There are times when a New Testament author makes an application of an Old Testament verse that is not at all obvious. Certainly, most people would not feel comfortable if a modern commentator made similar applications. 1 Corinthians 2:9 is an interesting case of that because we cannot even be sure Paul is quoting a verse from the Old Testament. A vast majority of commentators say that it is a quote or paraphrase of Isaiah 64:4.

In the NIV, this verse from Isaiah reads as follows:
Since ancient times no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

In the context of this section, the verse is speaking to the uniqueness of God. Israel is remembering how God has cared for them. There is no other god that has done this for them or for anyone else.

In the same version, 1 Corinthians 2:9 is translated as
However, as it is written:
“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him”

This is definitely not a quote of Isaiah 64:4 and not a paraphrase as many commentators claim. A paraphrase maintains the same meaning even though the words are different. The focus of Paul's quotation is on the salvation that God has prepared — on the gospel, which is God's secret wisdom that is being revealed. This is very different from talking about the uniqueness of God. I have read that almost the same quote can be found in some apocryphal writings. The dating of those writings makes it likely that they borrowed from Paul rather than vice verse. Another possibility is that they are both quoting from a third source. It would not be the only occasion that Paul quoted something outside Scripture.

Regardless, the application is the same for the Corinthians and for us. I still would not mind finding a source that deals with this more completely.

Note: I looked at other translations but the NASB, ESV, and HCSB were all too painful to read to use here.

I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo on the plane during the flight to Las Vegas. In the book there is a scene set in Rome during a carnival. Everyone is wearing masks. These masks allow people to do whatever they desire — even if it is outside what is morally or socially acceptable in Rome. They are emboldened due to the anonymity provided by the mask.

Las Vegas reminded me of this carnival. Instead of putting on a mask to hide your activities from your neighbors, you are traveling to a different city. The atmosphere was very similar to the carnival. People are encouraged to throw aside their inhibitions. It is a place where it is completely normal to see “hundreds of thousands of rhinestones, covering practically nothing.”

I will be in the desert of Nevada for the next week so no Internet access for me. I am pretty sure I will be somewhere near here if anyone wants to visit.

The Text (ESV)

Just a few comments on these verses:
1. Paul switches from “I” to “we” in this section on spiritual wisdom. This shows that all the apostles and leaders of the church are teaching the same wisdom. It also does not give the Corinthians who champion Paul any reason to claim that he has any special wisdom that the other leaders do not possess.

2. Paul makes sure to reiterate that this wisdom for the spiritual mature is not the wisdom of the world. The world's wisdom is like the tower of Babel. It may make us proud of our achievements, but it does not get us any closer to God. God has to reveal his wisdom to us.

3. This wisdom is the gospel. I conclude this because Paul writes this is the wisdom that “God decreed before the ages for our glory.”

“No one is doing right who acts unwillingly, even if what he does is good in itself.”

The Text (ESV)

Paul returns to the theme of Corinthians 1:17: he does not depend on human wisdom or eloquence when preaching the gospel. If a person could be saved through a persuasive argument rather than only through God's working, then that person's faith depends on the quality of the argument and he could be convinced otherwise. This is not to say that Paul did not use logic and reasoning when explaining the gospel. He clearly did as can be seen from Acts 18:4 or his time in Athens (Acts 17). The difference between Paul and the sophists was that his message depended on God's power. Now some use these verses to justify not preparing before preaching so that the Holy Spirit will be able to speak through them. I think that there is a significent difference between depending on fine sounding arguments and spending time in study and preparation. Paul is pointing out problems with the former. I think that he certainly did the latter.

I have thought much about what Paul means by “demonstration of the Spirit” in verse 4: “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” Does he mean miracles, speaking in tongues, healings? I prefer John Calvin's interpretation: “With this he [Paul] contrasts the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, which most interpreters consider as restricted to miracles; but I take it in a more general sense, as meaning the hand of God powerfully exercised in every way through the instrumentality of the Apostle.”

In the early days of the web, yellow page-like listings (e.g. Yahoo) were the primary method of locating information. Then came spiders collecting web pages to create repositories that could be searched using keywords (Lycos, AltaVista). These search engines did not take advantage of the connected nature of the web. Google changed that by ranking a page based on the quantity and quality of the pages linking to it.

What is next is still an open question. The most common answer is clustering. Teoma (bought by Ask Jeeves) was one of the earliest search engines to use clustering. Vivisimo and its sister search engine, Clusty, are two more examples. Now Yahoo is jumping on the bandwagon with Mindset.

The advantage of clustering is the possibility of teasing out semantic information by grouping pages based on their content and how they link to each other. If someone were to search for "Lincoln", does she want a biography of Abraham Lincoln or perhaps information about Lincoln, Nebraska or maybe tickets for Lincoln Center. Clustering allows the search engine to present some basic categories so that the user can easily refine her search. In the Lincoln example, the user could limit her search to only pages in the Lincoln Center cluster so she can get directions and concert times. Yahoo's Mindset is simpler in that it restricts the clusters to shopping or informational groupings. Right now, clustering search engines do not look like a threat to Google's dominance.

God Chooses the Weak

The Text (ESV)

Paul continues to explain God's view of human wisdom to the Corinthians in these verses. He reminds them that not many of them were wise or powerful from the perspective of the world. Not only that, but God normally chooses to work through the weak or foolish. God chose David, the youngest of Jesse's sons, when the world would have selected his oldest son. God chose to give Israel victory over the Philistines and Goliath through David when he was still too young to go off to war. God chose to deliver Israel from the Midianites through Gideon, not known for his courage, leading only three hundred men against an army of tens of thousands or more.

God chooses the weak, first of all, because it is his good pleasure to do this. It is also so that we understand that it is God who performs these mighty deeds and not man. This is just as true now as it was during Old Testament times. We are not saved because of our wisdom or abilities. This question remains for the Corinthians to consider: if God does not use human wisdom in his plans, why are they arguing over their leaders' human wisdom and rhetoric abilities?

To demonstrate their web data extraction capability, a company has created a search engine called Googspy that allows a user to see who is paying for what keyword in Google's Adwords. I don't know how "smart" their spider is, but grabbing this data through brute force is not that difficult given enough computing power and storage space. The results are interesting. For example, Microsoft pays for keywords ranging from apple software updates to suse linux to spanish culture.

The Folly of Christ Crucified

The Text (ESV)

Another point that Paul makes against the Corinthian church's reliance on human wisdom is that the world sees the gospel (and specifically, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ) as foolishness. In thinking about this, I came up with a few different explanations. Perhaps Paul is assuming some sort of logical argument along these lines: the wise men of the world do not believe the gospel and anything that wise men do not believe is foolishness so the gospel is foolishness. Maybe he is saying that the people of the world are blinded to the true wisdom of the message of the cross (2 Cor 4:4). The argument that I like the best is that the crucifixion of the Son of God really is foolishness to the world — especially to the people of that time. The cross was a symbol of shame, not reverence. Consider what Justin, an early Church father, had to say about this, “For they proclaim our madness to consist in this, that we give to a crucified man a place second to the unchangeable and eternal God, the Creator of all.”

First, in the myths that the Greeks and Romans would be familiar with, the sons of gods do not suffer through shameful deaths. In those legends, the son of a god such as Hercules performs mighty feats and only dies in heroic fashion. They do not humble themselves and certainly do not submit to death on a cross.

Second, there is a paradox involving the cross. Crucifixion was a tool of the Roman Empire—of Caesar. It was a sign of his power and control. There was even a cult of Caesar that viewed him as a god on earth. Slaves and the politically weak were subject to this form of humiliating death. But Christ was able to defeat a much greater power than Caesar, that is sin, through the weakness of the cross. The very symbol of Caesar's power and Christ's weakness is really the power of God. What appears as foolishness to men is actually God's wisdom.