1 Corinthians 1:17–2:16

¹⁷Christ didn’t send me to baptize. Instead, he sent me to spread the Good News. I didn’t use intellectual arguments. That would have made the cross of Christ lose its meaning. 

¹⁸The message about the cross is nonsense to those who are being destroyed, but it is God’s power to us who are being saved. ¹⁹Scripture says, 

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. 

I will reject the intelligence of intelligent people.” 

²⁰Where is the wise person? Where is the scholar? Where is the persuasive speaker of our time? Hasn’t God turned the wisdom of the world into nonsense? ²¹The world with its wisdom was unable to recognize God in terms of his own wisdom. So God decided to use the nonsense of the Good News we speak to save those who believe. ²²Jews ask for miraculous signs, and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but our message is that Christ was crucified. This offends Jewish people and makes no sense to people who are not Jewish. ²⁴But to those Jews and Greeks who are called, he is Christ, God’s power and God’s wisdom. ²⁵God’s nonsense is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 

²⁶Brothers and sisters, consider what you were when God called you to be Christians. Not many of you were wise from a human point of view. You were not in powerful positions or in the upper social classes. ²⁷But God chose what the world considers nonsense to put wise people to shame. God chose what the world considers weak to put what is strong to shame. ²⁸God chose what the world considers ordinary and what it despises—what it considers to be nothing—in order to destroy what it considers to be something. ²⁹As a result, no one can brag in God’s presence. ³⁰You are partners with Christ Jesus because of God. Jesus has become our wisdom sent from God, our approval, our holiness, and our ransom from sin. ³¹As Scripture says, “Whoever brags must brag about what the Lord has done.” 

2ND CHAPTER

¹Brothers and sisters, when I came to you, I didn’t speak about God’s mystery^aas if it were some kind of brilliant message or wisdom. ²While I was with you, I decided to deal with only one subject—Jesus Christ, who was crucified. ³When I came to you, I was weak. I was afraid and very nervous. ⁴I didn’t speak my message with persuasive intellectual arguments. I spoke my message with a show of spiritual power ⁵so that your faith would not be based on human wisdom but on God’s power. 

⁶However, we do use wisdom to speak to those who are mature. It is a wisdom that doesn’t belong to this world or to the rulers of this world who are in power today and gone tomorrow. ⁷We speak about the mystery of God’s wisdom. It is a wisdom that has been hidden, which God had planned for our glory before the world began. ⁸Not one of the rulers of this world has known it. If they had, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But as Scripture says: 

“No eye has seen, 

no ear has heard, 

and no mind has imagined 

the things that God has prepared 

for those who love him.” 

¹⁰God has revealed those things to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches everything, especially the deep things of God. ¹¹After all, who knows everything about a person except that person’s own spirit? In the same way, no one has known everything about God except God’s Spirit. ¹²Now, we didn’t receive the spirit that belongs to the world. Instead, we received the Spirit who comes from God so that we could know the things which God has freely given us. ¹³We don’t speak about these things using teachings that are based on intellectual arguments like people do. Instead, we use the Spirit’s teachings. We explain spiritual things to those who have the Spirit.^b

¹⁴A person who isn’t spiritual doesn’t accept the teachings of God’s Spirit. He thinks they’re nonsense. He can’t understand them because a person must be spiritual to evaluate them. ¹⁵Spiritual people evaluate everything but are subject to no one’s evaluation. 

¹⁶“Who has known the mind of the Lord 

so that he can teach him?” 

However, we have the mind of Christ.