How then can mere mortals ever know God’s wisdom? The
answer, verses 10-16. In verses 10-13, Paul writes about the
doctrines of inspiration and revelation whereby God has made
His wisdom known through the apostles. In verses 14-16, Paul
turns to the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
How can men know of a God who cannot be seen and whose
provisions are beyond human thought, the answer, through the
Holy Spirit, who has imparted the knowledge of God to and
through the apostles in the New Testament Scriptures. The
Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of God.” Just as the spirit of a
man knows the deep thoughts of the man, so the Spirit of
God, the Holy Spirit, knows the intimate things of God. When
the Lord Jesus was on the earth, He spoke many things to His
disciples that they did not understand or even remember.
Jesus told them that after His departure, He would send His
Spirit. The Holy Spirit would not only call the things He
had spoken to their remembrance, He would also enable them
to understand them so that they could record them for
others. In addition, the Spirit would reveal things to come,
things of the coming age.
Jesus told the disciples, “These things I have spoken to
you, while abiding with you. But the Helper, the Holy
Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach
you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I
said to you” (John 14:25-26). He told the disciples, “I have
many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them
now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide
you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own
initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He
will disclose to you what is to come. He shall glorify Me;
for He shall take of Mine, and shall disclose it to you. All
things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said, that
He takes of Mine, and will disclose it to you” (John
16:12-15).
In verses 7, Paul told the Corinthians, “but we speak God’s
wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined
before the ages to our glory.” A mystery is something God
reveals concerning the future that men do not understood
before its fulfillment because it is beyond human
comprehension. After God has completed a work that was
formerly a mystery, He fully discloses that mystery through
one of His apostles. Paul was one of the apostles given the
privilege to speak of several mysteries. In the Book of
Ephesians, Paul spoke of the privilege God had given him as
an apostle to reveal some of these mysteries (Ephesians
1:3-14; 3:1-13; 5:32).
In 1 Corinthians 2:10-13, Paul describes the fulfillment of
our Lord’s promise to His disciples, remember that Paul was
divinely added as the twelfth apostle. Man, Paul is saying,
could never know God on his own. However, God has chosen to
make Himself known through His Word and through His Spirit
so that the things of God might be recorded as a part of the
Bible. Here is a crucial difference between the apostles and
the false apostles. The apostles claimed to speak for God,
and they did. False apostles claimed to speak for God, and
they did not. To reject the apostles and their teaching as
the “wisdom of God” is to reject God, for they are the only
ones through whom God has chosen to disclose Himself. To
reject the apostles’ teaching is thus to reject the God who
disclosed Himself to men through them.
