1 Corinthians 3:19-23 - You are of Christ

3:19,20

“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight”. The world may well applaud itself on its “wisdom” on same-sex marriage or transgenderism, but its wisdom is absolute nonsense in God’s sight. Paul then quotes from Job 5:13 and Psalm 94:11. The world’s wisdom will be shown up for the foolishness that it really is. These verse remind one of Rom 1:21, “they became futile in their thinking”. The madness of the world will be shown up for what it is. We should not be enticed by its “wisdom”, nor should we feel threatened by it, for its vacuousness will be exposed.

3:21

Paul now goes right back to the original symptom of the problem, the boasting about human leaders. We must not boast about human leaders. Each one of us, if we are a follower of Jesus Christ, understands something of the gospel, knows God to some degree. But we all know only in part, and we are all also imperfect, there are things we do not understand, and quite probably things we misunderstand. So if we tie ourselves to one particular leader then we are missing out on the full glory of Christ, the full riches of the gospel. We also risk tying ourselves into the shortcomings of that individual. This is also why it so important that all of us make sure we learn from others, never falling for the deception that it can be “me and God”.

3:22,23

Everything is ours. Every Christian leader is ours, all the world, all the present and the future are ours. See how the world always tries to minimise, tries to restrict. Nationalism seeks to focus everything, limit everything, to one nation. The LGBT stuff seeks to define a person purely in terms of sexuality. Christian movements can end up defining things in terms of one doctrine, or one aspect of gospel mission. All things are ours in Christ. We belong to Christ, and Christ is of God.