in order to take ordinary people like you and me to give us the message, so when people called into His kingdom the only explanation can be God, because look at us. We are all nobodies telling everybody about somebody.”

“The heart of the message that we study, that we learn, that we teach, that we preach, that we bear witness to is absolute insanity to the world,” Steven J. Lawson told the attendees at the 2012 Ligonier Ministries Christian Mind Conference. “And the day our message stops being foolish to the Greeks – and this world – is the day our message has lost its purity and lost its power.”

Lawson’s topic “Foolishness to the Greeks” was based upon I Corinthians 1:18-25.

Throughout history, Lawson said, man has pondered the questions of ultimate reality: “Who am I? What am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Who is God? What is truth? What is reality? Where will I find fulfillment? What is success? What is death? What lies beyond death? What happens after I die?”

These were the searching questions that Greek philosophers of the ancient world were trying to answer, Lawson said. The Greeks pursued philosophy – what Lawson described as “the love of wisdom – that means man’s wisdom … Philosophy is man’s diagnosis of man’s problem and offers man’s solution as he lives in this world.”

The ancient Greek culture was “saturated with these philosophies,” he said. “All of these ideologies and philosophies were coming down from Athens to Corinth.”

He said that Corinth was a “cosmopolitan metropolis – a cultured society” that loved for the philosophers to come and speak. “The philosophers of the day were the rock stars of the day … It was no ivory tower type of philosophy. It addressed the real issues of the day.”

“Paul came to this bastion of philosophy, and he immediately began to preach the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Lawson said. “He put the Gospel up in the marketplace of ideas in the first century and the Gospel was in direction opposition to the philosophies of the day.”

“For Paul and the apostles and all of the writers of Scripture – and for the Lord Jesus Christ Himself – the only true answers to all of these life questions are found not in philosophy but are found in the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” said Lawson.

Foolishness

Lawson said that according to the text, Christians have a foolish message, a foolish messenger and a foolish method. “Therein is the foolishness to the Greeks,” he said.

Note first, he said that the “message that has been entrusted to you and me … in the eyes of the world, it is a foolish message.”

Verse 18 states the “word of the cross is foolishness …” The word of the cross is the Gospel of Christ, said Lawson, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture and He was buried and raised from the dead. “This is the epicenter of our message. It is the word of Christ. It is Christ and Him crucified and it is the only way to salvation.”

“We are not just dogmatic about the cross,” Lawson said, “We are bull-dogmatic about the cross.”

“No matter how carefully we present it; no matter how much apologetics we provide; no matter how many supportive evidences we can surround it,” he said, “the word of the cross is unequivocally foolishness to those who are perishing.”

“It is idiotic to those who are perishing — dumb, stupid, unintelligent, insane, madness, lunacy. It is nonsense to those who are perishing and it is so because the cross in the first century was a sign of shame. … There was no greater shame than to be publically executed on the cross,” said Lawson.

The reason the message was foolishness, he said, was because “the Christians preached that the eternal destiny of every man and women hinges on their relationship upon the one who hung naked on that cross.”

Lawson said that to those who are saved, the message of the cross is “the power of God … It is the power of God to reconcile us to God.”

He said verse 21 explains that “this was God’s plan before foundation of world … the world through its wisdom did not come to know God – not a one of them, no exceptions. All who would cling to the wisdom of this world are on a bridge to nowhere. No one can come to know God when they draw from the dry cistern of this world’s thinking.”

“We are describing a sunset to blind people. We are describing a beautiful symphony to those who have no hearing,” he said.

“Paul will tell us in moment that God is so pleased in the foolishness of the message, the messenger and the method,” Lawson said, “so all credit, all glory goes to God alone – so no one can take credit for the winsomeness of the message.”

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