Go out into mainstream Christianity and you’ll find the focus is almost always on the life of Christ and Jesus being our example.

As Jordan explains, “A lot of people are willing to follow the example of the lowly Galilean as He walked the shores of Galilee, and follow the stranger of Galilee, and follow the example He made, and follow the teachings that He gave, and follow Him in His flesh in His earthly life, but Paul doesn’t focus on any of that—he goes right through the Cross, because the preaching of the grace of God is there.”

When you trust Christ you are to trust a message from Paul that is so fundamentally, radically different from everything in human viewpoint and the way the world works, but preachers have everyone glued to Christ’s earthly ministry to Israel under their kingdom program.

*****

“You know what the world’s like?” says Jordan. “You got a guy next door to you and he’s got a chem lab in the basement and he tells you, ‘I’m fixing to discover a fuel source that will do away with gasoline and our dependence on oil.’ You say, ‘Good, good, wonderful.’

“He says, ‘I’ve got this Beaker A, Beaker B and Beaker C, and all I’ve got to do is figure out how to mix these three things and I’ll have a fuel source that will do away with the dependence on oil and we’ll be liberated. Tonight, I’m going to mix Beaker A and Beaker B.’

“So, that night you hear this gigantic explosion. In a moment, the fire department’s there. The paramedics are toting your friend off on the stretcher and you say, ‘John, John, what happened?! He says, ‘I mixed Beaker A and Beaker B and I got an explosion. It didn’t work.’

“So, he gets out of the hospital, comes home, fixes his home up. Six months later he says, ‘I’ve got a solution for our dependence on foreign oil and I’m going to experiment tonight and I’m going to come up with it.’

“You say, ‘What are you going to do?’ He says, ‘I’m going to mix Beaker A and Beaker B. You say, ‘Okay.’ So, that night he goes down there and you’re watching Boston Legal on TV and BOOM! you hear another explosion. Here comes the fire department and the paramedics, and as they carry him off on the stretcher, you go out and say, ‘John, John, what did you do?’ He said, ‘I mixed Beaker A and Beaker B.’

“After about six times that he does that, mixing Beaker A and Beaker B and getting an explosion, what would you tell him? ‘Hey, what about C?! Why don’t we try that one time?’

“Why don’t you try C, and it becomes so obviously important that that’s what you ought to do, that you begin to think, ‘What kind of a numbskull am I, just mixing A and B?!’ But that’s the wisdom of the world.

“That’s what Paul’s talking about. Here’s the philosophy of human viewpoint and here’s the way of the flesh, and then there’s Christ, but you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to follow A and B and forget about C. That’s what the world does.”