Episode 267: No One Saw It Coming | Tim Henderson

Introduction

Good morning friends. Happy Alpha Sunday. You guys doing alright? What are the three things you get to do if you come to Alpha? Food. Food, okay, which is not a verb, it's a noun. Eat, that's right? What else do you get to do? You get to do a puzzle apparently, get to connect and then finally? Explore. Explore. Not only you but anybody that you invite gets to eat and connect and explore and we really hope that you're gonna do that because it's a blessing for them and it'll be so fun for you.

What we're gonna do today is we're gonna continue our series that Quig kicked off last week in 1 Corinthians. We're actually not gonna do the whole book because that just, the church of the Holy Spirit, we don't do anything for like twenty five weeks in a row, right? Quig couldn't stand it if we went more than eight weeks. So we're gonna do like the first half of the book, then we're gonna take a break and then we'll pick it up a little bit down the road. But the first half of 1 Corinthians that we look at, I think we're gonna have a fantastic time. And I want to tell you why we chose 1 Corinthians of all the books that we could do. The New Testament letters have an attribute that we call occasional. The letters of the New Testament are occasional. That does not mean that they come and they go. What it means is that they were written in response to a specific occasion.

Throughout the Roman Empire as the gospel spread, there were all these communities, cities, and regions where churches had been planted and grown up, where there were communities of believers. And in each one, something different was going on. There were different ways. Maybe in this particular city, the people were suffering from some particular thing, or maybe they were sinning in a particular way, or maybe there was something going on that was really worth celebrating as the gospel was taking hold of their hearts. But in a different city, there's a different set of sin and suffering and celebration. And so each letter is written to a particular group of people going through particular circumstances.

As we ourselves take a look at what's going on in our community, one of our jobs is to be like, which what's true among us and which letter in the New Testament, which occasion that precipitated any given letter most closely correspond to perhaps the need of the present moment in this particular place. Make sense?

The Context of Corinth

Okay, so let's talk about Corinth. We chose the letter written to the church in Corinth. If you had to pick an American city that represents Corinth here today, what would you pick? Do you have some sense? Las Vegas. That's what I would say too, right? And I don't know what your impression of Vegas is, but mine is not overly high. Apologies to those of you, you know, from the great state of Nevada.

So Corinth was a particularly sexually broken community. Wasn't the only thing going on there. As you read through the letter, especially in the first half, there's plenty of sexual brokenness based on the things that Paul is saying, the corrections that he's bringing. There's a lot of pride. There are factions. This one follows this and this one follows that. The second half of the book, you kinda get into some different problems.

Corinth was a tricky church for Paul. He loved the Thessalonians, but they had issues with the return of Christ. Corinth had some problems that right now, at our present moment, this age, which I would characterize as being particularly sexually confused, in our moment, I think the letter to the church in Corinth has something to say to us. We want to try to understand what's going on with it, so that we might better understand what's going on with us.

Because here's the thing, guys, every expression of Christianity, including this one, is by definition, syncretistic. Okay? Do you know that word? Do you know what syncretism is? Syncretism is the fusing of different belief systems. And in particular, it's the fusing of incompatible belief systems. Right?

So you guys are not just Christians. Some of you are Christians that were born in the late twentieth century in the United States. Some of you are Christians that were raised in liberal progressive households. Some of you are Christians that were raised in conservative fundamentalist households. It's very likely the case that you are Christians whose views of personal property rights were shaped more by Adam Smith's work on capitalism than by Moses' Torah.

It's very likely that you are Christians whose view of sexual ethics was shaped by the sitcoms you watched growing up and those marked your life. Did you used to cheer for Sammy in Cheers, right, in all of his exploits? Did you used to whatever you watched growing up, right, whatever age you happen to be, those things mark us. We are all, every one of us, syncretistic. We are not pure in our Christianity, but we have all fused our Christianity with the cultural norms that we are surrounded by, even, and in particular those that we're not even aware exist. And the result is not pure Christianity, neither was that of the Corinthians.

And one of Paul's purposes in his letter is to speak to them and say, that isn't Christianity. That is the corrupting influence of Corinth. So let's have a little less of that and a little more of Jesus. That's what he's doing, he's writing this letter to that end. And as we do, we can sit here and we can listen. Paul's gonna get into all sorts of weird stuff, and when he does, we can sit in our comfy pews and say, what a bunch of losers. Or we can say, that reminds me of something. And the something he reminds me of is me. I suggest we take the latter approach.

The Surprising Cross

In this letter, Paul is gonna tell a bunch of Corinthian Christians to act more like Christians and less like Corinthians, which is to say, he's gonna ask them to be strange, at least to be strange according to the standards of their day. And he's gonna begin his whole letter by speaking to them about the one who was strange on their behalf, in their place, and for their good.

Paul is going to anchor the changes that he's calling the Corinthians to make in the shocking, surprising, altogether unforeseen cross and Christ crucified. Paul is about to say, we'll watch him do it. He's gonna say, Jesus behaved in ways entirely unexpected. And then he's gonna say, and we behaved among you in ways that were entirely unexpected, which is all a setup for the pivot which is coming when he's going to tell the Corinthians to behave in ways entirely unexpected.

But the whole thing starts at the cross. So take a look here. Go to 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 1. Here's what Paul says:

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.

Do you catch the implication? What you would have expected is that I would have done that. Right? But I didn't do what you expected me to do. We're gonna run this whole play a little differently.

He continues, in verse 2:

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

This singular focus of Paul is strange, but it's not nearly as strange as the agonizing, incomprehensible death of God. And then he says in verse 3:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech and my message were not implausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

So that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Do you hear what he's doing here? He's saying, listen, when we came, we did not follow the script. He's going to one of the most important cities in the nation that basically invented rhetoric—the whole paradigm of like pathos, logos, ethos—that's the Greeks, that's their contribution. And Paul says, when I came, I didn't do any of that. I did none of the eloquence, none of the rules. I skipped it all, and I just gave you this seemingly imbecilic message about a crucified Jew. And I didn't talk about anything else, and we didn't dress it up. I just pointed you to a cross. And it's inexplicable, naked horror, that's all we ever talked about. And he's saying, I didn't do what you thought I was gonna do. And this thing was a shock, it was a surprise.

Look at where he goes next, okay? I think this next little passage is really important, and I don't think it's very broadly understood, so see if we can't figure it out, okay? Verse six:

Yet among the mature, we do impart wisdom. Although, it's not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. 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.

And now check out verse nine. I want you to think into this with me. Okay?

But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.

That phrase right there, at the very end of it, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind is conceived, that God is prepared for those who love him. Okay? That is generally supposed to be about something, and I think the general supposition is wrong.

So let's do this. We'll do a little quick experiment. Take 15 seconds and ask whoever you're sitting next to, what is he talking about? What is the thing that no eye has seen, that no ear has heard, that no mind has conceived? And then I'll have a prediction of what you're gonna say. So ten seconds, go.

What is he talking about? What's the shock? What's the thing? What's the new thing? Almost always, you're gonna hear that. What's the thing that no eyes see, no ears heard? It's generally supposed that he's describing heaven. Right? That's generally what we think. I don't think that's what it is.

Okay? If this is suddenly a verse about heaven, then he's just completely air dropping that, boom, into an otherwise completely different argument. Quite to the contrary, this whole passage from the opening words of this letter, he's talking about one thing and one thing only, and it is the cross of Jesus Christ.

Just come back and just review with me the thing that nobody's seen, that nobody thought of. The whole point of this passage, the foundation of this letter, is Christ crucified.

Look at this, back to the beginning of the letter. He says:

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

He says that God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. And what is it that we preach? We preach Christ crucified.

This is all he's talking about. He goes on and he describes this in more vivid detail. He says that God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. That is Jesus on a cross. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things, the despise things, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are.

He goes on to say, I resolved to know nothing when I was with you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. He says, speak a secret hidden wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

You guys, the astonishing, the surprising, the shocking, the bewildering, the unforeseeable thing was that the God who made the world would consent to be lifted up and impaled on a beam for the sport and amusement of wicked men. And nobody saw this coming. This was absolutely out of nowhere to everybody. Because there's a risk, I think. I think it's a grave risk that the golden cross around your neck could be so sanitizing and so normalizing. It could cause to be just so banal and common the most shocking thing that has ever happened in the history of the world.

Do you remember when it was surprising news? Because today is Alpha Sunday. Alpha Sunday is all it's just an opportunity for us to stir up in your hearts to kinda to stoke your imagination of how what would it be like if God used you to invite someone into a conversation where there's food and there's welcome and there's freedom and there's opportunity to ask questions and to have doubts and to find discussions about the thing that would lead them to a discovery, a fresh discovery. Maybe a brand new discovery, or maybe a renewed discovery about the most surprising and most important thing that has ever happened in the world.

So I ask you again, do you remember when it was all new for you? Alpha is, I think, an absolutely brilliant opportunity, a brilliant strategy to help people discover the gospel, to help discover how great Jesus is. Many of you know that I was on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ for a long, long time, and one of our kind of global strategies to help people meet Jesus, to encounter him, is a film just known simply as the Jesus film.

The brilliance of the movie isn't the movie itself, it's the fact that we then translated it into something like a thousand languages or 1,200 languages. I mean, you name 20 languages? It's just it's unimaginable, the breadth of this thing. This movie has been seen by billions upon billions of people in every corner of the earth. And I have seen not just the film, I've seen the film several times, but I've seen films of people watching the film. Sometimes we'll take it into some village, some faraway place in some language I've never heard of, and we'll set up these lights in the village and all the people come crowding in, they'll sit on the ground and they'll watch the movie, and I've watched their faces as they watch the story, as they encounter Jesus, sometimes for the first time. They didn't know who he was, know nothing about him. And you'll watch the kids, you watch the grown-ups as they smile as Jesus is kind to the poor. You see him healing people, right? But then the movie takes this horrible dark turn where the crowd turns against Jesus and you can see it on the faces of the people watching the film. They're like, what's going on here? And then Jesus gets arrested, and this doesn't make any sense but we all know, we all know because you've seen movies. Movies always end well. It's gonna be fine, everything's gonna be fine and then this one, it's not fine. Like he is beaten and he is stripped and then they stretch out his arms, they nail him to a cross, and I can see in my mind's eye these children watching the film with tears streaming down their face. Those are like, what is this movie you've taken us to see? Like, what is happening here? Do you remember when the horror of the cross was fresh and visible before it became common?

One of the most artful depictions, one of the most creative attempts to kinda get behind the things that we already know, or the things that we think we know, is the children's book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about a lion, his name is Aslan. And he is this great and powerful and majestic lion, and he rules over the land of Narnia. And everybody loves him, although he is no doubt somewhat ferocious. Not only is there a lion, but there is a little boy, a boy named Edmund. And Edmund is the worst. Edmund is treacherous. Edmund betrays his brothers and sisters in order to gain power from himself, but Edmund, the betrayer, ends up being betrayed. For he gets double crossed by this evil witch who is using him as bait all along. And Edmund finds himself in a situation that he cannot solve. In fact, his very life is forward. His life, he has committed a capital offense, and he is on the verge of dying. And into this despairing moment comes Aslan. And Aslan has a private meeting with the witch. And in this conversation with the witch, for some reason, and nobody knows, nobody knows what happens, but the witch agrees to relinquish her claim on Edmund and to set him free. So everybody's super happy. They don't know what Aslan said, they don't know how he did it, they just know that Edmund is free and that's cause enough for rejoicing.

But later that night, Aslan walks off to the two girls, Lucy and Susan, notice that Aslan kinda leaves the camp and walks off into the woods, his great royal head drooping. And Aslan sees them and allows them to come and to follow him, at least part of the way, before he compels them to hide and stay back. And to their shock and surprise, as he leaves them, he walks towards a stone table that is surrounded by ogres and hags and evil trees, wraiths, and of course the witch herself. And now, I want you to hear. I'm gonna read you an excerpt. I want you to hear the story. Do your best to hear it like the children for whom it was written. Children who have fallen in love with this majestic and good, but dangerous lion.

Here's what happens as he approaches the stone. A howl and a gibber of dismay went up from the creatures when they first saw the great lion pacing toward them. And for a moment, even the witch herself seemed to be struck with fear. Then she recovered herself and gave a wild fierce laugh. The fool, she cried, the fool has come. Bind him fast.

Lucy and Susan held their breath, waiting for Aslan's roar and his spring upon his enemies. But it never came. Four hags grinning and leering, he also at first hanging back and half afraid of what they had to do, had approached him. Bind him, I say, repeated the white witch. The hags made a dart at him and shrieked with triumph when they found that he made no resistance at all. Then others, evil dwarfs and apes, rushed in to help them, and between them they rolled the huge lion over on his back and tied all his four paws together, shouting and cheering as if they had done something brave. Though, had the lion chosen, one of those paws could have been the death of them all. But he made no noise, even when his enemies straining and tugging, pulled the cord so tight that they cut into his flesh, and then they began to drag him toward the stone table.

I read this this morning, in the first service, and Becky Fetzer came up to me during Sunday school to say that she's a school teacher and she read this story to her class, I think it's like fourth or fifth graders. And when she read this very passage, one of the boys in her class shouted out, why would he do that? Why would he do that? It makes no sense. It is completely bizarre. In the midst of the story, which precisely the point. This nine-year-old, ten-year-old boy got it.

As the story goes on, they shave his great mane and they muzzle his noble face and they pull the cords tighter. Until finally, the witch drew near and spoke into Aslan's ear, and she said, and now, who has won, fool? Did you think that by all this, you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him, as was our pact. And so the deep magic will be appeased. But when you are dead, what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then?

Understand then that you have given me Narnia forever, and you have lost your own life and have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die. And then she drove a wicked knife into his heart and killed him. Children all over the world for the last seven decades have been shocked by this moment. And this moment, you guys, though shocking, is not senseless. For this is not merely the death of the great lion, but it is of course a depiction of the death of Christ, which was not a senseless death.

Though no one saw it coming, though we never could have anticipated, it was precisely what the moment called for. What Paul is quoting here, this is a strange thing. You can read a ton about this in commentaries. The passage that Paul quotes when he says, no eye see, no ear is heard, no mind is conceived of God, that whole passage, the funny thing about it is it doesn't exactly appear in the Old Testament. It's actually a mash-up of a number of passages, generally from Isaiah that Paul is drawing from. But the heart of it, the primary text from which he is drawing, is in Isaiah chapter 64.

And I want you to go back, wanna look with me at the source material that Paul is drawing from. Because beyond the fact that this whole passage is about the cross, Isaiah 64 is about the dilemma to which the cross is the only solution. So go back to Isaiah 64, look at verse four. This is what Paul is drawing from as he makes this claim:

Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any god besides you who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

You hear the quote, right? You can feel that this is source material for this. Here's what he says, here's what Isaiah is saying:

You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways, but when we continue to sin against them, you are angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags. We all shrivel up like a leaf, and the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls