They Are Thus Rather To Look To God's Wisdom (1:22-25).
‘Seeing that Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumblingblock, and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.'
The problem lay in the nature of man. ‘Jews ask for signs.' The Jews were a practical people. They wanted to see the divine activity. They wanted ‘signs' (John 2:18; John 6:30). They were always looking round for proof that God was about to do something for them. They wanted external verification. The idea arose from their history. Their history was a history of signs, and they looked for more. This was understandable, and yet ironically Paul knew that they had seen such signs. They had seen them in the life of Christ. They had seen His teaching and His continuous flow of miracles. They had even seen evil spirits defeated and the dead raised. But they had closed their eyes to them. The truth was they would only accept signs that came from someone who fell in with their particular viewpoints, someone who acted like the Devil wanted Jesus to do in the temptations (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-12) and performed spectacularly, someone who favoured them and acknowledged their support, recognising how right they were. They thought that they already had wisdom in the Law. They did not need wisdom.
‘Greeks seek after wisdom.' ‘Greeks' means Gentiles influenced by Greek ideas, the main constituents of that part of the Roman Empire. The Greeks were admired for their rationalism, their breadth of thought, their metaphysical ideas. And they were interested in all forms of wisdom teaching, including that which sought the release of the soul from the degraded body of flesh through attaining esoteric knowledge. And they had influenced the world around them. Men thought that such ideas would pierce the curtain that hid them from divine things, and they sought to speculate more and more, thinking that eventually they would hit on the truth. Indeed many thought that they had hit on the truth. But in the end their ideas faded, to be replaced by others. They did not achieve their object. Such knowledge could not bring reconciliation with God, and could not bring life.
‘But we preach Christ crucified (or ‘a crucified Messiah').' But although in Christ the Jews were given signs and the Greeks were shown true wisdom, they both rejected what they were given, dismissing it as foolish. To the Jews the preaching of a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. For crucifixion was the sign of a cursed man, and they could not and would not accept a cursed Messiah. They could not see that they were in fact under a curse and therefore that the One Who would redeem them must be ready to take their curse upon Himself (Galatians 3:10-13). They wanted to be saved, but by something that fitted in with their ideas, something respectable, by obedience to the Law, by submission to the ordinances of the covenant, not by something so radical. (They failed to see that it was what their whole system was pointing to).
And to be saved by a crucified Jew was to Greeks a thought beyond acceptance. To them salvation must come through the Greeks, and through Greek ideas, and through ‘wisdom', not through something so vulgar as a self-proclaimed Jewish prophet, or even worse a self-proclaimed god, dying like a common slave, a rebel, on a cross. Such a thought was preposterous. Thus the message of the crucified Christ was in general dismissed by both.
‘But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks --'. Once again we have the idea of effectual calling. It does not just mean called by men. It means effectually called by God. They have been called by God through the word and proclamation of the cross and have responded. And it includes both Jews and Greeks, whose eyes have been opened so that they responded to God's saving action, who have been drawn by the Father (John 6:44).
‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.' This parallels ‘Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek after wisdom.' Christ answered both requirements, for to those who had eyes to see He had the power to perform signs, indeed was Himself the sign, and He had the wisdom to reveal truth, for He was Himself the Truth (John 14:6). But it means far more than that. It means He has power and wisdom in abundance. Indeed that He is the One through Whom is revealed the fullness of God's own power and wisdom. That His power is revealed through His saving work, through His death and resurrection, and its results in the lives of men, and His wisdom through the effectiveness of that work in saving all who believe. He is thus the source of all true power and the source of all true wisdom, especially of saving power and saving wisdom. For that Almighty power is revealed through the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18), which also reveals His great saving wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:21).