The Bible Study Hour

Mark Daniels: This world is quite proud of its wisdom, of its accumulated information and its subsequent analysis, but the Apostle Paul throws a damper on man's much-vaunted knowledge. Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Paul shows us that for all the capacity of the human mind to accumulate data, no true spiritual wisdom flows from it. Join Dr. Boice as he demonstrates and applies this great truth to the actions of the church at Corinth, a church that tried to meld both and failed miserably.

Dr. James Boice: A number of years ago, I did a series of studies on the passages in the Bible where the words "but God" occur. A number of very significant passages that use those two words. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 4, is one example. The verses immediately before that talk of our sin and the way we have ruined ourselves by our sin. They mention the fact that we are under the wrath of God. And then in verse 4, immediately after that word wrath, we read, "but God." But God, because of the great love He has for us, has made us alive in Christ.

Another example is in the fifth chapter of Romans. There, Paul presents the ultimate of human affection or love, the fact that for love of a good man, someone might even be bold enough to die. And then the next verse says, "but God commends His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." In each of those verses and many others like it, there's a great contrast. On the one hand, you have what is possible to man, and then God, who is the God of the impossible, is brought in.

We have something like that in 1 Corinthians 2. This world is very proud of what it knows, what it's able to acquire by way of information and analysis. Paul looks at that in his day, but of course his observations apply equally well to our own time, and says that for all the acknowledged ability of the human mind to accumulate data, so far as spiritual things are concerned, there is no true wisdom that flows from it. That's because the things of the spirit have to be spiritually discerned and because God will not allow man to boast in his wisdom.

And so Paul tells how God has torn down the wisdom of the wise. He's made the wisdom of this world to be foolishness, just as He has made the strength of this world to be weakness and the nobility of this world to be nothing, in order that He might glorify that which is nothing. Paul speaks of the gospel, which is nothing in the eyes of the world, but which is the wisdom of God unto salvation at that point. Now, those previous verses dealt mostly with the foolishness of this world's wisdom, and in using the world's terminology, the foolishness of the gospel.

Paul wants to show that the foolishness of the gospel, that is foolish in the eyes of the world, is actually wisdom. Furthermore, it concerns the deep things of reality which God imparts to us by means of His Holy Spirit. That's where these words "but God" come in. You find them in verse 10 of our passage. The verses before that, verses 6 through 9, speak of human limitations, what we are unable to do so far as the perception of spiritual things is concerned. And then at that point, verse 10, Paul writes, "but God has revealed it to us by His Spirit."

This portion of 1 Corinthians is one of the great sections of the Word of God and the doctrine of revelation. This is the word that he uses there. God has revealed it. That verse, plus the verses that surround it—those that go before and show the limitations and those that come after that show the means—are a great analysis of what God has done to make Himself and the gospel known to fallen men and women who, apart from His revelation, would live and die and perish in utter ignorance of that which alone would be their life and salvation.

When we look at that and go through it section by section, we really have what is a theological, logical-theological presentation of these great doctrines. Now, the first doctrine is that of general revelation. This is what's involved when Paul is saying that the rulers of this age didn't understand God's secret wisdom. This means that it was there, not that they had heard the gospel preached to them, but that there is a revelation of God in nature which they didn't perceive because, of course, if they had, if they had perceived it, they would have been expecting God to reveal Himself in a personal way.

When the Lord Jesus Christ came, they would have said, "Yes, this is the one. He is in conformity with what God has revealed about Himself in nature," and they would have followed Him. Instead, says Paul, they crucified the Lord of Glory. So when Paul begins to talk along these lines, he is presupposing what he develops at much greater length in the book of Romans, namely that doctrine of a general revelation of God in nature which holds all men accountable, though in point of fact, no one, unless he or she is unaided by the Holy Spirit, ever comes to God on that basis.

Now, in Romans 1, verses 18 through 20, Paul has a very perceptive analysis of what God has done in nature. Paul says in those verses that God has revealed His eternal power and God has revealed His Godhead. That's to say, the fact that there is a God and that He's an all-powerful God. The two terms go together philosophically. That means that there is a supreme being. God has made that known in nature. But, says Paul, men and women in their sin don't like the fact that a God of that description exists.

They'd be glad to have a God if he was a limited God, that is, not sovereign, not all-powerful. They would be glad to have a God if God would be given the name God, but wouldn't actually be God, that is, one who is our Creator and to whom we owe allegiance. Some popular religions have a God that's watered down to the level that we can accept. The kind of God who reveals Himself in nature, the kind of God who is all-powerful and who is God and who is our Creator and who demands our allegiance, is the very kind of God we don't want.

Consequently, men and women, as Paul says in that paragraph of Romans, suppress that truth about God. Hold it down. Deny its existence because, of course, if they acknowledged it, they would have to recognize that they were creatures and worship Him. That's the one thing they don't want to do. Because of that, says Paul in Romans 1, the wrath of God is poured out from heaven against all who act on those principles, and that includes all men and women. That's the background for what Paul is saying here.

Paul is talking about general revelation and he's talking about the suppression of that knowledge of God in nature. The result of that is what he says when he quotes from the Old Testament: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him." Is that because there is nothing there to be seen? No, it's there to be seen. We have eyes to see, we just don't see it. Is that because, we ask, there is nothing there to be heard? Has God not spoken? No, we have ears to hear, but we don't hear.

Is that because the gospel is so foolish it can't be understood by the operation of the human mind? Oh, the gospel is perfectly rational. It's the great wisdom of God. That's what makes sense of everything. But although we have minds, we don't put them to that task. And so it's perfectly true, as he says, that if men and women were left by God to general revelation, no one would be saved because no eye would see, no ear would hear, no mind would conceive—indeed, they do not conceive—this wonderful, glorious message of the gospel.

When we were talking about the foolishness of this world's wisdom, Carl Sagan looks at the wonders of our creation, all of the glories of the universe, the distant planets, the quasars, the deep black holes, and all of those things, and stands there marveling at the universe, but cannot see the one who is responsible for it. There's probably no greater contemporary example of what Paul says here in Romans 1 and what he says also in 1 Corinthians 1 about the blindness of the human eye where general revelation is concerned.

I would say that it's not merely the fact of the immensity of the universe that ought to point us to a God great enough to create that and to whom we owe allegiance. Paul would say even the smallest detail of the universe ought to lead us to allegiance to such a God. There would be enough evidence in a fingerprint, enough evidence in the petal of a flower, enough evidence in a snowflake, to lead anyone who could think clearly to recognize a divine supreme being who lies behind it and place upon that individual the obligation to seek that God out. And yet, though we have eyes in our natural state like Carl Sagan, we cannot see.

The Lord taught that Himself in a parable, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man being in hell said, "Lord, send Lazarus back to my brothers so that they'll believe when they see someone who has risen from the dead." And Jesus replied by way of the parable, speaking through Abraham in the context of the story, "No, no, they won't believe even if one rises from the dead. They have Moses and the prophets. If they won't believe the word, they won't believe even though they see a miracle." This is what Paul's saying.

Now, the second thing that God does, therefore, in this process of making Himself known to sinful, fallen men and women, is to reveal Himself in special ways. This is why theologians speak not merely of general revelation, which means the revelation of God in nature, but of special revelation, which is to say the revelation that God gives within the warp and woof of history and the cosmos. J.I. Packer writes on this in several places, and he says this special revelation of God has three parts. First of all, there's a revelation in history because God intervenes in history to do certain things.

History is not merely the outworking of human desires and passions. It is that, but it is also, at specific points, the direct result of the outworking of God. And so God intervenes in history. He intervenes to call Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and to establish him as a special person, and through him to create a special people through whom God's going to work. God intervenes to protect the Jewish people and to lead them out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, and to establish them in their land and protect them and keep them.

Eventually, God acts in history to send the Lord Jesus Christ to be our Savior, to live, to die, to rise again from the dead. God sends the Holy Spirit in history, and He establishes the Christian church. In a sense, all of that is special revelation. Then, says Packer, God also reveals Himself specially by writing, that is, by the Scriptures. Not merely that God acted in certain historical events. You and I would see those events and say, "My, those are unusual events," but we wouldn't understand what they're about.

So at the same time God acts in history, God acts through His holy prophets and apostles. As a result, they produce what we know as the Word of God, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, composed of many parts. Through that, God explains what it is that He's doing in history. He explains what He was doing when He called Abraham. He explains what He was doing with the Jewish people and the significance of the Exodus from Egypt. He explains what the coming of Jesus Christ, what His life, what His death, what His resurrection meant, and what He is doing in establishing the church.

Then, says Packer, in the third place, the God who reveals Himself in special ways in history and in writing also speaks to the individual mind and heart in what you really call in theology, illumination, so that we begin, as we read, to understand what it is that God has done. The interesting thing, however, is that apart from the work of God's Holy Spirit in our heart, none of us understand that writing. We look at the revelation of God in nature and we say we can't see it, and that is true; we can't apart from God's illumination.

We look at the written word that God has given and we say, "Well, we can't understand it," and that is true apart from God's written revelation. I suppose that's what Paul has in mind when he spells it out, saying, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him." Some years ago, I received a letter from a pastor out in western Canada who was asking a number of questions about what he perceived to be contradictions in the pages of the Word of God.

I couldn't tell from his letter whether this was a genuine question or not, or whether he was one of those people who already has his mind up and was just giving in the form of questions the reason why he wouldn't believe that the Bible was the Word of God. But I took his question seriously and I answered it at some length. I remember he had a number of questions. One of them had to do with the time that elapsed between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and His Ascension into heaven.

This pastor pointed out that two of the Gospels, Matthew and John, don't even mention the Ascension. That's true, they don't. He thought that was a problem, but I can't see why. There's lots of things they don't mention. And then he pointed out that, in his opinion, there was a contradiction between Mark and Luke on the one hand and the Book of Acts on the other, because, as he said, Mark and Luke seem to imply that Jesus ascended to heaven immediately after His resurrection—at the most after one or two days—and Acts says quite clearly that it was 40 days later that Jesus ascended into heaven. He said, "There's a great contradiction. You can't get around that no matter what you do."

Well, I looked at the passages, studied them a little bit, and wrote back to him. I said, "You know, if you just read these passages with the assumption that the writers really did know what they were talking about and read them carefully, you'll find that there's no real contradiction there." I said, for example, at the end of Mark's Gospel, he doesn't spell out days in the same way that the author of Acts does, but there are three indications there in the very last chapter that there's a certain passage of time.

Three times over, Mark says, "After these things, after this, after a little while." Three times in just that one chapter. That's obviously a greater passage of time than three days. Why shouldn't we assume that Mark knows what he's talking about? He's just not being as detailed in his presentation as Luke is in the Book of Acts. I said, moreover, it would be a very strange thing, would it not, if Luke who wrote the Gospel and Luke who wrote the Acts, being the same person, contradicted himself from one book to the other?

We would read a human author and we would give him the benefit of the doubt in a situation like that. I said you have to do the same sort of thing here. So I gave a very careful answer. Another question he had had to do with the thieves that were crucified along with the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the Gospels says that there were two thieves and they were both cursing Him. And one of the other Gospels says one thief was cursing and the other thief—and it goes on to tell how that other thief believed and called out on Christ to save him.

I said, well, that really isn't terribly difficult to understand. Most of the commentators down through the whole history of the Christian church assume, I suppose quite rightly, that both thieves began by cursing, and one during the time of the crucifixion was won over by the patient endurance of Jesus Christ, converted on the spot, had a change of nature and turned to Jesus and said, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." It didn't seem to be any kind of difficulty to me at all. At any rate, I wrote that. He wrote back and said he found that unacceptable, and so I just put it down as an exercise in futility and went on to answer, I suppose, several hundred other letters of that same nature that have come in over the past six years.

The reason I tell this story is not to give all that detail, though you need it in order to understand the story, but to say this. I was doing a series on Scripture—what it is, how we received it, how we understand it, and such things—and I was to give an address on dealing with Bible difficulties. Now, I've given that in other places, and one of the illustrations I had in dealing with Bible difficulties is to quote this man from out in western Canada and say, "You see, it's not really a question of overwhelming difficulty. It's really a question of how you approach the Word of God. Will you give it the benefit of the doubt? Will you try to understand it? Or will you come to it first of all with a frame of mind that says there are difficulties?"

And I was to give that particular address, beginning with that particular illustration. Just before I went down there, I came out of my office and I went down to the front of the church and I looked in my mailbox to find what mail had arrived that morning. When I looked through it, lo and behold, there was a letter from this man out in western Canada. I recognize his writing. I'd recognize it anywhere. And I thought, isn't that interesting? I'm going to talk about this man and here's a letter from him. I wonder what he said. It might make a good illustration if the man's been converted in this time.

So I opened the letter and to my surprise, what I found in that letter was an objection to the doctrine of inspiration, raising precisely the same questions in the same words that I had answered five or six years before. I was very tempted to take the two letters and put them over one another and hold them up to the light to see if the man had traced them. He'd forgotten that he'd even asked me the questions those years before because the answers made so little impression on him; they simply drifted in and drifted out.

So we have a doctrine of general revelation here which no one sees. We have a doctrine of special revelation which no ear hears or mind conceives. What is the problem? Well, the problem, you see, is that we lack the Holy Spirit by which such things are understood. And when you begin to talk about God's process of revelation, what you come to next in the steps of God's dealings with fallen human beings is regeneration, by which God takes one who is spiritually dead and, by means of the Holy Spirit, makes him spiritually alive on the basis of which, when the word is preached, he now hears and understands.

When the revelation of God is spread out in nature, he now sees and comprehends that God is the author of it all. You would say at that point, well, that's perhaps all we need, and of course that's a very important thing. When Nicodemus came to Jesus by night and wanted to discuss things—beginning with an analysis of who he perceived Christ to be and His miracles and the fact that that authenticated Jesus as a teacher come from God—the first thing Jesus said to him was not, as we might, "Well, Nicodemus, that's pretty good. You've come a long way. You certainly have a keen mind. That's a good point at which we can begin our conversation. Let's start there and go on."

Jesus said nothing of the sort. He didn't even begin with that. He said, "Look, you don't understand anything. You must be born again." All of the wisdom that Nicodemus had—and he was undoubtedly a very wise man humanly speaking—all the knowledge that Nicodemus had—and he was undoubtedly a very knowledgeable man humanly speaking, he certainly knew the Scriptures—all of that was of no avail unless he was born again. And of course, when we're born again, then the Spirit who has inspired the Word originally now speaks to us as we study the Word personally and gives us what in theology is called illumination.

We begin to see the great things that God has prepared for those who love Him. What I want you to see about this passage, however, is how Paul stresses throughout that the basis of all that communication, the basis on which regeneration takes place and the point at which we have illumination by the Spirit, is nevertheless the Word of God, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. This is the way you have to understand that plural pronoun "we" as it occurs throughout the passage.

When Paul says in verse 6, "we do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature," he's speaking as an apostle of Jesus Christ. He is one of the prophets and the apostles. It's not "we" meaning you and me who speak; it is "we" the apostles who've received the revelation. This is emphasized again and again. In verse 7: "No, we speak God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden but that now God has made known to us, you see." Verse 10: "God has revealed it to us by his Spirit," and so on. You find that the whole way through.

It becomes very clear, incidentally, when we get to chapter 4, because here the Apostle Paul spells this out in detail: "So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Jesus Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God." He's speaking about the apostles at that point, and it's the same reference that he has here in chapter 3. When you understand that, you understand that this is a great claim to inspiration. It's probably the greatest claim in all the Word of God to revelation, except for the phrase that you find throughout Scripture: "thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord." Somebody said you find that perhaps 2,000 times.

Verse 13, you see: "This is what we speak. Now, we, the apostles. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words." What does that mean, spiritual truths in spiritual words? Does it mean mystical truths in mystical words? That's a reference to the Holy Spirit. Truths that the Holy Spirit teaches, expressed in words given by the Holy Spirit. And that's a great claim, you see, to inspiration.

I find it interesting that when the Lord Jesus Christ was with His disciples following the resurrection and they were unbelieving, as they all were, He began to teach them from the Scriptures concerning Himself. A great example of that is Christ's appearance to the Emmaus disciples as they were going home following the resurrection. You find it in the 24th chapter of Luke. These disciples had been in Jerusalem. They had followed all of the details of that final week in Christ's earthly life—His arrest, His crucifixion—and then, because they were still in Jerusalem due to the Sabbath, they were there on the morning of the resurrection and they even heard the report of the women who came back from the tomb.

They told Him that when He asked them why they were downcast. They explained all these things. They said, "Well, this morning, there were these women who are part of our number. They'd been to the tomb and they came back and they said the body wasn't there and there were angels, and angels said he was risen from the dead." But they didn't understand and they didn't believe that at all. You see, in an unregenerate state, no eye sees, no ear hears, mind doesn't conceive spiritual things, even though the evidence is right there in front of them.

And so, they just packed up their things and went home. And it was when they were in that state of mind—depressed, of course; they weren't happy about it, they were very sad, but unbelieving—that Jesus drew near to them along the way. Now, if you were writing the story, how would you say at that point? I think if I was writing the story, I'd say, "Hey guys"—it might have been a man and his wife, I don't know, but—"Hi there." I might say, "Look, it's me." They'd say, "Who?" And He'd say, "Why, it's me, Jesus." "Come on," they'd say, "You're kidding."

He'd say, "No, it's me. Look, my hands, there's the holes where I was crucified. Look, my side, that's where the spear was thrust in." He'd overcome them with the evidence of His physical presence, wouldn't He? I mean, what better evidence could there be? "Let's send Lazarus back from the dead to convince the brothers that they might not end up in the place of torment." Here's Jesus in the flesh, risen from the dead. Jesus didn't do anything of the sort. What do we read in the story? Jesus went to the Scriptures and, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.

And you know what happened? That's what gave them understanding. That's what convinced them and that's what made them witnesses for Him throughout all the remainder of their lives. Afterwards, they talked about it. They said, "Oh, when he was with us, what he did. Oh, it was just a marvelous thing. First of all, he opened the Scriptures, and then as he opened the Scriptures to us, our eyes were opened." You see, Paul says eyes don't see, but they said, "Our eyes were opened, we saw, when he opened the Scriptures."

And then finally, as it says later on in the same chapter, with their eyes opened and the open book before them studying it, He began to open their minds so that they could understand all the things that were written there concerning Himself. You see, 1 Corinthians was written to a group of people who were still very much a part of the culture in which they lived, and the Greeks valued wisdom and they wanted to be wise. They were seeking wisdom in the wrong way, and the wrong way was producing all kinds of problems, including divisions, which he's going to talk about later on in the book.

But Paul would say to these people, and he would say to us today, do you want to be wise? Do you really want to be wise? That's a very good ambition. How are you going to be wise? Are you going to find wisdom in the world's way? Oh, if you seek it that way, you'll be thought wise by the world, though you'll be spiritually foolish. Or are you going to seek wisdom in God's way? If you want to seek wisdom in God's way, then this is where you find it: in this book as God the Holy Spirit takes it and explains it to you and shows you how all these things relate to Jesus Christ, in whom is hid all the fullness of the knowledge of God. May God give us grace to study this book and grow wise spiritually. Let us pray.

Our Father, we confess that even when we look at this book, we feel foolish, and of course we are. We don't have the ability to understand it. We read it and it's with dim eyes, and we listen and it's with ears hard of hearing. But when you were here on earth, you were the one who opened the eyes of the blind and healed the deaf and gave understanding to the ignorant. And that's what we would have you do with us. Father, we don't want to seek wisdom in the world's way, though we would know what there is to be known. And our Father, we would seek wisdom from this book. Do speak to us. Do open our eyes. Do give us ears that can hear and teach us and lead us in the way that we should go, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to The Bible Study Hour, featuring the teaching of Dr. James Boice. The history of the church is one of great blessings from the Holy Spirit in times of reformation and revival. But those times are often forgotten, and we need the teaching of the Holy Spirit to continuously remind us of these great gifts. Find out more in this week's CD offer entitled "The Holy Spirit as a Teacher." It's also by Dr. Boice. This free CD is our way of saying thank you. To receive it, call 1-800-488-1888 and we'll be quick to send you a copy of "The Holy Spirit as a Teacher." That number again is 1-800-488-1888.

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