Coming To Nothing: A Brief Comment on 1 Cor. 2:6

A great sadness swept over me as I read a word from Scripture and the Holy Spirit quickened that passage to me. This is what I was shown.

“We . . . speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing” (1 Cor. 2:6 NIV).

Why only among the mature? and who is mature enough to qualify to hear it, much less understand it? The answer: Only among the spiritually mature, because those spiritually immature will turn on those telling them things too deep for them to understand and will tear them to pieces.

“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces” (Matt. 7:6 NIV).

“Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word” (Jn. 8:43 RSV).

They are unable to recognize the importance and value of what they are told and so treat it and its tellers with disrespect and harm, to their own destruction as well.

“Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals–these are the very things that destroy them” (Jude 1:10.

Those of this world have their own “wisdom”, by which they govern all their activities. But it is a faulty, limited human wisdom. They are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” ( 2 Tim. 3:7). Both they and their wisdom will disappear.

“Where there is knowledge, it will pass away” (1 Cor. 13:8 NIV).
“For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31 NIV).

” . . . passing away.” Is there any pronouncement of doom so terrifying as that of this passage, that “the rulers of this age . . . are coming to nothing?” How utterly horrifying the certain prospect that all that one is and has done will come to nothing, an utter waste of precious life, to become a dark mist that vanishes into the darkness for ever, forgotten for all eternity. And all because one failed to heed the Word of God.

As Matthew Henry says in his commentary on this passage: “There are things God hath prepared for those that love him, and wait for him, which sense cannot discover, no teaching can convey to our ears, nor can it yet enter our hearts. We must take them as they stand in the Scriptures, as God hath been pleased to reveal them to us.”

If we do not take them as they stand, then we ourselves shall not stand but come to nothing–for ever.