Chapter 2

¹So when I came to you, brothers, I did not come and tell you the secret purpose of God in superior, philosophical language, ²for I resolved, while I was with you, to forget everything but Jesus Christ and his crucifixion. ³For my part, I came among you in weakness and with a great deal of fear and trembling, ⁴and my teaching and message were not put in plausible, philosophical language, but they were attended with convincing spiritual power, ⁵so that your faith might rest, not on human philosophy, but on the power of God.

⁶Yet there is a wisdom that we impart when we are with people who have a mature faith, but it is not what this world calls wisdom, nor what the authorities of this world, doomed as they are to pass away, would call so. ⁷But it is a mysterious divine wisdom that we impart, hitherto kept secret, and destined by God before the world began for our glory. ⁸It is a wisdom unknown to any of the authorities of this world, for otherwise they would never have crucified our glorious Lord. ⁹But, as the Scripture says, there are things

“Which no eye ever saw and no ear ever heard,

And never occurred to the human mind,

Which God has provided for those who love him.”

¹⁰For God revealed them to us through his Spirit, for the Spirit fathoms everything, even the depths of God himself. ¹¹For what human being can understand a man’s thoughts except the man’s own spirit within him? Just so no one understands the thoughts of God but the spirit of God. ¹²But the Spirit we have received is not that of the world, but the Spirit that comes from God, which we have to make us realize the blessings God has given us. ¹³These disclosures we impart, not in the set phrases of human philosophy, but in words the Spirit teaches, giving spiritual truth a spiritual form. ¹⁴A material man will not accept what the Spirit of God offers. It seems mere folly to him, and he cannot understand it, because it takes spiritual insight to see its true value. ¹⁵But the spiritual man is alive to all true values, but his own true value no unspiritual man can see. ¹⁶For who has ever known the Lord’s thoughts, so that he can instruct him? But we share the thoughts of Christ.