Stumbling Block - 1 Corinthians 1:17-25

The focus that some of the people have on remaining loyal to the person that baptized them is a hindrance that Paul is addressing, and he points out that “Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel.” While this phrase might be a little misunderstood, because Christ did call Paul to baptize, the point might be that Paul’s primary mission was share the gospel with everyone so that they could know the truth, not to get them to be baptized.

This means that the end goal wasn’t just baptism but acceptance of the gospel message. If the end goal was baptism, then it wouldn’t matter what Paul told the people, as long as they ended up in the water. This purpose would not benefit God in any way, nor would it benefit the people who were duped into it, the only beneficiary would be Paul who would gain power. Paul’s purpose was not to gain power, but to empower people with the gospel of Christ.
Paul continues that he is supposed to preach the gospel “not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.” This goes back to how Paul preached the gospel. If he were to use flowery and persuasive words and rely on his own gift of speaking to convince people of his message, then they would miss out on the power of God that is the only thing capable of conversion.
Paul talks a lot about the “wisdom of the world” and the different messages contained therein. We know that bustling city centers in the ancient Greek areas were hot beds of philosophic debate and intellectual discussions and surely religion would have been a regular topic. But the difference between those who would debate “wisdom” and what Paul was trying to do was that the debaters would have to rely on their logic and reasoning to persuade an audience, but Paul was to rely on the power of God to convey his message into the hearts of his listeners.
The IM comments, “When Paul spoke against ‘the wisdom of this world’, he was referring to the flawed philosophical traditions of his day and not to the worthwhile pursuit of learning ad education that the Lord encourages. Paul used the words wise and wisdom repeatedly in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:13 to refer to worldly philosophies and those who supported them.” “Worldly wisdom” is different than education, and ultimately both things can either have correct or incorrect components, the whole process is how do we know what is right and what process do we use to make the decisions.
The concept of the “cross of Christ” that Paul uses so frequently could explain one of the reasons why so many Christians are obsessed with the sign of the cross even these 2,000 years later. The IM says, “Paul’s primary message was ‘the preaching of the cross,’ which he taught was the ‘power of God’ to save those who believed. Paul used the phrase ‘the cross’ as a kind of shorthand reference to the Atonement. The Atonement, however, involved more than Christ’s death on the cross. Elder C. Scott Grow of the Seventy taught: ‘Through His suffering and death, the Savior atoned for the sins of all men. His Atonement began in Gethsemane and continued on the cross and culminated with the Resurrection.”
If Jesus’ only provided the portion of the Atonement that occurred while he was fastened to the cross, then we would not have been able to take advantage of repentance, nor would we all have been resurrected. There is an excellent break down of the events that occurred during the atonement in “The Infinite Atonement” by Tad R. Callister, where he talks about how the horror that the Savior experienced in Gethsemane that caused him to bleed from every pore, seems to have recurred to a greater extent while Jesus hung on the cross dying, so there is a lot more that goes into it than just what happened in the view of everyone who passed by Golgotha.
Paul’s preaching of “the cross” however emphasized Jesus’ manner of death and the IM points out that this was a problematic concept “for both Jews and Gentiles to accept. In the Roman world, crucifixion was a punishment reserved for criminals or slaves and symbolized shame and defeat. The idea of someone vicariously suffering and dying for others, then subsequently coming back to life, was ‘foolishness’ to the philosophically minded Greeks. For the Jews, whose concept of the Messiah brought the expectation of royalty, power, and victory, the message that the Messiah had died on a cross was a ‘stumblingblock’ and an unacceptable idea.”
I totally understand the whole thing about growing up believing one thing and then realizing that your whole life has been a lie. I would imagine that many of the Jews who believed the gospel had a lot of mental and spiritual reconciling to do before they were able to accept the gospel in full. It can be a very tough thing to believe something that not only goes against what you were taught growing up, but something that is so far out there that it doesn’t even make sense in your mind as a possibility. I definitely believe that I probably would not have been able to get over a few things to follow Jesus if I had been alive and a Jew at the time of Christ. First would be the general lack of knowledge about his birth in Bethlehem and then the second would have to be the non-militant Messiah who was crucified.
As far as the Gentiles go, I can understand how they might see being murdered in a degrading way might disqualify you as being the Messiah in some of their eyes. I think that in the case of most gentiles, the concept of a Messiah was probably going to have to be taught to them because of the various different religious practices at the time. And like the IM said, no one had ever come back from the dead before, it would be like someone saying that an alien came from outer space, it’s never publically happened before so there would be many skeptics. Both are understandable concerns that need to be worked through to accept the gospel.