that I believe is true, that we all can relate to, and that is that as human beings, all of us like to figure stuff out for ourselves. All of us like to figure stuff out for ourselves. It really doesn't matter how old you are, what stage in life you happen to be in. There is this drive to analyze and to master, to figure things out. It starts very young. Think about that simple game that toddlers play where they have this plastic box that has the different shapes There are holes in different shapes, and they have to find the right block to put in there, the one that matches the circle or the square or whatever the case might be. And you could do it for them, and that may be helpful to get them started, but they really want to do it for themselves. Child gets older, and the same thing happens when it comes to learning how to ride a bike. You can put on training wheels. You can be there by their side holding them up. But at a certain point, they want to do it themselves, even if they fall over again and again. They still want the process of mastering this skill of keeping their balance and keeping the movement going. Or think about a teenager practicing a sport. and going through the same moves over and over again until he develops enough skill to where he could get put on a team. You as a homeowner or a car owner, you could hire somebody and maybe sometimes you should, but probably you go on YouTube. And you watch video after video after video until you feel like you can do this for yourself. You can fix it. Or maybe you are a new employee, and you are very motivated to excel. And so you arrive early at work, day after day, until you get comfortable with the basic tasks that you are expected to perform. You don't want somebody to have to be there holding your hand all of the time. You want to figure it out. or maybe at a higher level, an engineer, or a scientist, or an inventor working tirelessly to solve a problem that no one has been able to solve before. Those are all great things, and those all lead to helpful results. There really is an appropriate satisfaction that we experience when we master some body of information or when we develop some new skill. And when we have success in some of those areas, we can end up actually being useful or creating something useful for the lives of other people. The problem comes in that we not only like to figure stuff out for ourselves, we also like to get the credit for figuring stuff out. We like to get the credit. We like to be known as smart or astute or skillful or powerful. And that tendency is regularly ingrained in us from the very beginning. when our parents pat us on the back and congratulate us for our little achievement, or when our teachers give us good grades at school, or when we receive awards because of our performance in sports, or at work when we receive promotions or raises, specifically because we worked hard and arrived at a new level of achievement, we figured stuff out. The flip side is that if we end up with bad grades or no promotions or whatever the case might be, we can end up feeling like our lives don't amount to very much. It's like we're all hardwired to excel at something or other. And we thrive not just on the achievement, but on the recognition, the sense of status, the applause that comes often as a result. Well, that can raise problems in our relationships with one another. It can create tension as we get maybe a little too competitive and our daily lives end up being driven by this desire to where we push other people aside, maybe. They can create problems in that regard. But what about that same attitude when it comes to figuring out the ultimate issues of life? When we're looking at questions like, what is the purpose of human beings in the first place? Why are we here at all? What are humanity's deepest problems and how can we solve those problems? What values should we live by or what virtues should we pursue in life? What is the good life and how can we arrive at it? And the other fundamental question, is there a God? And if he exists, how can we have a relationship with him? Even with those kinds of questions that are so far beyond us, we still like to figure stuff out for ourselves. And we still like to get credit for figuring it out. And that is the dynamic that Paul is addressing as we come to 1 Corinthians 1. You probably know that this church was just rife with division and all kinds of moral problems and challenges. And in one case, here at the beginning, Paul begins to deal with them about the fact that they were dividing up, according to their favorite preachers, they were giving special preference to those whose presentation was impressive from the standpoint of Greek rhetoric and Greek philosophy. You can see him begin to get into that as he makes this statement at verse 17. So look at that first. Paul says, did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel," and now specifically he says, to preach the gospel, not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. He starts to go after what he calls here words of eloquent wisdom. Now he is not saying that preachers shouldn't do the best they can to get their message across effectively. He is not saying that preachers are not allowed to phrase their sermons or their appeals in words that are beautiful and that are persuasive. What he is talking about are the standards and the techniques of the Greek rhetoric of that day that ultimately were designed, not so much to get a message across, but to make the speaker look really smart and therefore to draw a crowd after him personally. And Paul says that is not at all what is going on in true gospel preaching. In fact, that kind of man-centered, man-glorifying mentality is diametrically opposed to the whole point of Christianity. And that's what he's going to develop as he continues. And we're going to read a little bit more now, starting in verse 18. And Paul makes his first point along those lines, that the message of the gospel goes against this human drive to figure stuff out and to get credit for it, to be recognized for it. Read with me here. You can follow along as I read, starting in verse 18. Four. The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. He's setting up this contrast between this Greek drive, especially for appeal through beautiful words and smart-sounding rhetoric, and he says, do you realize what you're talking about? Whatever words you happen to use, do you realize the content of the gospel message that we proclaim? It is not a message that appeals to human wisdom. It is a message actually designed to humble human beings, to bring them to the end of themselves, and to see that the way of salvation is through a method that is totally embarrassing to human nature. And here's how one preacher illustrated it. He said, picture a well-respected American businessman, a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, whatever, Somebody well-dressed, well-groomed, being taken out of the gate of the city to the garbage dump and being stood in front of a post with a naked man hanging by the nails driven through his wrists. covered with blood, gasping for his last breaths, and being told, this, sir, is wisdom and righteousness and holiness and redemption. Will you kneel down here and cast yourself on him for mercy?" In other words, God has chosen a way of salvation that devastates human pride. And imagine how that man would respond. He might say this, that? You want me to bow down before that? You think I need that? Don't you see how I'm dressed? Have you seen the car I drive? Don't you know where I work? And don't you know how much money I make? And you think I need that heap of bloody flesh? Who do you think I am, a dog? A worm? Well, kind of. Yeah. That is the kind of humiliation that the gospel requires in providing the only way of salvation. And that's the thrust of verses 18 to 25, but as if that were not humbling enough, Paul goes on to argue as well that God's general pattern in election, as far as those in whose lives he has chosen to bring to faith, his general pattern in election also goes against this human desire to figure stuff out for ourselves and to be recognized for it. And so verse 26. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. So whether you're thinking about the provision of salvation and how it works through the death of Jesus, or whether you're thinking about the kind of people in general that God chooses to draw to Himself for faith in Jesus, all of it is very humbling to humanity. And it is not that no humanly wise or wealthy people are ever saved, but in general the pattern is that those who do come to Christ because of God's electing grace, those who do come to Christ are people like that. people who are not known for their status and their accomplishments in society, people who in general are rejected as nobodies in the world, and this is another fact that is designed to bring us to humility before the Lord. And as Paul closes out the chapter, he comes to the statement that is what I want us to reflect on, and it's actually one of my favorite passages in all the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 1, verses 30 and 31. And he comes to this conclusion. And because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord." Over against our own efforts to figure stuff out, these words tell us that God is the only one who has figured it out. This is all about his wisdom in his plan of salvation and that Christ himself is the wisdom of God. And that's our theme this morning, Christ, the wisdom of God. We're just going to go through the wording of these couple of verses and try to reflect on each part along the way. as a way of deepening our appreciation for God's way of salvation, and hopefully as a way of preparing our hearts to approach Him in the Lord's table. And he speaks, first of all, briefly about the source of wisdom. Where does this come from? The verse begins by saying, and because of Him. And because of Him. And that pronoun him obviously refers back to the person that is mentioned in verse 29. Verse 29 ends, the last word of that verse is God and because of him. Him is a reference to God and particularly the Father. He says, and because of him, which literally is simply one short statement, actually a two-letter preposition in Greek that we would translate from, and from him. Those two letters of that preposition make all the difference in the world and for all eternity. And from the beginning of this passage, Paul is emphasizing that God alone is the source He is exalting God himself as the only one who has figured this out. God alone is the source of the wisdom we need in order to know who we are and what our problem is and how that problem may be resolved and how we may be reconciled to our creator. You and I cannot construct a ladder up to God Through whatever efforts to figure this out, through our own philosophy, through our ethics, through our religion, we are not able to construct a ladder that is tall enough and that is sturdy enough to hold up the weight of our lives to gain us access to the Lord for all eternity. That ladder has to be thrown down from Him. It is a divinely designed ladder. It is a divinely created ladder that is the only kind that will work sufficiently to connect us with God. He alone is the source of this wisdom. And the great news is that he has in fact provided such a ladder. What is the ladder? What is the means by which we may enjoy this wise plan of God and be reconciled to him? That's the second expression in the verse. He describes for us the means of wisdom, and he says again very briefly here, of him you are in Christ Jesus. you are in Christ Jesus. That is what I'm describing as the means by which we are able to enjoy God's wisdom. And the means is by being united to Jesus Christ. It is not just Christ being provided. though that is a starting point. It is our own being joined to Him, experiencing union with Him. And on a pretty regular basis here in our assembly, I come back to this doctrine of union with Christ. The Bible does teach that the Lord values us as individuals, and He interacts with us as individuals. But in the bigger scheme of things, we are told that he actually deals with us on the basis of representatives, not exclusively or not primarily on the basis of ourselves, but on the basis of representatives that he himself has appointed. Now, this is not a difficult concept to understand. We actually just had another illustration of it this past week in relation to the government of this country. This past week, an elected American representative visited the country of Taiwan. And whatever you think about her or what she did, that was interpreted by China as signaling that the United States wants Taiwan to be recognized as a sovereign state. The problem is that China doesn't want that. They actually viewed her visit as an affront to their government because they claim possession of Taiwan. And so you may have read that in retaliation, The country of China carried out a military operation that simulated an attack on Taiwan. They didn't do that because any of us Americans went over there and made a statement. We were over here carrying on our lives. We know very little about the situation. We may have very little personal concern about something so far away. Nevertheless, the Chinese government took that action because a single person who represents America visited Taiwan. For better or for worse, she is one of our representatives, in fact, the highest in the House of Representatives. And government works that way, whether you're talking about people in Congress or whether you're talking about people in the executive branch or all levels of the government and of society, we entrust certain privilege and certain responsibility to people to represent us before other nations or as it relates to certain issues. Our whole society is based on the concept of representation. And something like that is how God has set up his whole relationship to the human race. Our first representative was Adam, and he utterly failed, and he plunged all of his descendants into destruction. We come into the world inheriting his depraved nature. We also come into the world with his condemnation legally charged to our account. And so God, to resolve that problem, commissioned a second representative to undo the devastation that Adam had brought about. That representative was actually a member of the Godhead. He is the second person of the Godhead who took on a human body and a human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. And as a genuine human being, he did everything that Adam failed to do. He obeyed God's law perfectly. He also satisfied the infinite penalty of the law that Adam had broken. And the Bible extends this opportunity to us. That if by God's gracious working in our hearts, we as individuals accept Christ as our representatives, all of his accomplishments are considered to be ours. They are charged to our account, that is a lot of what it means to be united to him, to be joined to him in the sight of God so that God treats us on the basis of Jesus' successful accomplishments instead of on the basis of Adam's failures and my own personal duplication of those failures. And so the means by which we come to experience this wisdom is by being united to Christ as our representative. And Paul is going to elaborate on that as he continues in this verse. If we ask the question, well, what are some of these accomplishments of this representative that I come to enjoy when I am united to him." Our third consideration here is the content of this wisdom. We've talked about the source of wisdom and the means of wisdom, and now number three, the content of wisdom. Paul goes on to say that Christ became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Now, I've been talking about this wisdom all along, but I really haven't defined it very precisely. In general, the word wisdom has to do with a skill of one kind or another that enables us to carry out some task effectively or successfully. And if you were to read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, you would find about 20 different usages of the terminology for wisdom. And it is used in different ways to refer to different kinds of skills. But Paul's main focus is on what he calls the wisdom of God. God's skillful working out of what? I'd like you to look at chapter 2, verses 6 to 10. And it seems that, particularly in those verses, he comes the closest to giving us a definition of this wisdom from God. Starting in verse 6, "'Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. but we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagine, what God has prepared for those who love him. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. Now there's a lot in those verses, but the only point I want to make is that Paul seems to be using this expression, the wisdom of God, as a way to sum up everything that is involved in the wise plan of God for reconciling people to himself. It includes various dimensions. It includes, of course, the cross work of Christ, everything leading up to it and everything flowing from it, including his resurrection. And it includes, as well, all of the benefits that we receive as a result of the work of Christ. These are deep things. These are multifaceted things. These are things that are unimaginable and not understandable to us, apart from God actually revealing them to us. And so the wisdom of God is a way by which Paul is talking about the total plan of divine salvation. Now coming back to our verse, 1 Corinthians 1.30, what he's going to do is he's going to elaborate on a little bit of that plan. And I want to share with you the translation of this verse in the New International Version, because I think it gets at what Paul is intending. Here is what verse 30 says in the NIV. It is because of him, of God, that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, and then they put a big long dash and they say, that is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. In other words, those three terms, righteousness, holiness, and redemption, are subsets of the wisdom. They are filling out some of what is involved in this huge divine plan of salvation. I don't think they are the whole of wisdom. But they are key aspects of it when it comes to our personal salvation and our personal relationship with God. And you can picture it this way. It's like the wisdom of God is this massive treasure chest that is just overflowing with precious stones. And from this box, Paul chooses to pull out three of the shiniest and most valuable jewels and to put them on display and wow us with them." And so he pulls out something called righteousness. And he says, would you look at this? Isn't this glorious? Just stare at that jewel for a little while. And after you do that, he pulls out something called holiness or sanctification. And he says, now take a look at this one. This is amazing. You're not going to believe what this means. And this is just one part of all that God and his wisdom has done for you. And after that, he pulls out another jewel and he says, now this one's called redemption. Stare at that one for a little while. This is just incredible. Let it move your heart. Let it adjust your thinking. Let it cause you to turn away from all human wisdom that you're tempted to rely on as you try to figure stuff out for yourself. That's never gonna work. This is the treasure that you need. Behold the wisdom of God in his righteousness, his sanctification, and redemption. And so let's look at each of these jewels. What is helpful as we try to define these words and as we try to understand them is that in other places in the Corinthian epistles, Paul actually revisits these concepts and gives us a little bit of definition. The first term is the word righteousness, which is a legal term that refers to our standing before the court of God's justice. And it means that despite our many sins, Believers are declared to be in the right before the eyes of the law. And Paul elaborates on that in a passage like 2 Corinthians 5 and verse 21, where he says, for our sake, God made Christ to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Legally, the guilt of our sin is transferred to the sinless Christ, which means that we don't have to bear that guilt anymore. And we don't have to fear the punishment for all eternity that that sin deserves, because Jesus has fully met the penalty of that broken law on the cross. And at the same time, In addition to our sin being transferred to him, Paul says that his righteousness is transferred over to our account forever. The law books forever declaring that the demands of God have been perfectly kept by this divinely appointed representative. That is the jewel of righteousness. What about the second word? With the second word, we move from the legal realm to what we could call the religious realm. That is, the world of worship and the temple. I'm talking about the word sanctification. which has to do with being separated unto God. That means being pulled out from the mass of sinful and condemned humanity, and God treating us in a different way from how he treats other sinners. He designates us as his special possession. He distinguishes us as belonging in a unique way to him. You think about the tabernacle and the temple. And when we think about a word like holiness, we might think about God himself in the Holy of Holies. and that that word is attached to him, his character, and maybe to people who serve him there like the priest. But you want to remember that every last implement, every little thing that was used in that temple was actually declared to be holy as well. Every shovel, every dish, every fork, every spoon was holy. And that's not because it was necessarily made of any different or unique kind of material. It did not look any different from the kinds of implements that people would use in their homes and in their kitchens. but they were different from God's standpoint. You didn't treat them in any old way because they had been specifically consecrated to God's service in that place. They had been set apart for a unique Godward purpose. That's really the thrust of this idea of sanctification. Now when you and I hear the word sanctification, we think right away of that process throughout our lives whereby we are gradually growing in our obedience to the Lord so that in the details of our lives, our experience, our conduct, we are becoming more and more set apart to him. And that idea of progressive sanctification is certainly something that the New Testament teaches, and it is something that is guaranteed for us by the work of Christ. But that really is not how Paul uses the language of sanctification in 1 Corinthians. And we get a clue about what he's up to from the very beginning of this chapter, If you look at chapter 1 and verse 2, when he's introducing this letter, and when he is introducing himself and then the recipients of the letter, in verse 2 he says that he's writing to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus. And another way to put it, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. There is a sense in which in our daily growth over the course of life, we are becoming more holy. But there is another and more foundational sense that Paul is getting at here, that from God's standpoint, we already are holy. He already calls us saints. This is not something that you have to wait to the very end in order for you to take on this title. He refers to them as already sanctified, which is especially striking given what we know of all of the blunders and all of the poor choices, all of the moral failures, all of the disunity that was even right then tearing apart the church at Corinth. Without denying any of that, Paul's going to deal with that very directly. He actually starts out by referring to those very same people as saints. Now there's a jewel that ought to wow us, that that is how God would choose to describe us, despite our many failings. Paul is not making light of their sin, but he is talking about them from God's broader standpoint. Because they are in Christ, the Lord views them as fundamentally different from the rest of the world. They are already his special possession. And we're talking about these things as jewels from God's treasure box, but really what this term sanctification, one way to think of it is that it means we are actually viewed as jewels in God's treasure box. when He is looking for that that would delight Him, that would bring Him joy, that would cause Him to be happy. This is incredible. I don't understand this. I spend my life frustrated with myself. Very few times throughout any particular day am I actually happy with myself. God looks at us and He says, now that is my treasured possession. not in and of themselves, but because of what Christ has made of them, they bring me pleasure. They bring me joy. They are my jewels. That lofty status of being already set apart to God actually becomes one of the great motivations for pursuing holiness in our lives. Because I want to reflect in my practice more and more what I already am in my position. The jewel of sanctification. And that brings us to the third and final aspect of God's saving wisdom, and that is the word redemption. There's the third jewel. And here we have moved out of the temple and into the marketplace. It is not just where people buy food and clothes, but where in the ancient world they bought and sold slaves. This word redemption is not in general about purchasing. It is about delivering somebody from slavery by paying a required price. One of the great blessings of the wise plan of God is that he has purchased us out of the slave market of sin. Totally different way to conceive of our lives outside of Christ and how the world thinks about it. They view their lifestyle as being the freedom to do whatever they want. God says about their lifestyle that it's about being enslaved to their base passions and not having the ability to resist those passions. or to live for something that is more valuable than your immediate gratification. What they view as a cause for celebration and freedom, it's actually demeaning and degrading bondage. And with redemption, the Christian has been set free from that kind of worthless life. We are now free to live a truly worthwhile life. which is a thought that Paul returns to in this letter in chapter 6, where he urges the Corinthians to resist the immorality of their culture with this argument. 1 Corinthians 6, 19. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The point is, why would you want to go back to the garbage that you have been delivered from? You've been set free for something so much better. You have been set free for something as glorious as being a temple of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit. And that's the glory of redemption. Now I've said a lot the last several minutes. I don't want us to get lost in the weeds. And so let's review the big idea. The big idea is, you and I, we like to figure stuff out for ourselves, and we like to get the credit for it. But that is not how salvation works. Salvation is about God's own wise plan to reconcile us to himself through union with Christ, and that union, among other things, brings us righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. And the one question that is left is why would God set things up in that way? Why does his wise plan work in that way? Really, Paul had already given the answer in the negative in verse 29 when he said, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And now here at the end of our passage in verse 31, he says basically the same thing positively. when he ends the chapter this way, that God has done it this way, so that, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. That is the goal of God's wisdom. It is not just like a secondary thought, or just a sort of a consequence that happens to take place because of what he's done. He says, God has done it so that things would lead to boasting, not being in ourselves, but in him. And that line that he uses, he's adapting from a very famous statement in Jeremiah 9. And in that context, as the people of Judah were overrun by all kinds of social problems and all kinds of moral problems and all kinds of political problems, there were people trying to figure stuff out. What's really going on here? And how can these problems be solved? And in their ingenuity and their wisdom coming up with theories and approaches We're wise enough, we're strong enough, we have the manpower, we've got the wealth to figure this out, and God says, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the strong man glory in his strength, let not the wealthy man glory in his riches, but let him glory in this, that he knows and understands me, and that he is submitted to my definition of what life is and how it's supposed to work and how to solve these problems by being transformed by me so that your life more and more produces what I delight in, that is righteousness and loyalty and that sort of thing. Paul is now adapting that and applying it to the ultimate question of man's eternal salvation. The only way to have confidence about salvation is to rely on God's own plan and provision. In fact, he has arranged the whole thing so that he alone gets the credit for it. When we come to Christ, we confess, we didn't come up with this plan. We didn't get ourselves into Christ either. We didn't have even the good sense to understand and accept this plan. He first had to work in our hearts the faith so that we would embrace him as our mediator. And as a result, the Lord gets all the glory. That is the goal of this wisdom, the exclusive glorification of God as the only being who actually deserves glory, so that everyone who boasts, who has the sense of joyful confidence, like I've got it, I've arrived, this is something of substance and eternal value. The only people who do that are doing it by way of drawing attention to God as the one who worked all of this out. I pray the Lord has brought each of us to see that and to rely on His plan instead of on our own ideas and our own works. If you have not done that, there is no better time than today to abandon your personal righteousness and humbly accept the righteousness that the Lord Jesus Christ provides. And for those of us who are trusting in him, what a beautiful truth to celebrate and to rest in. as we come to the Lord's Supper, because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.