1 Corinthians 1:25-28 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.… This clause is the last of a series of clauses, of which each that precedes it prepares the way for it, and by natural progress leads the mind toward it. The foolish and the weak, the base and the despised things — it is only natural that from the last and lowest of these the apostle should step to the things which are not; that is, which have no existence that is recognised by mankind; which arrest no thought, excite no fear, and are not prominent enough to be scorned. And these things, he says, the Lord hath chosen, to bring to nought the things that are; the great institutions, establishments, forces, which mark or mould the constitution of society. He hath chosen them for this purpose, to the end that His name may be magnified by their agency, and His glory be revealed in their ultimate triumph. That the "things which are," at any time, in human society, however venerable, are always liable to be displaced by others which were not in existence, or were not of recognised importance when the former were established. These are facts familiar as any fact of nature, which impress immediately the most careless observer. "Things which are not," so far as men's earlier knowledge is concerned, which exist but in embryo, and are only to be developed by a keener observation, are yet usually superior to the things which precede them, and more replete with a vitalising energy; that thus each industrious community is likely to surpass in its later years the attainments of its earlier, and the race itself to be gradually enriched and elevated as the centuries proceed; these also are facts which modern history clearly illustrates. But these things of which the age knows not and dreams not are all the time present to the mind of the Most High; they are indeed His preordained instruments, not only for working the changes which shall come in the aspects or in the life of society, but for the grander purpose of establishing supremely His kingdom in the world. So here, as everywhere, does Christianity vindicate its origin in God's mind, by placing us at once upon the highest levels of truth, and opening to our minds the widest range for reflection. Let us review the scenes amid which the text was written, and then the events which became its immediate and complete vindication. It was written from that delightful and populous city planted by the Ionian colony on the hills overlooking "the Asian meadows," along the Cayster. In this city of Ephesus, important and peculiar, partly Greek but still more Oriental in its manners and spirit, the metropolis of a province, and with a commerce that drew to its wharves the representatives of all nations, in which schools of philosophy seem so much to have abounded that one of them was opened to Paul for his labours, yet in which the Eastern superstitions and magic haughtily confronted philosophy, and still had a power which they had not either at Athens or at Rome. In this city, where the East and the West were commingled, and within whose spacious walls and harbour was assembled so busy and so various a life, the apostle, coming westward from Antioch, abode for more than two years, and from thence wrote this Epistle. It was written to Corinth, that wealthier, more brilliant, and more luxurious town planted upon the celebrated Greek Isthmus, and by its position attracting the trade not only of Greece, but of all the countries whose shores were washed by either of the seas between whose almost meeting waves it fortunately stood. It is evident, then, at once, what were the institutions which Paul describes as "things that are"; the great established powers in society, which withstood, or at least did not harmonise with, the extension of Christianity. Foremost amongst them we must reckon, of course, that haughty Judaism, dogmatic and secular, into which the religion given by God to the people of His election had by degrees been transformed, and which now had the seat of its dominion in Palestine, but the outposts of its influence in many, cities of the empire. Ennobled and vitalised as it had been at the beginning, by the supreme truth of the being of God, eternal and holy, almighty and wise. the Creator, moral Governor, and Judge of the universe, it received a practical impressiveness from the discoveries which it made of His presence and providence, and of His perfect law. Yet from this religion the nation had early and persistently swung away into grossest idolatries, reproducing in gold the Egyptian Apis beneath the very pavement of sapphire on which the feet of God were treading above the mount; in their subsequent history, polluting the hills which looked out upon Jerusalem with the fury and lust of sacrilegious observances. Second in order of these "things that are" — these powerful institutes of the day of the apostle, opposed to Christianity — must be reckoned of course the heathenism which prevailed outside of the Jews among all nations; which confronted Paul everywhere, ancient as man, but still vigorous in strength, imperial in place, and arrayed in universal opposition to the gospel. First of all it is to be recognised by us that this heathenism which so withstood Christianity was not an altogether artificial system in any nation; that it grew out of real and even deep motions in the general mind, and was not in its substance a matter of chance or a creature of contrivance, least of all an arbitrary and fabricated arrangement either of statecraft or of priestcraft; nay, that it had a certain real moral life in it, and was related not to depraved desire alone, to the lust and the pride which it never denied and too often deified, but related also, however insufficiently, to needs which the soul always feels to be inmost and knows to be abiding. Its answer was a vain one, but it sought to give an answer, to questions which never since the exile from Eden have ceased profoundly to agitate the race. Unconscious prophecies of better things lurked in many of its forms and in some of its traditions. Its sacrifices were efforts to staunch the flow from bleeding hearts. And while the popular mind acknowledged chiefly the hold of its ceremonies and shows, the thoughtful found also some solace or stimulus in its sublimated legends. Then further it must be noticed that as existing in any nation it took the form most germane to that people, to its genius and spirit, to its circumstances and habits; and that everywhere it allied itself with whatever was strongest, whatever most attracted men's minds. Thus in Greece, from the first, it enshrined itself in art; made eloquence its advocate; was indebted for the memorable form which it assumed to the noble poetry in which its mythologies were melodiously uttered. In Rome the same power allied itself with politics, and became a military force. Still further we must remember that in no land was this recent; in none was it devoid of that dignity and authority which were derived from a high antiquity; while to all the peoples, in proportion to their advancement, it was associated with whatever was to them most renowned and inspiring in their history. It was dear to them as the bond which connected their life with heroic ages. There remains a third thing to be recognised as standing among the "things that are" — the powerful institutes and establishments of society, opposed to Christianity — when Paul was writing from Ephesus to Corinth. But this was also the most powerful of all; the most dangerous to assail, to human view the most inaccessible to change or decay; supreme over every force that could touch it, and comparing with them all as the Mediterranean with the restless streams which sought and sank into it. It was, of course, the authority and power of imperial Rome. It was hardly as yet at its uttermost height, this imperial power; for scores of years still slowly passed before that age of Trajan and the Antonines which marked its consummate might and splendour; while it was later even than this that Severus carried his victorious arms to Ctesiphon and Seleucia, transferred the entire legislative power from the senate to himself, and scattered the profuse. memorial of his reign over Africa and the East. And so was this empire now exhibited to Paul, encircling the sea which was the centre of his thoughts, from Carthage to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Ephesus, and on to the very pillars of Hercules, with no sign of weakness. Considering its history, its growth, it seemed hardly so much a construction of man, this empire of Rome, as one of the preordained elements of nature; reaching in its exhaustive roots to the centres of history, and draining the earth to give it nutriment. So it stood before Paul, as at Ephesus he saw it, as everywhere he met it, as he knew and felt it environing the earth. And Paul knew that this mightiest establishment of government on the earth, this impregnable despotism which was touched by no fear, against which human power seemed vain, that this should also, in God's own time, be wrecked and "brought to nought." But how should it be done? By what agencies should. each of these prophesied victories over Judaism, heathenism, and the terrible iron-limbed empire of Rome, be brought to pass? Not, he affirms, by the forces which already are at work in the world, and which may be still further multiplied, and made to bear on this new issue; not by armies revolting, or statesmen conspiring, or philosophers projecting new answers to heathenism; not by nations reclaiming their ravaged rights, or the still existing senate combining with the people to bury the haughty imperial prerogative in a cataclysm of revolution. The forces which God shall employ for this work, and to which He shall give a might irresistible, are simply thus far the "things which are not"; the things which He alone can bring out of the secrets of thought and life, and make triumphant on their mission. How utterly insignificant was Christianity in the beginnings before one temple had sprung toward heaven; before one treatise had wrought its principles into scientific statement, or clothed them in the grace and the majesty of letters; before any government had sought to incorporate its rules into statutes; before any one of all the great names now associated with it had become its bulwark in the popular confidence. In the simply spiritual elements it involved, it was set against this array which opposed it; and of all the auxiliaries which it afterward gained, not one had as yet appeared on the earth. How utterly insignificant seemed then its force! How incredibly inadequate to the end to be accomplished! The truths which had been taught the apostles, and afterward recalled to them and unfolded more fully by the witness of the Spirit, and which were to be enshrined in evangelical narratives, not one of which had yet been written — these were the primary instruments to be used, with the oral proclamation of their principles and laws, for the spread of God's kingdom, and the overthrow of whatever withstood its advance. And these! — it seemed like binding the lightning in the meshes and knots of metaphysical argument. Epistles and talks in the synagogue against armies! The might that lay on letters and lips against the might that ruled from thrones! The publication of doctrines against establishments of power as rooted- as the hills! And yet these were the very agencies — these "things which were not" in every sense — which were not regarded, and which hitherto existed only in germ, these Gospels and Epistles which were still to be written, these teachings and preachings which had scarcely commenced, these Christian forces in life and character which hardly thus far had appeared on the earth — these were the forces which God had chosen to bring to nought the "things that were" — the ancient, immense, and impregnable institutions that stood in all their august might and tremendous effectiveness fronting the gospel. Not with energy only, but with an exact precision of speech, had Paul then described them. The philosopher thought of them, if he thought of them at all, with a contempt only greater than that which he gave to the most absurd or childish of fables. The soldier regarded them less than the mists which had hovered last year around the crests of the hills. To the Jew, in comparison of his august forms and world-challenging miracles, they seemed as frail and shadowy as dreams. The whole: wisdom of the world anticipated as little an impression from them as we that the tiny animalculae in the ocean, streaking its waves with phosphorescent glow, will arrest the revolution of shaft and wheel, and stay the steamship on its march. Those secondary forces, too, which were in time to be evolved by God's plans, and confederated in effective alliance with these, although, of course, existing in embryo, they were, if possible, still more unrecognised, and even unrealised, when Paul was writing. The awakening spiritual longings under Judaism, at which his ministry to so large an extent was sympathetically aimed; the awakening moral instincts within heathenism, whose premonitions he must have felt, of which Plutarch soon afterward became so illustrious an example; the gradual progress of moral decline in all the systems that were rooted in error and maintained by force — all these were things which one by one came into development, each in its time, as the truths and the spirit of the gospel went forward, but which were as latent, when Paul looked forth from Ephesus on the sea, as were the germs of modern oaks. And those still additional procedures and events, also auxiliary to these more silent forces, already were purposed in the mind of the Most High; already He saw their seeds unfolding; but how vaguely, if at all, were they thus far foreshown even to Paul; how entirely unsuspected were they yet by the world! The destruction of Jerusalem by the arms of Titus, who seems to have felt himself but the instrument of a power which he could not comprehend and could not contravene, in his overthrow of the city; the consequent extinction of the Jewish nationality, the final obliteration of all distinctions between the tribes, and the scattering of their impoverished remnant to the ends of the earth — this was a fact lying still as hidden among God's plans. Judaism was surpassed and terminated in a higher religion, more adequate to man's wants, more illustrative of God's glory. Heathenism was not only broken down, but it was made, thenceforth and for ever, the veriest outcast of civilisation. The Roman Empire was as finally extinguished as if the crust of the globe had been opened to swallow it up. And all was wrought within a few centuries by what; at the outset had appeared so unreal or so ineffectual. (B. S. Storrs, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.WEB: Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. |
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