BIBLE TOPICS

"The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God", wrote Paul to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3 v 19). The apostle was undoubtedly one of the best educated Jews of his age, steeped in the Jewish rabbinical tradition, and familiar with the Greek thinking which permeated the Roman world in the first century. Yet he could hardly be more explicit in his assertion that all worldly learning is valueless in relation to the revealed message of Christ:

"... hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness .. because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Corinthians 1 v 20-25).

One of the themes of New Testament teaching is that man has become alienated from God, and all his faculties and aspirations tend in a direction which is away from God; as Paul continues later in the same letter:

"the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him" (1 Corinthians 2 v 14).

This theme is no less explicit in the Old Testament:

"There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death" (Proverbs 16 v 25).

"It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps" (Jeremiah 10 v 23).

This teaching is not very flattering or palatable to man, but cannot be evaded by anyone prepared to accept the word of Scripture. Paul himself was particularly aware of the pitfalls of human thinking in relation to spiritual truth. From his childhood he had been immersed in the traditional teaching of Judaism, a tradition which had blinded him to a recognition of Christ as the Messiah, and which had been in no uncertain terms condemned by Christ himself. Paul's words to the Colossians have a very personal urgency:

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ" (Colossians 2 v 8).

Plato