Jesus Christ And Him Crucified

“And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” —1 Corinthians 2:1–8

In the book of Acts, we have the account of Paul’s entry into Corinth where after a year and a half of earnest work he left a church that came behind, we are told, in no gift. Going into that brilliant but Godless city where they gloried in human ability and in human attainment, where they made much of the various arts and where they deified human lust and knew nothing of the true God, the apostle’s soul was deeply stirred. He had been but a few days before in Athens and there, we read, had gone by invitation to the place where the philosophers, the intelligentsia, gathered to hear and to tell some new thing, and where at their own request he undertook to explain the message of the Gospel. However, they did not permit him to come to the crucial point for they interrupted him as soon as he spoke of a Saviour who died and was raised again, and refused to listen further. Probably there never was a more eloquent sermon preached than that which the apostle delivered that day on Mars Hill and yet the results were somewhat meager. There were a few who clave to him but the great majority turned away, rejecting him and his proclamation.

From Athens he went to Corinth. I do not believe there is any reason to think that he felt he had made a mistake in preaching as he did at Athens. His rule was this, “I am made all things to all men if by any means I might save some.” There he realized that he was addressing men of the highest culture and had to present the message in a way that he hoped would appeal to them; but upon going to Corinth he put aside everything, as far as he possibly could, that was merely human and went in absolute dependence upon the Spirit of God with one great message, “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

He says, “And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.” He realized it was quite possible by the flowers of rhetoric to cover up, to obscure the shame of the cross, and so he did not permit himself any flights of fancy or of the imagination in presenting the glad tidings, but seriously, earnestly, solemnly as became a man who stood between the living and the dead, he preached the message of the cross in all simplicity, for he determined, he said, “not to know any thing among them, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” And that should still be the method of the servant of God; for after all, there is no other message that will avail for the salvation of sinners or the edification of God’s beloved people. Everything centers in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” That is the person and the work. Always Christ personal was presented in apostolic preaching. Men were not asked to believe a creed, they were not asked to subscribe to a system of doctrine but they were asked to receive a Person and that Person, the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think sometimes we make a mistake in supposing that just pinning our faith to a verse of Scripture is salvation. I wonder whether many have not been deceived in that way. I hear people speak of knowing they are saved and when asked why, they reply, “Because I believe in John 3:16 or John 5:24,” and you look for some evidence of a new life in them and do not find it. They never appear at a prayer meeting but if there is a social affair or something like that, they are present. Apparently they have no real interest in the study of the Word of God; you never see them at a Bible lecture. They have time for anything that ministers to the flesh but very little time for spiritual food and it makes one tremble for them. I cannot think of anything more dreadful than to have gone through life thinking that one was really saved and then at least to be suddenly ushered into eternity and wake up forever lost. You see, believing a text does not save anybody. Believing in Christ saves all who trust Him. I believed every text in the Bible before I was converted. I never thought of doubting one of them until after I was converted. That may seem like a strange thing to say but as a lad I believed all that I was told, that the Bible was the Word of the living God. I accepted it all. Some years after I was converted I became perplexed over certain things and began to doubt and it led me to a deeper investigation and then my faith was confirmed. But in all those years that I believed everything in the Bible I was not saved. I had never been regenerated, I had never received a new nature, I was lost and if I had died in my sins, I could have quoted hundreds of Bible texts, I could have repeated chapter after chapter of Holy Scripture in the flames of hell while bewailing the fact that I had never been acquainted with the Person that these passages of Scripture glorified. Do not make any mistake here for it is one that can never be remedied if you go into eternity resting on a false hope. Examine your foundation, ask yourselves the question: “Is Christ Himself precious to me? If He is, why do I not enjoy His Word more, why do I not love to spend more time with Him in prayer, why is there so much frivolity and levity and carelessness in my life? Why do I do so many things that I know the Lord Jesus would never do and cannot approve in me if I really love Him?” He has said, “If a man love me, he will keep my words” (John 14:23). “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

What is the use of professing to be a Christian if there is no evidence of it in the life? What is the use of speaking of the new birth, of talking about having eternal life if I live the same kind of a life that tens of thousands of respectable Christless men and women live all around me? What is the difference between my life and theirs? If this change has ever taken place in me, when did it take place, when did I open my heart’s door to Christ and receive Him? If I have received Him, then he has come to dwell in me and that changes everything for me. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

Now observe, it is “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Some say, “We preach Christ” but the Christ who lived on Earth for those thirty-three wonderful years could never save one poor sinner apart from His death. Jesus Christ was crucified? Why? The crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ throws into relief several tremendous facts. First of all, it emphasizes the wickedness, the corruption, the vileness of the human heart. Who was Jesus Christ? He was God manifest in the flesh. He was here in the world His hands had made and His own creatures cried, “Away with him, away with him; crucify him!” Could you get any worse commentary on the iniquity of the human heart than that? Man, as far as he was capable, was guilty of the awful crime of deicide, he would murder God, drive Him out of His own universe. “The fool hath said in his heart, no God” (Psalm 14:1). It is not exactly as in our Authorized Version, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Many a man admits there is a God who says, “No God,” and that is what that verse really tells us in the Hebrew. “The fool hath said in his heart, no God.” “No God for me.” He has said, “I do not want God to come into my life, I do not want to be troubled about God, I want to take my own way, to do my own will.” And because men were set on that, they nailed the Christ of God to a cross. If there is anything that tells out what man is, this does.

Stand in faith by that cross, see the blessed Saviour suffering, dying there, see the nails upon which He hangs and the blood dripping from those awful wounds, see the thorns crushed upon His sacred brow and the blood enwrapping His naked body as with a crimson shroud. That is what sin has done, the sin that is in your heart and in mine. That tells out the story of the wickedness, the deceitfulness of our hearts. The men who thronged about that cross and cried out in derision, “Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40), were no different from ourselves, their hearts were like our hearts. They were representative men. We may see ourselves there. The cross brought out, declared all the malignity that was in the heart of man but it also told out the infinite love that was in the heart of God. One might well have understood it if God looking down upon that scene had let loose the thunders of His wrath and the lightnings of His judgment and had destroyed that throng in a moment, if He had said, as He did so long ago, “My Spirit shall not always strive with man. . .I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:3, 7). But no, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” When man cast Him out and nailed Him to a tree, God in infinite love for sinners made His soul an offering for sin. It was as though He said, “That cross, the symbol of shame and agony, shall become the great altar upon which will be offered the one supreme Sacrifice which atones for the sin of the world. “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” What wonderful evidence of God’s love for sinners is seen in that cross.

In the light of that cross, how can men still go on doing the things, living in the sins that led to it? The cross of Christ is that which casts light on everything that men glory in in this world and stains all its glory so that the apostle could say elsewhere, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14). Did you ever think of it in this way? You profess to be a Christian, you say that you owe everything for eternity to the One that the world rejected. What effect does that have upon your life? Do you still have fellowship with that world that cast Him out? Do you still participate in the things that characterize that world?

A Christian walked down the street one day with the intention to go to the theater. Something was on that he thought he would be interested in. He came to the very entrance, even stepped up and bought his ticket and the next moment there came flashing into his mind, “If I go in there, I crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.” He tore the ticket up and ran from the place thankful to be delivered. If you as a Christian go back into the things of the world from which the death of Christ has separated you, you are denying the cross of Christ. That is what it means. If we understood this, what a separated people we would be, how it would do away with all this dilly-dallying with the world and its folly. How we would realize that we owe too much to the One that the world rejected to go on with that system which has thus treated the eternal Lover of our souls. “Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

“I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.” I think every servant of Christ knows a little of that. How often as one things of facing an audience, the heart fails and the spirit cries out, “O Lord, what can I do, what can I say? Suppose I should make a mistake, suppose I should give the wrong message, how dire the effect might be on some. I can never undo it for eternity!” I can see Paul bowing before God every time he contemplated going out to preach the Word and crying out, “O Lord, keep me from mistakes, let me have just the right word, give me to be Thy messenger, save me from trying to attract attention to myself, save me from glorifying man.”

“My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” Paul recognized the fact that there is such a thing as meeting man on the soul plane instead of the spiritual. A man may preach the Gospel and yet do it “soulishly,” on the soul plane, depending upon that which simply appeals to the human mind, and gathering perhaps that, at the psychological moment he had gotten a grip on the audience by a tender story, ask for decisions. And when the people respond, he says, “There now, what a lot of people have come to Christ,” and perhaps not one in the crowd has had the conscience reached or has had to do with God about his sins. Paul was afraid of that. He said, “I do not want to preach things in such a way that my human effort will persuade them. I am depending upon the Holy Spirit of God and divine power to do the work.”

“That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” Because, you see, if I make a profession of salvation on the strength of a discourse that has stirred my emotions and made me feel that I ought to do something about it, and also because of my admiration for the preacher, very well, when the preacher is gone and my emotions are no longer stirred, I will find myself wondering whether I am converted or not, whether there is any reality in this thing or not.  I felt so differently under the spell of that emotion, now I do not feel that way at all. If the Holy Spirit of God has presented Christ to me and I have received Him, never mind about my feelings, I am saved and saved for eternity. My faith stands, “not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” I rest upon His sure testimony.

We do not mean by this, the apostle says, that we have nothing but the simplicity of the Gospel message to give to men but we seek also to lead believers into the deep things of God. “We speak wisdom among them that are perfect.” What does that mean? Did you ever see a perfect Christian? Surely not in the absolute sense, but it means perfect in the sense of well developed. When he talked to the unsaved or to young believers, he had one message and when he talked to mature saints, he sought to lead them on into the deeper things of God. He does that in this epistle and elsewhere.

“We speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world.” Christianity is a divine revelation, not a human theory. “Not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to naught: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery”—something that is hidden from the Christless, that which the Spirit of God reveals to believers—“even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” There are rich treasures of wisdom, wonderful truths to make known; for in Christ are “hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” And as we go on with Him, we enter into a depth of understanding that the world knows nothing about.

“Which none of the princess of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” If they had only known that the man who stood in Pilate’s judgment hall that day so meek, so lowly, answering never a word as he was vehemently accused, was God manifest in the flesh, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. And so God takes mankind up on the ground of ignorance and says, “I am going to excuse your ignorance but there is one thing I will never excuse. After I enlighten you and present My Son to you, if you do not receive Him, I will never excuse that.” Men are excused because the light has not come but not excused when the light has come. “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19 ). What a wonderful thing it is to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified.