The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the CorinthiansDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the Corinthians
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Corinthians, 1st -- Commentaries
That which, in point of fact, has made God known is the Cross of
Christ. No doubt it must have seemed foolishness and mere lunacy to
summon the seeker after God away from the high and elevating
speculations of Plato on the good and the eternal and to point him to
the Crucified, to a human form gibbeted on a malefactor's cross, to a
man that had been hanged. None knew better than Paul the infamy
attaching to that cursed death, and none could more distinctly
measure the surprise and stupefaction with which the Greek mind would
hear the announcement that it was there God was to be seen and known.
Paul understood the offence of the Cross, but he knew also its power.
"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, but unto them which are called, both Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God."
As proof that God was in their midst and as a revelation of God's
nature, the Jews required a sign, a demonstration of physical power.
It was one of Christ's temptations to leap from a pinnacle of the
Temple, for thus He would have won acceptance as the Christ. The
people never ceased to clamour for a sign. They wished Him to bid a
mountain be removed and cast into the sea; they wished Him to bid the
sun stand still or Jordan retire to its source. They wished Him to
make some demonstration of superhuman power, and so put it beyond a
doubt that God was present. Even at the last it would have satisfied
them had He bid the nails drop out and had He stepped down from the
Cross among them. They could not understand that to remain on the
Cross was the true proof of Divinity. The Cross seemed to them a
confession of weakness. They sought a demonstration that the power of
God was in Christ, and they were pointed to the Cross. But to them the
Cross was a stumbling-block they could not get over. And yet in it was
the whole power of God for the salvation of the world. All the power
that dwells in God to draw men out of sin to holiness and to Himself
was actually in the Cross. For the power of God that is required to
draw men to Himself is not power to alter the course of rivers or
change the site of mountains, but power to sympathize, to make men's
sorrows His own, to sacrifice self, to give all for the needs of His
creatures. To them that believe in the God there revealed, the Cross
is the power of God. It is this love of God that overpowers them and
makes it impossible for them to resist Him. To a God who makes Himself
known to them in self-sacrifice they quickly and delightedly yield
themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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