Charles H. Spurgeon - Sermão - Christ, The Power and the Wisdom of God

Man desires a god whom he can admire without having to surrender to him. He readily accepts a deity who confirms his expectations, respects his standards, and presents himself before the tribunal of his reason to prove that he deserves to be believed. What the unregenerate heart can scarcely endure is a God who speaks with absolute authority, who reveals the insufficiency of all human wisdom, and who saves in a way that leaves no glory to the creature. Resistance to the Gospel of Christ often arises precisely at this point. The sinner does not reject only what he does not understand; he frequently rejects what threatens to dethrone him.

So it was when Christ was proclaimed to the world. Some desired power, but they could not recognize power in a crucified Messiah. Others sought wisdom, but considered it absurd to find the highest wisdom of God in a cross. Some wanted a demonstration capable of satisfying their demands; others expected a truth that could be accommodated to the categories of their own intelligence.

God, however, did not give men what their pride demanded. He gave them His Son. And in the One who was despised, humiliated, and crucified was precisely what they sought without knowing where to find it: “Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1.24).

This apostolic declaration completely changes the way we understand Christianity. The Christian faith does not begin with an abstract principle, a moral code, or a philosophy designed gradually to perfect man. At its center stands a Person. God did not answer human ruin merely by granting higher information, offering better rules, or presenting a method by which the sinner might rebuild himself. He gave us Christ. Therefore, the more deeply we understand our condition before God, the more extraordinary this answer becomes. Our problem is not merely ignorance, so that an explanation would be sufficient; it is not merely weakness, so that some encouragement would solve it; it is not merely moral disorder, so that stricter discipline would restore us. We are alienated from God by sin, guilty before His justice, and spiritually incapable of producing the life we have lost. We needed something no creature could provide. We needed the power and wisdom of God.

The cross makes this truth even more astonishing because God chose to reveal His majesty precisely where the wisdom of this world expected to find defeat. Calvary appears, at first glance, to be the triumph of weakness. Christ is rejected, accused, wounded, and delivered over to death. His enemies remain standing while He is laid in the tomb. If the event were judged only by the appearance of that moment, scarcely anyone would call it power. Yet Scripture teaches us to look again. What appeared to be helplessness was the sovereign fulfillment of God’s redemptive purpose. The Lamb was not being overcome; He was willingly offering Himself. Justice was not triumphing over a defenseless innocent man; the Son of God was bearing the guilt of those He had come to redeem. Death was not bringing His mission to an end; it was being led to the place where it would lose its dominion. God chose to manifest His saving power through a way that humbles every human claim to power.

The same is true of His wisdom. No created intelligence could have conceived a reconciliation between guilty sinners and a perfectly holy God without diminishing the seriousness of sin or compromising the justice of God. If God simply ignored guilt, His holiness would be treated as something of little consequence. If He executed upon the guilty the full sentence they deserved, where would we find hope? The Gospel presents an answer that did not originate in human imagination. In the work of Christ, justice and mercy do not contend with one another. God does not cease to be just in order to justify the sinner. Sin is truly condemned, justice is fully satisfied, and yet the guilty person who is in Christ is received as righteous before God. Thus, He remains “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3.26).

This means that Christ must not merely occupy an important place within the Christian faith. He is its center, its substance, and its glory. Remove Christ, and the Gospel loses that which makes it the Gospel. Preserve religious vocabulary, moral principles, spiritual experiences, institutions, and traditions; if Christ is displaced from the center, a religious structure may remain, but not the apostolic message in its fullness. Paul did not desire to offer men a generically elevated spirituality. His proclamation was concentrated upon the One whom the world despised: “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1.23). And not because the cross was an especially attractive idea to his hearers, but because in it God had set before men the only hope capable of saving them.

There is also a necessary correction here for those who already profess the faith. It is possible to begin by trusting in Christ and, little by little, to seek elsewhere what can be found only in Him. When guilt weighs upon the conscience, we are tempted to examine our own worthiness instead of resting in His righteousness. When weakness constrains us, we search within ourselves for a strength we have never possessed. When providence becomes obscure, we desire to understand all the ways of God before trusting the God who ordains them. When we face temptations, sufferings, and doubts, we easily turn the Christian life into an attempt to produce, through our own effort, the sufficiency that the Gospel calls us to receive from Christ.

But grace does not merely lead us to Him at the beginning of the Christian life and then leave us to proceed with our own resources. The One who saves is also the One who sustains. The One who justifies is the One who intercedes. The One who breaks the chains of sin is the One who strengthens the believer in his pilgrimage. The Christ whom we need when we discover our guilt is the same Christ whom we will need when we pass through our afflictions and, finally, when we stand before death. The Christian life does not consist in becoming progressively less dependent upon the Savior, but in understanding with ever greater depth how absolute our dependence upon Him has always been.

This dependence does not diminish man; it places him in his proper position before God. The Gospel destroys our boasting precisely in order to establish our security upon a firmer foundation. If salvation depended, even in its smallest part, upon some autonomous strength existing within us, there would always be reason for fear, because whatever arises from our strength also shares in our instability. But if our hope rests in Christ, its firmness is measured not by the constancy of our emotions, but by the perfection of the Christ in whom we trust. Therefore, faith can pass through seasons in which feelings waver without the foundation of salvation wavering with them. The believer is not secure because he can hold Christ with hands that are always strong, but because he belongs to the One whose hand loses none of those whom the Father has entrusted to Him: “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10.28).

Our understanding of reality also finds its true center in Christ. Sin has not only darkened human affections; it has affected the way we judge ourselves, the world, and God. We may accumulate knowledge and still remain ignorant of why we exist. We may understand many mechanisms of creation without knowing the Creator. We may develop sophisticated systems of thought and still go astray precisely in the questions that reach the heart of existence: Who is God? Who is man? What happened to us? How can the guilty be reconciled to their Creator? What were we made for? What lies beyond death? Christ does not make all human inquiry unnecessary, but He places knowledge beneath the light that restores its proper proportion and purpose. “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things” (Romans 11.36).

For this reason, the wisdom of God must not be confused with mere intellectual ability. In the Scriptures, truly knowing involves learning to walk before God. A person may master theological vocabulary and remain spiritually foolish. He may defend correct doctrines while his life contradicts what his lips confess. Truth received merely as information has not yet reached all the regions it intends to govern. When Christ is recognized as the wisdom of God, He does not merely reorder our ideas; He begins to order our affections, choices, priorities, and hopes. The light that illuminates the mind must also reach the feet. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119.105).

Perhaps this is precisely why the sufficiency of Christ never becomes an elementary doctrine that the Christian outgrows. The further we advance, the more we discover its dimensions. The new convert finds forgiveness in Christ; the mature believer discovers that this same Savior is his righteousness, strength, wisdom, consolation, and hope. The afflicted find in Christ a companionship that suffering cannot take away. The tempted find a High Priest who knows their weaknesses. The guilty find blood sufficient to cleanse their conscience. The weary find grace to continue. And the one who approaches the final frontier discovers that Christ has already passed through death and emerged victorious from it. The sufficiency of the Savior does not diminish as our needs increase. Our needs merely reveal new reasons to confess it.

It is before this greatness that 1 Corinthians 1.24 calls us to remain. Not before a theory about Christ, but before Christ Himself. The power that created all things is not insufficient to save what sin has ruined. The wisdom that ordained the eternal purpose of God will not be perplexed by the complexities of our existence. The One who conquered death will not abandon His people when they approach the grave. And the One in whom are “hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2.3) does not need to receive authorization from human wisdom in order to be worthy of trust.

The words that follow, therefore, lead us to a truth before which pride must fall silent and faith may rest. Man seeks power where God revealed what appeared to the world as weakness; he seeks wisdom where God exposed the insufficiency of autonomous reason; he searches within himself for resources that can be found only in the Son. The Gospel calls us in another direction. Not to contemplate our own strength more intently, but to lift our eyes. Not to find within ourselves the answer to our ruin, but to receive it from God. Not to add something to the sufficiency of the Redeemer, but to discover that, from the beginning, everything we needed was in Christ Jesus.

And when this truth ceases to be merely a doctrinal formulation and reaches the conscience, we begin to understand why the Church can endure persecution, why sinners can be transformed, why saints can remain steadfast in the midst of affliction, and why men and women can face even death sustained by a hope that did not originate within themselves. At the center of it all is not the strength of the Christian, the genius of the preacher, the ability of the Church, or the excellence of the creature. There is Christ. Christ crucified. Christ risen. Christ reigning. Christ sufficient.

For those who are called, He remains forever “Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1.24).

Divino Cordeiro