Best Logo EVER? 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Most famous modern logo in your mind? Golden arches of McDonald’s? Rainbow Google? Apple – with one bite out of the fruit? Starbucks – they needed a really great logo serving such pitiful tasting coffee! The Nike swoosh? Coca-cola?
If you are going to sell stuff, apparently, you need a great logo.
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Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist: When Saint Paul starts off on his journeys, he consults with an eminent public relations man: “I’ve got this campaign, and I want to promote the gospel.” And the man would say, “Well, you’ve got to have some sort of symbol. You’ve got to have an image. You’ve got to have some sign of your faith.” And then Paul would say, “Well, I’ve got one. I’ve got this cross.” The public relations man laughed his head off: “You can’t popularize a thing like that. It’s absolutely mad!” (The cross was a universal symbol of shame. If you were carrying one towards your ultimate demise, you deserved shame, dishonor, and embarrassment. It was an “excruciating” symbol of torture..it described indignity, pain, and ugliness. Roman orator Cicero said it was unbecoming of a Roman citizen to even utter the word “cross.”) Looking Up: Modern Christians view cross very differently than the Romans, Kyle Hooks, Oct. 27, 2017)
But, says Muggeridge, it wasn’t mad. It worked for centuries, in centuries, bringing out all the creativity of people, all the love and disinterestedness in people, the symbol of suffering, and I think that’s the heart of the thing. (Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Geoffrey Barlow).
Read 1Cor. 1:18-31
Christ, the Wisdom and Power of God
18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach[a] to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards,[b] not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being[c] might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him[d] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
As you know my favorite book title is by author Tom Sine – The Mustard Seed Conspiracy. God chose the silly things, the weak things, the dishonorable things, the things of little reputation to confound the wise. Think about it – blowing trumpets to bring down the city of Jericho. A forgotten shepherd boy becoming the greatest of the Israelite Kings, described as “a man after God’s own heart.” A baby in a cattle trough to set the world right side up. A cross – a cross! – as your logo to change the nations for Christ.
Makes no sense.
Now…we have been told for some time now in our contemporary era to submit to the ultimate Wisdom of the world – science. That is the Wisdom OF Wisdom…bank on the facts, bank on the researchers, bank on the numbers-facts-observation of the scientists.
But as we have found out, even science is not infrequently… wrong. COVID facts and policies aside, of course.
- Pluto is a planet. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is. And this year, it isn’t again. Got it?
- Ulcers are caused by stress. Unequivocally, wrong. Ulcers are caused by bacteria, and the researchers proved it …actually won the Nobel Prize in 2005.
The unbreakable laws of Newtonian physics…unbreakable, until we discovered quantum physics with mechanics that completely changed the way we understand the world. On a quantum level, things get crazy in ways that are hard to comprehend. - Pythagoras and his followers were almost religiously obsessed with numbers. One of their key doctrines was that all numbers could be expressed as the ratio of integers. So when Hippasus pointed out that the square root of 2 was irrational…it shocked the Pythagoreans, and they had him drowned at sea.
- The Greeks were thought to be scientifically advanced…they held a crazy belief that you could grow lambs on trees. This belief allegedly arose out of the Indies, where people described trees on “which wool grew.” The idea of lambs growing on trees persisted well into the 1600’s.
- Time is constant, said the scientists. But not since Einstein. When he showed that light was the only constant, the world thought he was crazy. These days, however, NASA has to adjust its clocks because time runs differently depending on how far you are from a source of gravity and how fast you are going. A clock at sea level ticks faster than a clock at the top of the Empire State Building.
- Water is an earth thing and an earth thing only. Science told us so. But as NASA recently discovered, there is more water on Jupiter’s moon of Europa than there is on our own planet.
- Science has convinced us that apes are the smartest non-human animals. Now studies are showing au contraire, some birds are smarter yet.
- In 2006, historians found evidence that King Tut had died in a chariot accident. In 2014, however, scientists discovered that he had in fact died because of inbreeding.
- Dinosaurs had leathery skin, right? Actually, scientists have now come to the conclusion that they were mostly covered in feathers. https://list25.com/25-things-science-got-totally-wrong/
Science is the irrefutable gospel of every age. Until it’s not. Then what?
Let’s look at the passage. Notice this verse:
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
- Being saved? I love E. Stanley Jones here…he said, “I am a Christian-in-the-making.” By Christian, he meant a Christ-like one. What are you being made into today? Either a Christ-like one…or something else. It might depend on your logo if you know what I mean.
- There was an old Asbury Seminary president who was kicking around the campus when I was there called J.C. McPheeters. When asked how he was doing, he would always say, “I am improving.” I like that. Are you improving? How…by ever-changing science or by the never-changing wisdom of the Cross?
27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things— and the things that are not-to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.