those who think they already have the truth do not enter fully into dialogue. I’d like to hear Paul com ment on that! There is no dialogue between the foolishness of God and the wisdom of man. Without Jesus Christ a man is blind and dead. A blind man cannot see nor a dead man live until a miracle takes place. Spirit ually, that never will happen until the blind and dead believe the foolishness of God and find wisdom, be lieve the weakness of God and find strength. Long ago a teacher came to Jesus by night. He knew the Scriptures and was very religious. Jesus said to him, “ You must be born again.” That was something new for Nicodemus. There was no chapter in his book about that. No wonder he asked, “ How can these things be?" Jesus answered, “ Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?” In other words, “ Nicodemus, the trouble with you is, you have a well-thought-out system but you can't fit this into your system. Your system must be adjusted to God’s system. You don’t add me to what you already have; you must begin again. God doesn’t come to you on your terms; you come to Him on His terms.” The tendency today is to play up to Nicodemus. It would be considered “ corny” to say to a university professor, “ You must be born again.” We adjust the Gospel to his intelligence and tone down its require ments out of respect for his importance. We are for taking him into the church first and explaining later. But our Lord never watered down the way of salva tion or marked down the cost of discipleship to suit anybody. We might as well face it: the Gospel does not make sense to the natural man. It is nonsense to him and will be until he accepts it. When God sent His Son to this world, He showed how little He thinks of our culture, philosophy and intellectualism. Even the New Testament Greek is not the classic Greek such as the Corinthians spoke but rather the language of the marketplace. There is nothing elegant about a bruised and beaten man with His beard pulled out. His face covered with spittle and blood, dying between two thieves. That is shocking to fastidious Sunday-morning church-goers who want pleasant little sermonettes guaranteed not to offend anybody. At Christmas, we make the birth of Christ sound like a fairy tale but there is nothing “ Hollywood” about a baby born in a barn to a poor peasant woman. A great Bible teacher said shortly before his death that as he grew older he was more and more con vinced that much of our Christmas celebration is a clever device of the devil to hide the true meaning of the birth of our Lord. If you are looking for the real meaning of Christmas, you won’t find it in the tinsel- 10
and-holly, Santa Claus, Rudolph-the-red-nosed-rein- deer commercialized paganism of the season. You will find it in a precious verse (I Tim. 3:16) which may have been a hymn or creed of the early church. I love to quote it for the sheer poetic beauty of it but most of all because it sums up "the foolishness of God” : “ And without controversy great is the mys tery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, Justified in the Spirit; Seen of angels, Preached among the nations, I wish somebody would put that on a Christmas card! Compared to that, nuclear physics, for instance, is just kindergarten stuff! We shall spend all eternity marveling at the wonder of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Just because the plan of salva tion was not worked out by a conference of Ph.D.’s in a University, doesn’t mean that there is nothing profound about it. The message of the Gospel is so different from anything we would have contrived that the wise-acres and smart-alecks of this world call it nonsense, stupid, silly. Indeed the original word gives us our word “ moron.” The foolishness of God is resented be cause it leaves no room for human pride and allows no man to boast for no flesh can glory in God’s presence. Men call it moronic because they don’t know who the real “ moron” is! The facts are these: There is a God in spite of all fools who say in their hearts that He does not exist. He has spoken to us in a God-breathed book. The trouble with man is sin. God came to earth in His Son, put Himself in our place and died for our sins. Jesus Christ came bodily out of the grave. He is not converting the world today but is taking out of it a people, His Church. Civilization will grow worse and worse and end in catastrophe, the victim of its own inventions. Jesus Christ will come back person ally to take over when we have demonstrated that we don't know how . . . and that demonstration is in its final stages. Stand in a university and say that and you will still be called a moron! It is foolishness to the world and even to some preachers who are embarrassed to be so out-of-style and out-of-step with “ progress.” We are seeing in this day of anarchy a Satanic DEMON- stration of the Mystery of Lawlessness. It is high time the church gave a demonstration of the Mystery of Godliness, "the foolishness of God.” KB THE KING’S BUSINESS Believed on in the world, Received up into Glory.”
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