1 Corinthians 2

Proclaiming Christ Crucified

²When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the testimony^h of God to you with superior speech or wisdom.^{* 2}For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. ⁴My speech and my proclamation were made not with persuasive words of wisdomⁱ but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,^{* 5}so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

The True Wisdom of God

⁶Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are being destroyed.^{* 7}But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory ⁸and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the human heart conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—^*

¹⁰God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.^{* 11}For what human knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God.^{* 12}Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. ¹³And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.^j*

¹⁴Those who are unspiritual^k do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.^{* 15}Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny.

¹⁶“For who has known the mind of the Lord

so as to instruct him?”

But we have the mind of Christ.^*