jimbussell

The foolishness of God has been something I have been thinking about the last few weeks. The foolishness of God sounds silly at first, but if you look at the whacky things that God has used throughout human history to get His message across, it tells me that God loves a good drama. Of course it’s more than that. I believe God has used oddball methods to make an impact. If you were the divine creator and you chose to create a people to call your own, you might want to make them the mightiest nation and empire to kick everyone’s butt…but Our Lord chose to do just the opposite. He created a people to form as His children and His nation that never has, and never will be (that is, until we are out of here) a mighty empire or nation that could dominate the region, much less the world, using their own influence or strength. Israel for most of their history proverbially, has been the ninety-eight pound weakling on the beach that constantly gets sand kicked into their faces. Why keep them weak? Isn’t that foolish? In our thinking as humans it is because humanity is eaten up with self elevation and self worth and self might, etc. The Lord uses foolishness to His advantage to prove His points; any success that Israel has ever had can only be attributed to The Lord and one place He drives that point home is in Isaiah where, while talking about how He will never abandon them, the Holy Spirit makes this point through Isaiah:

Isaiah 44:24-25 Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, And He who formed you from the womb: “I [am] the LORD, who makes all [things], Who stretches out the heavens all alone, Who spreads abroad the earth by Myself; Who frustrates the signs of the babblers, And drives diviners mad; Who turns wise men backward, And makes their knowledge foolishness; (NKJV)

How about the victory over a stronghold of Canaan called Jericho that we read in Joshua chapter 6¹. The Israeli military under the leadership of Joshua did everything they weren’t suppose to including allowing the Levites to participate in the military processions around the city, as they silently circled the walls for six days…the soldiers watching from the walls of Jericho must have thought they were insane…until the walls came crashing down. That whole military strategy was just crazy…but it worked and it made an impact then on the whole world and it still makes an impact on those that read the accounts in the Torah.

Let’s just take look at what most would consider a really stupid thing to do; to go up against a thousand Philistines unarmed except for some bone you found lying on the ground, instead of doing the sane thing and running like a rabbit. That’s what Sampson did in Judges 15² when the Holy Spirit temporarily indwelled in him and gave him the advantage. Why did Our Lord choose to do it this way? You take 700 men coming up against 1000 men and slaying them, that is not an act that would get more than local attention and one that history would attribute the victory to the might and training of the smaller army…but you take one man using the jawbone of a donkey, encountering and slaying 1000 men…that gets attention. That makes headlines and it is something that not only would get passed down from generation to generation but the victory cannot be attributed to anything other than divine, supernatural influence and guidance.

The Lord also uses foolish moves to keep Satan off balance. Satan, all through history has tried to out-think and out-maneuver The Lord only to be confused and thwarted by some of these kooky things The Lord does such as: pronouncing a curse on the royal line of David that seems stupid on the face of it….until we learn that He had created an ‘out’ by the exception to the inheritance rule we covered earlier. By allowing Satan to believe he has defeated God with the destruction of all Jewish male babies in Egypt by Pharaoh…except for one tiny child named Moses, by killing all the male line of Judah by Athaliah…except for baby Joash,³ by the destruction of all the copies of the Torah by Manasseh…except for one copy hidden in the Temple Treasury…on and on God allows these dramas to play out like an action movie where the fuse gets to the last inch before the hero snuffs it out.

The most foolish thing though, is recorded in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians⁴ where Paul states that the most foolish act of all is the preaching of the cross. He says there are those who will not accept it, they will deny it straight out. There are those that take humanity to a level that if they can’t prove it, they won’t accept it and Paul, in verse 22 uses the Jews (I read Pharisees…remember the Pharisees from Matthew 12 that wanted a sign after they accused Christ of being of Satan?) and he uses the Greeks (who sat around expounding the philosophies of Herodotus and Socrates, etc…what we would call not seeing the forest for the trees) as examples of those who consider the gospel as a quaint unprovable myth while example of all this foolishness has been recorded from the beginning and is there in plain sight for all to see. This is what Paul is getting at in I Corinthians 1:27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; (NKJV)

God Bless, Jim

1 Joshua 6:20 So the people shouted when [the priests] blew the trumpets. And it happened when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat. Then the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. (NKJV)

2 Judges 15:14-16 When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting against him. Then the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him; and the ropes that [were] on his arms became like flax that is burned with fire, and his bonds broke loose from his hands. He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand and took it, and killed a thousand men with it. Then Samson said: “With the jawbone of a donkey, Heaps upon heaps, With the jawbone of a donkey I have slain a thousand men!” (NKJV)

3 II Chronicles 22:10-12 ¹⁰When Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son was dead, she began to kill off the whole royal family of the house of Judah.
¹¹But Jehosheba, a daughter of the king, took Joash, Ahaziah’s son, and spirited him away from among the king’s sons who were about to be slain, and put him and his nurse in a bedroom. In this way Jehosheba, the daughter of King Jehoram, a sister of Ahaziah and wife of Jehoiada the priest, concealed the child from Athaliah, so that she did not put him to death.
¹²For six years he remained hidden with them in the house of God, while Athaliah ruled as queen over the land.

4 1 Corinthians 1:18 on…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. ²²…For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; (NKJV)