It's Not Random...But It's Not Coherent Either

There are plenty of events that cannot be explained logically.  We can go through the Bible and try to give some sort of rationale to all too many of them and we will find ourselves dumbfounded.  Paul suffered and we might say it was for his development spiritually but was he really that far bent out of shape to require all the hardships and painful trials he endured?  There is a great battle going on unseen within the universe and it is unfathomable to us its reach.  We can talk about the Civil War or World War II in general ways and feel like everything was quite reasonable but when you track the events of a single life going through it, the wars are irrational and incoherent.  Strategies are all well and good and the leaders directing armies make sense of what they are doing but for the poor soul on the battlefield, there is nothing sensible in it.  We are in the midst of a great and terrible conflict and although we are not aware of the forces operating all about us, we don't have to look far to see the collateral damage.  Anger, bitterness, frustration, broken hearts, lost dreams, shattered hopes are not far from any of us and it all seems like nonsense if we don't factor into the life equation the unseen battleground.   The devil and his forces are waging war against humanity and it is terribly brutal what is coming of this war.  Yet our Savior has promised to bind up the brokenhearted and release from darkness all those prisoners who have experienced the fury of the battlefield.  If it was all God in this, we might be able to draw a straight line of cause and effect but the devil is out there too and he is not reasonable in his workings.  Good people get blasted and terrible ones seem to have "all the luck".  Smart plans get beaten into the ground by circumstances we can't factor into our organizing.  Blessings seem to come in haphazard ways and the prayer of Jabez is a great model for good Christian people until the tent stakes are ripped out of the ground by a hurricane and what is left from the storm is rubble.  We have a Savior though who took the worst the devil could throw at Him and on the third day rose from the dead and one day the devil will be thrown into the lake of fire and the battlefield will become a paradise.  Until then, we trust in a good God who loves us and suffers with us in the "aches" of life.    Faith in our Lord's love for us is not a platitude; it is the way we have it and His love for us will triumph in the end.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the full armor of God...      Ephesians 6:12-13a NIV

Reasonable Rationality

The problem with Christianity is not in the audacious claims made by it.  Everything about Christianity is really quite reasonable and logical.  Its difficulty lies in the simplicity it presents.  Who can't imagine a God making the universe?  It really isn't that stunning a conclusion!  And what is so odd about that God loving His created beings with unquenchable affection?  Is that hard to consider?  And can we be so shallow in our thinking that we can deny the possibility that there is universal right and wrong; that some things always are good and fair and others have for all time been wicked and bad?   What can we say about a God who is willing to take the extreme measure of dying Himself to make a way for His beloved people to become wholly good and thoroughly flawless?  Is that too strange a consideration?  What marks the Christian is not the illogic of her assumptions; it is the complete reasonableness of her thinking!  No Christian should apologize for believing that God is love and eternal and holy.  That is the logical conclusion.  What is irrational is the determination that evil is somehow desirable and life is temporary and behind all of this we see and smell and touch is the random unthinking of empty space.  Just consider for a moment the love you feel for a baby griping your thumb for all he is worth or the joy you experience making a new friend who really does want to be with you!  Is that the stuff of nonsense and balderdash?  The beginning of wisdom is that love is really Love and good is really Good and life is Life and darkness is too small to contain the Light.  Perhaps just a moment or two is enough to resettle your senses and grasp the simplicity of your faith, that God loves you and really does love you and is working out every detail of that life of yours for good that is eternally good and intelligently loving and in your favor.  You are not alone.  You are in the lap of Love and that Love does not give up on you even when you want to give up on Him.

 "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"—which means, "God with us."     Matthew 1:23 NIV

I Get It Conclusion

The wisdom the world does not possess and cannot acquire is the “word of the Cross”. The “word of the Cross”, is most bluntly, moronic to the world. Foolishness as it is commonly translated. It is not that the world misunderstands what we have to say about the Cross because it misinterprets the facts. Rather like the Gorilla trying to comprehend the stock market, the world has no shot at figuring out the Cross. Paul calls it the power of God but only to the ones “continually being saved.” For the others, those in a constant state of destruction, it is idiocy.

There are two ways the word of the Cross is power of God for those continually saved. First, it makes stupid every argument held against it. Verse 20 uses a term that describes a transformation; the change from being intelligent to being ridiculously foolish or more literally, moronic. Suppose we were to mix common baking soda and vinegar. The resulting chemical reaction would produce carbon dioxide gas and water. When you place the word of the Cross on the wisdom of the world, and combine the two with faith, the wisdom of the world becomes stupid. It no longer makes sense. I once thought when I was a child that I could as I grew stronger fly on my own power. Of course it hasn’t worked out but the logic of my argument as a four year old made sense then. But now, through the transformation of mental maturity, I realize it was a child’s dream, we are not made to fly that way. I once thought, before the word of the Cross, that there wasn’t enough evidence for God. Now, by the transformation brought on me by the Cross, I cannot imagine life at all without God. The logic is not in my clearer thinking, it is in the supernatural work the Cross does within me. I “see” what I did not see before Jesus made my thinking clear about Him.

As an insider to my mind, I think I came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is Lord and Master of my life but the truth is I didn’t. The work happened supernaturally. It came by the word of the Cross. Nothing about Jesus and the life He brings makes sense outside this change. We bust our heads against a wall trying to convince people it is logical to belong to Jesus. It cannot be made logical because it is impossible to grasp. The word of the Cross alone has the power not only to persuade but also to make sense of eternal life. The opposite also is true. What seems so logical, the life without Jesus is morphed by the word of the Cross into utter stupidity. The time away from Christ becomes by that Cross a mess of foolishness and vanity. We are not convinced to follow Jesus, we are made by the Cross into followers of Him.

The second way the word of the Cross is the power of God for the ones being saved is that it is what continuously makes you saved. We aren’t saved by something we think or do but rather by the word of the Cross itself. The change has nothing to do with carefully crafted arguments or intelligent considerations. Eternal life comes by the word of the Cross and it alone has the power to make you, as Paul puts it, “continually saved”. No one is “argued into the Kingdom of God and no one convinced of it through logic. There is by the word of the Cross a literal transformation that makes me into something I can never in my own power or through any other power morph out of being. I cannot become a non child of God once I am one because it is not me that does it: it is by the word of the Cross.

Verse 21 is fascinating. It tells us that through the “foolishness of the proclamation” a miracle occurs. The nonsensical, “moronic”, idiotic if you will proclamation brings about the faith transformation. Just saying the “Christ having been crucified” opens wide a door that is completely closed, a door to an eternal life transformation. It is a bit mysterious this process because believing is not given as a means of attaining eternal life, it is the characteristic of the ones having it. It is like saying that all Walkups have big noses. I am not a Walkup because I have a big nose but there is not a Walkup running around without a big nose. Believing or faithing is what every single Christian does. It is the foolishness of the proclamation of Christ having been crucified that takes the soul into continual salvation. It is the power of the change. Believing is what you look like when the Christ crucified proclamation works in you.

Now I understand that the call of the Gospel is to “believe”. We believe though not because we get it or we think it through. We do not turn into Christians on belief. Belief is the response of the soul to the penetration of the message of Christ crucified. The power of it works in me and then I believe. This, the Bible says is grace…a gift. Romans 10:17 is a strange and near shocking twist on popular theology. It states that, “faith comes from hearing the message”. Literally, it reads that faith comes out of the hearing. We do not hear the message because of our faith. The message of Christ crucified delivers the faith into us. It is the power generating faith.

The message itself is a stumbling block to some (the Jews) and moronic to others (the Gentiles). But that doesn’t keep the proclamation of the Gospel from tearing into people and making their old unbelief completely illogical to them. Because the message of Christ crucified is sufficient in itself to make changed lives, we do not have to be skilled messengers. It does not need help from good, satisfying logic. It simply needs to be announced and then it bores in on the one being saved. Here is a scientific chemistry experiment for the church. Go before the Lord and ask Him to point out to you one you can proclaim the Gospel. Take a deep breath and then do it. Pray for God get the words out. Christ died on the Cross to give you eternal life. He rose from the dead and He is the one and only savior of your soul. The pray and step back. The proclamation is not held back by the wisdom of the unbelieving. It is corralled by the silence of the Church. One voice is all the Gospel needs. Why not make it yours.



Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. Romans 10:17 NIV

I Get It! Introduction

“I Get It”

1 Corinthians 1: 18-25 GJW
18 For the word of the Cross to the ones being destroyed is foolishness but to the ones continually being saved, to you, it is the power of God. 19 For it has been written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise ones and the intelligence of the intelligent, I will push out of the way.” 20 Where is the wise one, where is the learned one, where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For in as much as in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God took pleasure through the foolishness of the proclamation to save the ones believing. 22 And in as much as the Jews demand a sign and the Gentiles seek wisdom, 23 we on the other hand, we proclaim Christ having been crucified…to the Jews it is a stumbling block, to the Gentiles moronic. 24 But to the called ones, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the stupidity of God is wiser than (the wisdom) of man and the weakness of God is stronger than (the strength) of men.


The “ah hah!” experience is famous in psychology as the moment when suddenly you get it; when your eyes open to what you never understood before, when your brain synapses all at once fire into inspiration mode. We’ve all had something like this happen to us; maybe not as world changing as the Wright Brothers suddenly knowing what was wrong with their airplane design or Thomas Edison realizing what he needed to do to correct his first light bulb but our ah-hahs are pretty important to us. You remember where you put your brush. Ah-hah! You think of your friend’s daughter’s name. Ah-hah! Inspiration comes for fixing your car’s carburetor. Ah-hah!

Recently I have been bemused by the “ah-ha” so many in the political world seem to be having about Jesus. The slogan that has sprung up recently as an “ah-hah” of sorts is that Jesus was a community organizer. Listening to a conservative talk-show, I was floored by the ah-hahs bandied around regarding Christ. A caller, decrying the slogan of Jesus being a community organizer told the host that Jesus was most certainly not a community organizer; he was a “teacher”. Now, as soon as the caller made his point, the host immediately corrected him. “Oh no” he expounded, “Jesus was not a teacher, he was truth”. That is what the Bible tells us about him and what Christians believe. So that was it. Three ah-hahs! Jesus was a community organizer, Jesus was a teacher, Jesus was truth. Honestly, I cannot find fault with any of the ones who thought they could define Jesus as they did. They each based their impressions on what they thought they had figured out and normally that is good enough. The trouble with Jesus is that your ah-hah will never be adequate…for that matter an ‘ah-hah can be your most fatal mistake when it comes to Him. Jesus is not an explanation, a definition nor even a biography. But to know Him is an impossible task if you rely just upon your common sense.

There are two types of understanding. The first is a natural wisdom, a common sense intelligence that everyone possesses to some degree or another. It takes things in and then makes decisions based on experiences, impressions and influencers. The ah-hah for natural wisdom is the result of mental synthesis, putting it all together and then the brain remaking what is there into an understanding. We operate out of this in practically every area of life. We discipline our kids based on it, choose careers based on it, form friendships and develop opinions through natural wisdom. For most people, that is all they know. We may see Gorillas using sign language to ask for water but you will never hear of one writing a book about family relations or discussing the grief process because it is not possible for them. Natural wisdom is all the wisdom the world has and so it cannot be charged with ignorance for being unable to go beyond it. Paul insists there is a wisdom that rises above natural wisdom just as distinctively as the wisdom of man soars above the understanding of a gorilla.
To Be Continued