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1 Corinthians 1:18–24
Names are important — especially for churches. Proverbs 22:1 reminds us that “a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.” And in today’s world, that truth has never been more relevant. Browse the church directories of any city and you will find names like Point Church, Life Church, Journey Church, Bridge Church, Mosaic Church, and Generation Church. What strikes you immediately about that list is how ambiguous every one of those names is. Not a single one points to the central message the local church was commissioned to proclaim.
That is why the name Calvary matters. The moment someone hears “Calvary Baptist Church,” they are immediately drawn to the cross of Christ — because it was at Mount Calvary that Christ died. The name is not a branding decision. It is a theological declaration. And that declaration stands at the heart of everything we are about to consider.
The Apostle Paul was crystal clear about the mission God had given him: “For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect” (1 Corinthians 1:17). To do anything less than preach the cross, Paul says, makes it of “none effect.” So what happens when the message of the cross collides with the wisdom of this world? That is exactly what the Holy Spirit drives home beginning in verse 18 — and the collision is not a gentle one.
The Cross Is Controversial
The world has a word for the message of the cross. That word is foolishness.
“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
The word “foolishness” here does not simply mean disagreement. It carries the idea of a wildly mistaken or unfounded opinion — something ridiculous. And notice carefully who Paul says holds this view: “them that perish.” This is the same phrase Christ used when He spoke to Nicodemus: “that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Scripture is plain that every person born into this world is born already condemned, already perishing. And it is precisely this person — the one already under spiritual condemnation — who looks at the preaching of the cross and calls it a wild, unfounded idea.
This is stunning when you stop to think about it. With all of our modern-day thinking and so-called higher learning, the preaching of the cross still stands as something stupid or silly to the world at large. Our public colleges and universities are filled with the preaching of humanism and not holiness. They celebrate man’s clever thinking while simultaneously denying Calvary. Society faces horrific illness on every side, and yet it does not turn to spiritual truth. Instead, it reaches for its own science, technology, and engineering. We have sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers by the thousands. Man prides himself on his education, his business equity, and his political ingenuity — and yet it never once occurs to him that God has the answer.
But God does have the answer. And His answer is the cross.
It is the cross that turns a drunk into a devoted father. It is the cross that turns the crook into a committed truth-teller. It is the cross that makes the weak become strong. We who have been delivered and rescued from the awful fate and bondage of sin — we know this to be not foolishness, but fact. We now live under what Paul calls “the power of God.” That word power carries the idea of a controlling influence — something so powerful it shapes every word we speak and every action we take. We are not simply people who changed our minds about religion. We are people who were rescued.
The Cross Challenges Everything Man Builds
The controversy does not stop at personal opinion. The message of the cross actively challenges the entire structure of human wisdom — and God warned us this was coming long before Paul wrote a single word to the Corinthians.
In 1 Corinthians 1:19, Paul quotes directly from Isaiah 29:14: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” The original context of that Isaiah passage is deeply instructive. The mighty Assyrian empire was rolling across Asia, conquering nation after nation, drawing closer and closer to the borders of Judah. God, through the prophet Isaiah, urged His people to trust in Him. But the king’s counselors — the wise men of the day — advised him to make an alliance with Egypt instead. Trust the nations, not God. The king listened to the counsel of men. The result? The Assyrian army rolled straight over Egypt, proving it to be, in Scripture’s own words, a “broken reed.” Most of Judah suffered. Jerusalem was besieged. God turned the wisdom of the wise men into the very foolishness they thought they were avoiding.
The application is pointed and timely. Man’s wisdom collapses when men find themselves at the end of themselves. It is only when we exhaust our own ideas, our own efforts, and our own self-will that we begin to see our folly and futility. And it is only then that we look up — and see the wonderful message of the cross and the saving power of God.
The Holy Spirit drives this home with three blunt rhetorical questions in verse 20: “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” Each question is a challenge. Produce your wisemen. Bring your scholars. Bring your skeptics. It is the same challenge Elijah issued to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel — dance, chant, scream, and cut yourselves if you must, but let’s see what your wisdom actually produces. The answer then was silence. The answer now is the same. All the wisemen, scholars, and skeptics of this world cannot answer the logic behind the cross of Calvary — a logic that comes only from an Almighty God who is infinite, infallible, and indisputable.
Consider D.L. Moody. By the world’s standard, Moody had no business standing before anyone. He was just an uneducated shoe salesman. And yet this man, as he followed Christ, challenged atheists, agnostics, and free thinkers not just across America, but in Great Britain as well. On one occasion in Britain, he convened a meeting specifically for skeptics. They came by the hundreds. Moody, however, had more sense than to engage them on intellectual grounds. He went after their hearts. He shared story after story — believers on their deathbeds contrasted with agnostics on theirs — until finally five hundred men stood to their feet and accepted Christ as their Savior. For all their clever arguments, Moody had only one answer. It was Deuteronomy 32:31: “Their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.” It was the Word of God that won the day. God had once again made foolish the wisdom of this world.
Two Kinds of Blindness, One Missing Answer
Here we arrive at the deepest diagnosis the Holy Spirit offers. The question is not merely why the world disagrees with the message of the cross. The question is why the world cannot see it at all — even when the evidence is standing directly in front of them.
The Holy Spirit identifies two groups in 1 Corinthians 1:21–22 and shows that while their approaches are different, their blindness is the same. First, there are the Jews, who “require a sign.” This was not a theoretical demand. For three and a half years, the Jews had miraculous signs in abundance. Jesus Christ Himself walked up and down throughout all of Israel — healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, setting free those in demonic bondage. He walked upon the water. He stilled the storms. He fed multitudes with a few small fish and a couple of loaves of bread. Even at the cross, the signs continued: darkness over the land, earthquakes, tombs opening, and the Temple veil torn in two. A Roman centurion — a Gentile soldier — looked at the scene and declared, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). Yet to His own, He came, and His own received Him not. Even today, the Jews remain blind to the message of the cross, still demanding signs — a devastating demonstration of what spiritual blindness actually looks like.
Then there are the Greeks — and by Greeks, Paul means essentially anyone who is not a Jew — who “seek after wisdom.” Where the Jew needed a miracle, the Greek needed rationality. They demanded that everything pass through the filter of reason and logic. When Paul stood in Athens, surrounded by the greatest minds of that world, and proclaimed the gospel, they responded by calling him a “babbler” and mocking him. The cross did not satisfy their categories. It did not fit their framework. And so they dismissed it.
Both groups have one devastating thing in common. Paul says it plainly: “the world by wisdom knew not God.” They are, as 2 Corinthians 4:4 describes, spiritually blinded — the god of this world having darkened their minds against the light of the glorious gospel of Christ. They are, as Ephesians 4:17–18 says, spiritually ignorant, their understanding darkened, alienated from the life of God. Spiritual blindness is not uniform. It takes the shape of whatever a person values most. For the Jew, the cross was a scandalous stumbling block. For the Greek, it was sheer senselessness. But underneath both reactions is the same root condition: a heart that cannot, on its own, receive what God is offering.
The Invitation That Stands Against All of It
And yet — here is the glory of the gospel — God does not leave it there.
“But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24).
The word “called” means summoned — invited. And the invitation of God is extended to everyone. Both Jew and Greek. Every man, woman, and child on the face of this earth. The invitation is made possible by His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and it stands open still today. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
For those of us who have heard and heeded that call, there is a very specific path we walked. We acknowledged our sinful condition — that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We repented of our sinful lifestyle. We accepted by faith Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection as the full payment for our sin. And we verbally asked Him to be our Lord and Savior, because “if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9).
The result was nothing less than transformation. We were born again. Old things passed away. The old man was put to death, and we became a new creation — not through our own effort or our own wisdom, but through the transforming power of the gospel. We also received the Holy Spirit, who illuminates our minds to the truth of God’s Word. Before salvation, we were in the same darkness as the rest of the world around us — no understanding, no comprehension, no real knowledge of God. But praise God, that is no longer who we are.
This is the message that the world calls foolish. This is the message that confounds the wise and reduces every human system of wisdom to rubble. And this is the message that Calvary Baptist Church exists to proclaim — not with the wisdom of words that make the cross of none effect, but with the plain, powerful, unapologetic preaching of Christ crucified.
If you have never responded to that invitation, do not let the world’s verdict of foolishness keep you from the greatest gift ever offered. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:23). That gift is yours — if you will receive it.
And for those of us who already have — may we make the preaching of the cross everything in our lives. May it flow from our lips. May it be visible in the lives we live. The cross is not a relic. It is not a symbol on a steeple. It is the power of God. And the world around us desperately needs to hear it.
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