Wisdom of the Fool

“We can all agree, it’s a mixed bag for the living;
​full of sorrow, full of grief.”
—Kyle Morton

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Human beings have always tried to solve the problem of suffering with intelligence. Philosophers sharpen arguments. Kings pass laws. Reformers attempt to build better societies. Yet the central claim of Christianity is that the redemption of mankind came through 

Mikal Johnson

something that, at first glance, appears absurd: the execution of an innocent man on a Roman cross.

By the standards of worldly wisdom, that looks like failure.

Yet “the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’” (1 Corinthians 3:19, echoing Job 5:13). The very solutions humanity expects — power, control, triumph — are not the ones God chose. Instead, the story of salvation turns on apparent defeat.

The problem with many modern tellings of the Gospel is that they start by portraying humanity simply as villains in the story. But the biblical pattern is different. Scripture often presents mankind less like criminals awaiting punishment and more like captives crying out for liberation.

Think of Israel in Egypt. They were slaves under Pharaoh, ground down by labor and fear. Their cry rose to heaven not because they had cleverly solved their own problems, but because they couldn’t. Their freedom came through an act of God that no strategist or philosopher could have predicted.

The cross works the same way.

From a purely practical standpoint, it makes little sense. If you were designing a rescue plan using ordinary logic, you would not begin with humiliation, suffering, and death. Yet that is precisely the point. What looks like weakness becomes the turning of the tide.

The pattern runs through Scripture: the last becomes first, the rejected stone becomes the cornerstone, the end becomes the beginning.

Anyone who has spent time reflecting on the world eventually arrives where the writer of Ecclesiastes did. Under the sun, everything seems to dissolve into vanity. Knowledge grows, yet sorrow grows with it. Pleasure offers distraction, but not permanence. Even wisdom itself eventually runs up against limits it cannot cross.

Michael Card captured that tension in his song “Under the Sun.” Solomon searched for understanding everywhere — through learning, through pleasure, through experience — only to discover that none of it could anchor the human soul.

And yet Ecclesiastes does not end in despair. It ends with remembrance of the Creator. The darkness drives us toward the light.

That is the strange wisdom of the cross.

God did not redeem humanity through a display of overwhelming force, nor through philosophical argument. He entered the brokenness Himself and allowed the worst the world could do to fall upon Him. What appeared to be the end became the beginning of liberation.

To the calculating mind, it is foolishness. To those who recognize the chains of this world, it looks very much like freedom.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Happy April Fool’s Day!

In His Name, Mikal