The apostle Paul starts from an anthropomorphic view of God that was common in antiquity and is still common now. It cannot be said that nothing worthwhile can be found along this path...
The apostle Paul starts from an anthropomorphic view of God that was common in antiquity and is still common now. It cannot be said that nothing worthwhile can be found along this path: some sound judgments are still possible here. Thus, starting from our own small strength, we think of God's omnipotence; comparing Him with our reason, we imagine His wisdom and omniscience. Comparing Him with our limitations helps us touch the truth of His boundlessness and transcendence.
But this way of thinking about God conceals a serious danger: we think that God is like us and imagine Him as a human being, only a very "big" one. Instinctively it seems to us that where a weak little human can accomplish nothing, God will accomplish everything. Where we suffer and die, God will come out victorious. That is indeed what happens, but not at all as we imagine.
By ordinary logic, it would have been natural for Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane to "mobilize" the very twelve legions of angels He spoke about to Peter, and for the angels to scatter the guards and expose the chief priests. But something completely different happens, something absurd, in the words of the apostle Paul ("foolishness" in the Synodal and Slavonic translations is moria in the Greek text, meaning "folly, absurdity, madness"). Either the power of God does not consist in what we think it does, or His victory is not won by power at all, as the prophet Zechariah says. And the Lord accepts death on the Cross.
The Greeks and the Jews, the apostle Paul's listeners, turned away from him as soon as they heard that God suffered on the Cross. God cannot suffer - this was the common conviction of the entire ancient world, the source of all theological reasoning about the impassibility of the deity. From this point of view, the absurdity of the Gospel events produced a whole series of conflicts and heresies in the New Testament era: Christians could not manage to join the Greek-Jewish certainty about God's impassibility with faith in the crucified Jesus. Not years, as one might expect, but centuries upon centuries were spent on this... Because behind the word of the Cross stands the greatest mystery of God's love, the incomprehensible foundation of biblical Revelation.
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1:18 To them that perish - By obstinately rejecting the only name whereby they can be saved. But to us who are saved - Now saved from our sins, and in the way to everlastingsalvation, it is the great instrument of the power of God.