How We Find God

There was a man who you may have heard of by the name of Martin Luther, a great reformer in the church five hundred years ago, who once wrote that there was a great contrast in two different types of theologies of God. There is a theology or an understanding of glory, and then there is a theology of the cross. The word theology, if you don't know, means the study of God, the study of God. And so he is saying that you can have an understanding of God around either the idea of glory or of the cross.

And often, they are not really interchangeable, at least not in our human understandings of those things. Some people, he said, have a theology of glory of God, for the God that they believe in or imagine. When they think of this particular God, they think that they need to climb sacred mountains to get closer to Him, because God is so far removed from us. They imagine when they meet this God, encountering a big and powerful God, marvelling at how impressive this God is. Someone who has a theology of glory about God might take a hike through nature and think, wow, this is all very big.

Someone powerful must have created all of this. He must be very big, and I am very small. He is much more powerful than I, and therefore, I must obey him. He is kind of intimidating, therefore, and fearful, and therefore, they conclude, I must respect him. This is people that have a theology of glory concerning God.

But then the God who is revealed in the Bible is a God who refuses to be confined to that. Sure, His fingerprints are all throughout nature. Indeed, power and His glory is seen throughout the entire universe. He is not devoid of glory. But that is not how this God of the Bible reveals Himself to mankind.

In fact, someone may go through their whole life looking at the night sky, at the glory of the night sky, and never stop to think that the God of the Bible created that. It is insufficient, even that glory, to reveal who God is. The Bible holds out a surprising way in which God may be found by us. It is not a theology of glory, a theology rather of the cross, specifically the cross that Jesus died on.

And it is surprising, I say, because if you know the story of Jesus, if you know what leads up to the cross, what flows out of the cross, you see a God who has intentionally hidden His glory from being discovered, so that He might end up on that cross. He instead reveals Himself in ways that we do not expect. God reveals Himself in weakness by being able to die. He reveals Himself in suffering. He reveals Himself in humiliation, the God of glory.

The Bible makes this startling statement that it is at the cross where God has most visibly, most clearly revealed Himself to us, through rejection, and ultimately, through death. And you can go back even to the Old Testament, where some people claim there is a different God, there is a God of glory, God of holiness, a God of perfection, that people may not approach, sort of unprepared. And yet, even in the Old Testament, we find a God who takes a ragtag bunch of people called Israel. He calls them the least of all the nations of the earth, a nation of slaves in Egypt.

And He says, my glory will be shown through them. My glory will rest with them. He is going to set up the salvation of all mankind through this nation. And then we come to the New Testament, and God chooses disciples that are not the boldest or the brightest. They are not scholars, they are not philosophers, they are fishermen and tax collectors.

They deny Jesus, they betray Jesus, they run away from Jesus. God, against all the expectations we might have, reveals His glory. But it is not through that creative power, and it is not through intellectual people that find out a mystery. God reveals His glory through dying on behalf of people. In other words, if you have come here this morning and you would like to see God, you can.

You will see Him hanging on a cross. And that is the passage that we are going to look at. That is exactly what it says. We are going to turn to First Corinthians chapter one, and we are going to read from verse 18. First Corinthians chapter one, verse 18.

This is the apostle Paul writing to the church in a place called Corinth, which was in Greece. For the word of the cross, the teaching of the cross, Paul says, is folly to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, Paul quotes scripture here: 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. In fact, 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. 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.

And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us the wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. So far our reading. This morning we are going to unpack this passage, and we are going to go home hopefully with this one take-home message: that God has revealed Himself most clearly in the apparent foolishness of the cross. God has revealed Himself most clearly in the apparent ridiculousness of the cross.

If you have ever thought Christians are crazy, if you, as a Christian, have ever wondered why it is so hard for people to understand your faith, the Bible gives the answer here. We seem crazy. It seems like foolishness to believe what we believe. A God who has died, and through death has won a victory. In our passage, Paul identifies two people, two types of people in the world.

Paul is writing to a Greek city called Corinth in his letter to the Corinthians. And he says to them that two basic types of people exist. And Paul says, for both of these types of people, the cross is foolishness. For some, it is folly. For some, it is ridiculous, and for others, it is powerless. Verse 18 he says, for 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.

In these few verses, Paul mentions five times a word which is Greek for foolishness, a Greek word for foolishness, because he is describing the unexpectedness of the gospel. The Greek word is moriah. The adjective is moros, which is where we get our English word for, guess what it is, moron. Moron.

Christians are morons. It carries the meaning of something that is ridiculous, something that is stupid or ignorant. Now, let us be clear. For a second, how many times we have heard people say this: Christians are stupid. Christians are ridiculous. How many times have we heard it?

How many times perhaps have we said it? Maybe one time before we became Christians, we also said that. Paul says, yep. Christians hold on to something that is moronic in the eyes of the world: a God who dies on a cross.

But then he says, those who have experienced the liberating power of that cross, it is the power of God personified. Now why does Paul divide the world into these two groups of people, the Greeks and the Jews? Why will some reject the cross even while others stake their lives on it? Well, we have to ask this question: What is the cause of repulsion to the gospel message?

And Paul answers that in verses 22 to 25, where he begins explaining what the root cause of this rejection is. He says in verse 21, ironically, that in God's wisdom, God does not allow Himself to be bound by wisdom, or at least human wisdom. He does not simply allow Himself to be found by the smartest of men and women in the world. That if they just think hard enough, if they just research hard enough, if they just look deeply enough into created order, they will find Him. He does not give Himself to the philosophers amongst us.

Instead, verse 21 says, it pleased God through the folly, the foolishness of what we preach, what we say, to save those who believe that message. What is that message that Paul preaches? Well, Paul says to the Corinthian church right after this paragraph, this passage that we read in chapter two, verse one. This is what he says. Have a look. When I came to you, Corinthians, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or with great wisdom.

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and what? Him crucified. It is not the philosophers who will know God. It was God who came to everyday people through the man Jesus Christ and the cross. That is how God has shown Himself to mankind.

But the question still is, what keeps people from accepting this statement, this revelation? What will stop someone from believing that God could simply pop into space and time? Ultimately, it is the one and only thing that keeps anyone out of heaven, and it is pride. It is not intelligence. It is not scientific reasoning.

It is not conflicting morality. It is not the advance of time and modernity. What keeps people from receiving the revelation of God is pride. And what it is is it is exemplified by these two camps here: wisdom and strength, wisdom and power. Paul holds out these two examples and says, these two examples epitomise two groups of people.

These Jews and these Greeks. And generalising it, he says, for the Jews, they look to God's power. They look to the miracles that God can perform. Verse 22 says, they demand signs. Show us God, they said, and we will believe.

You have probably heard of people say this as well. I had a conversation some years ago with someone I worked with. His name was Brad, who was an engineer in the engineering workshop in a factory that I used to do some labouring in. And one time we started talking about God, and I explained to him the message of Jesus Christ. And he said to me, KJ, I am a visual person.

I am a scientific person. I have to see things to believe it. God, in other words, he says, will have to come and stand right next to me. He said this: God will have to stand right next to me before I will truly believe that He is real. In other words, Brad says, I want my own private show of power before I believe.

To experience the reality of God, God needs to break through the fabric of time and space, stepping through the veil of the supernatural into the natural. And Brad's wish, Brad's view is not unusual. This is exactly what the people in Paul's time were saying. It was the Jewish people that were predominantly asking for this. Show us the strength of God.

Show us the reality of God doing something so supernatural that it cannot be anything but God, and we will believe it. The problem is, of course, and we see it in the gospel accounts of Jesus, it is never enough. It is never enough. Even when Jesus was walking amongst the Jewish people at the time, some of them refused to give up that resistance in their proud hearts, and they demanded even more signs. At one time, remarkably, Jesus had just fed five thousand people with a handful of loaves and a couple of fish.

And the next day, there is a bigger crowd wanting to see what Jesus' next sideshow alley trick will be. Jesus says to them this in the Gospel of John: Truly I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of bread. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. In other words, if you are holding on to God and hoping that he will convince you through powerful external signs or miracles, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. God does not bring us to a saving knowledge through those things.

The food, Jesus says, that endures is only found in the Son of Man. Now, that is something we can say to our non-Christian friends. That is an indictment against them, but boy oh boy, it is in the church as well. We need miracle after miracle, week in week out, to prove that God is real, to prove that this gospel message is true. That is not how God reveals Himself to mankind.

But then on the other hand, Paul says, there are the Greeks who are saying, show us God's inscrutable wisdom. Show us how all of this makes sense. Give us the reasoning, give us the logic, the science before we are ready to believe. And I have another friend who falls into that category, Harry. Harry is a lecturer at university, a smart man.

He lectures in education. He is a teacher of teachers, and he specialises in maths. He loves maths. He said to me, the Christian message sounds too bizarre. It offends my sensibilities. It offends my modernity.

The gospel does not make sense to me because it does not fit, not in his words, the wisdom of this age, how things should work according to what everyone around us is saying. And this is exactly the same position of the Greeks in Paul's time. Show us how this message is wise, and we will believe it. But God does not care about revealing Himself through the wisdom of our age either.

I mean, once you get it, you can see incredible wisdom. But God does not need to convince us of His wisdom for us to know Him. There was a time again in the gospel accounts in John chapter 12, when it says that some Greeks came up to Jesus at one point and said to one of Jesus' disciples, Philip, we want to see Jesus. Meaning, we want to have a scholarly conversation with him. We want to pick his brain.

And Jesus simply tells Philip to go and tell them, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it. Whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Now imagine the question: we want to see Jesus. And Philip comes back and he says this.

What will you think? You will think that is a crazy person talking. That makes no sense to the simple request: we want to see Jesus. This man is wise? The Greeks wanted to hear intellectual quips.

Jesus gives them something that sounds so rambling about a kernel of wheat dying in order to produce more wheat, that they leave thinking Jesus is a moron. But they do not know, do they, what Jesus is predicting. He is the kernel that must die. He must die for more to come.

But those who love their life, Jesus warns, those who hold on to their lives and refuse to give it up to take the life that Jesus offers them, they will lose it. So what God wants us to understand this morning is that the barrier to knowing Him is not really about intelligence or gullibility. It is not about personal miracles or a private spiritual moment of revelation. The barrier to belief is our pride. To those who think God should satisfy wisdom, to those the gospel is foolishness. To those who expect a powerful moment, to those the gospel is powerless, a God who dies.

The Bible says, however, that the message of the cross frustrates both the wise and the strong. It humbles every bit of pride out of us. And then we come to our third and our final point. The God of an upside-down kingdom is ruled by an unexpected king. With clever wordplay, Paul begins to paint the picture of how God is actually showing Himself to us.

And he says that it is altogether confusing, and yet at the same time absolutely awesome. He sums it up in verses 27 to 29, and I summarise it. He says, God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world, and he does what no preacher should do, he humiliates his audience and says, you are the lowly things.

You are the things that are of no value. He chose the lowly things of the world, the despised things he calls them, the things that are not to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast in themselves but God alone. I have a third friend. I have got three friends. I know you do not believe me.

And I have shared the gospel with them also for many years. She is also quite brilliant, and I was surprised one day when she told me that she had become a Christian. Why was I surprised? Well, she had travelled the whole world, pursued all sorts of wonderful, esoteric experiences, cared passionately for people, strived to make the world a better place. And every now and then, when we would speak, I encouraged her to explore God just a little bit more.

She felt, however, that she could not overcome some of her moral and intellectual objections to God, specifically to Christianity. Yet the amazing thing is, she could not shake the feeling of what she could only describe as God's pursuing of her. She could not escape the feeling that He was always around. Thoughts and discussions about God would bug her all the time. And yet, the more she picked up books to try and explain it all away, the more conflicted she felt inside.

She said she did not find God appealing at all at first. He seemed too harsh, too strict, too one-sided, too loving for some and not loving enough for others. Exhausted from this struggle, she convinced herself that Christianity was a sham. It was made up by people, mostly men, who wanted to create an organisation called the church to have power over them. And yet, almost immediately after concluding this in her mind, there would be the overwhelming knowledge that God was not simply going to disappear with that conclusion.

Like a shadow, He kept following her thoughts until she realised one day that she was not the one walking down intellectual and philosophical roads towards God. God was the one who had been pursuing her all along. Eventually, this friend of mine said to me that she gave in and received Jesus as her saviour, who died on a ridiculous cross and rose from the dead miraculously to give her forgiveness and life. To her amazement, she had not found God in the hallowed halls of philosophy, the esoteric experiences of all that the world can give, in all its sensualities. She did not find Him in human ethics, self-help books.

When she became really honest about it, she discovered that she had encountered Christ through her scars and in her insecurities. It was in the areas of pain and frustration, of the things that she had not figured out, the things that she could not fix. That is where Christ found her. And in this way, this is the way that all of us who are Christians have ultimately become Christians, through the unexpectedness of the cross. The name Christian simply means little Christ, little follower of Jesus.

And this is what Jesus told those Greeks when they asked to see Him. Jesus said, if anyone wants to follow me, they must die to self. They must take up their cross, and they must follow me. Jesus calls us to the cross because He knows that at the cross, we find God. But here is the most important factor.

It is not the cross that in some way we break through to get to God. It is at the cross that Jesus broke into the world to get to us. The shocking yet awesome news of the cross shows a God who gives instead of demands. A God who dies rather than kills. A God who triumphs through defeat.

A God who saves life through losing His own. And for a culture of glory like ours, this is so hard to accept. Give us a theology of glory any day. Make me work hard for this. Watch any movie today and you will see this God.

They talk about His largeness, they talk about His power, His wisdom, His perfection. And when we are told that when we want to approach this God, we are told that we must approach Him with our best foot forward. But God beckons to us from brokenness. God breaks through the back door of our hearts, but also the back door of history. He comes in two thousand years ago into a place called Judea, which is the backwater of the Roman Empire.

God arrives in Logan City. I can say that because I am from Logan City. And He arrives to people that we consider unmodern, uncivilised, with none of the sensibilities that we have. How can we trust what they saw two thousand years ago, we say. How can we believe people, before they had cars, before they had iPhones, before they had modern medicine, how can we believe that they really saw what they claim they saw?

But God loves to frustrate the wise. I mean, we know Jesus could have come now, and in five hundred years, people would have said the same thing. God comes in human history when He wants, and He dies on a dusty wooden cross on a lonely hill. But it is this God who invites you and me to encounter Him even in our doubts. He understands our suffering because He suffered.

God is waiting for us in that place already. We think things are hard, we think that we must get out of difficulty in order to see God clearer, yet God has already suffered before we have even arrived there. And this is why Paul says in verse 24, to those who are called, both the Jews and the Greeks, which is all the bases covered, to the Jew and to the Greek, Christ is the power of God, and He is the wisdom of God. For those who have come truly to believe that God showed up at the cross, this is what we believe: that at the cross, the wrath of God was displayed.

The wrath of God is the punishment for our sin. But it was no mere physical death that Jesus experienced. It was the eternal punishment that He suffered in mere seconds, minutes and hours in our place. It was so severe, the Bible says, the accounts of that moment say that the earth went dark, the sky was dark as Jesus hung on that cross. Humanity, all of humanity, in those hours, their sin was paid for. The cross seems like foolishness, and yet, in hindsight, we realise that it could not have worked in any other way.

Who can forgive sin? Only the one who has been sinned against. Who can show complete and utter mercy? Only the one who has created love. Who can re-establish justice in all the earth?

Only the one who is supremely just. Who is the one that can conquer eternal death? Only someone who has eternal life. The story could not have ended in any other way. The death and the resurrection of Jesus was indeed the power and the wisdom of God.

So in closing, for any friends of ours who might be listening this morning, who may still find a lot of this perplexing, this might sound like foolishness, at least for now. But I want to encourage you: start praying. Just speak to the God who is out there. You have nothing to lose.

You have everything to gain. And ask this God to give you understanding, to help you to see the wisdom and the power of the cross. If you have ever thought that the gospel needs to be more civilised, that it needs to be less bloody and less gory, that the gospel must be more culturally sensitive to our day and age, have you ever thought our church needs to be cooler? Our church needs to be more impressive? We need a pastor that looks and sounds the part.

If you have ever thought, I need more wisdom, I need better polished arguments in sharing the gospel, please remember this: the gospel will always be foolishness to those who do not believe. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we pretty it up. But on the other hand, the gospel will always be the power that saves those who God calls. It will always be power.

Our theology has to be shaped by the cross. Our theology must rest there, that that is where God is revealed. So that God may gain the glory, and we may boast in Him. Let us pray. Father, we thank you for this incredible summary again found in your word.

Our Lord, when we say this gospel is so difficult, and at times we struggle to summarise it, Lord, we find these incredible moments of clarity where it makes sense. God, give us today, in this moment, that clarity that penetrates all our defences, all our doubts. Our God, in this sacred holy moment, Lord, help us who may not yet know you, may have been taking our time. And Lord, that we may give our lives to you. God, today we say, I will lose my life to receive the life that you offer me.

Father, for those of us who have friends and family that do not know you, friends and family who have wandered far away, and we have wondered, and we have been anxious about how we can ever convince them, how we could ever possibly give a package, give a presentation that they will find appealing, not offensive, not foolish. Oh God, give us the peace, give us the assurance, and for those you call, for those that mysteriously, Lord, we do not know, who will mysteriously understand, for those, oh God, in that moment, we will have the privilege of seeing the power and the wisdom of God into their hearts and their minds. We thank you, God, that you are a merciful God, otherwise, you would not have done any of this. And so Lord, on their behalf, we appeal on your mercy that you will, in your kindness and grace, extend your forgiveness, your revelation in Jesus Christ.

Lord, help us to be a church that is grounded on the theology of the cross, the theology that keeps us so humble, where we will try and do things in our own strength even as we try and hold out that gospel. We will try to run programmes even around the gospel. We will try and do things even around the gospel in pride and not in humility. Lord, forgive us. It does not reflect the great and glorious news we claim to believe.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that to those who confess their sin, you are faithful and just. You are quick to forgive. You are abounding in love. And today, you receive us anew, white as snow, through the work of Jesus Christ on that cross and the life-giving power of His resurrection three days later.

We thank you for that. We celebrate that again today. We honour you and glorify you. In Jesus' name. Amen.