Dr. David Carey Dixon - December 10, 2023
Staring into the Foolishness of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25)
The book of Proverbs has a lot to say about wisdom and foolishness, doesn’t it? Foolishness is refusing to listen to wisdom, in the first place, so a fool is someone who refuses to learn wisdom and discipline. Especially fools fail to fear God, and despite their incompetence, they are “wise in their own eyes,” and hence, unteachable: rather than learning from their mistakes, they just do the same foolish things over and over. Did you ever hear the modern definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results! Much like a dog that returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly (Pr. 26:11). In fact, Proverbs 26 is wholly dedicated to instructing us on how to identify and handle the person who is foolish: “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it; if someone rolls a stone, it will roll back on them.” ( Pr. 26:27). That’s simply the law of sowing and reaping. The most foolish thing we ever do is to reject God’s authority over our lives – yet we’ve ALL done that at some point or another (and it’s not necessarily some big outward mutiny against God, but just little quiet things where we do not submit our hearts to His truth). So our problem is not just a matter of changing our mind and deciding to correct our course. When we reject God’s authority, we fall into a deep dark pit that only God can rescue us from (that’s the biblical doctrine of sin): we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God; i.e., we’ve fallen into foolishness and become trapped in our own dreams and schemes (and that’s a “double whammy,” because we’re both guilty and trapped!). Yet God’s way of rescuing us is as bizarre as anything we could never imagine! We might even refer to it as the “foolishness” of God (in no way comparable to ours, of course!).
Scripture References: 1 Corinthians 1:18-1825
