1 Cor 2:14-16 - The Untouchables

14-16 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Man’s inability to understand the things of the Spirit of God unaided is foundational to the gospel of grace. Paul has spent a good portion of this letter so far making clear the spiritual nature of the understanding of gospel truth. Spiritual understanding can come only from God, as a gift of His grace, and spiritual birth is a necessary precondition to repentance and faith.

Think about it. If the natural man cannot understand the things of the Spirit of God it follows that he must first be made an unnatural man or a postnatural man, or be reborn of the Spirit of God before He can actually grasp spiritual things. He cannot know the truth unless God enables him. And the reason for his inability is that he is spiritually dead. This spiritual deadness has lead all mankind to think and to act like spiritually dead people, to serve and to please themselves and to hate the very idea of being subservient to God.

But the spiritually reborn and living child of God has the indwelling Spirit of God imparting to him the very mind of Christ, Who is the eternal Son, one in substance with the Father and the Spirit. Just as all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in Jesus, so portions of the fullness are revealed in us, starting with the understanding of the wisdom of God in the cross of Christ and going on from there.

Inasmuch as we know the mind of God by the Spirit revealing it to our hearts through the Word as it is lived out in God’s daily providence, we are able to discern truth from error, good from evil, righteousness from sin because we do it not according to our own opinions, but according to God’s own revelation of His purposes and His mind.

This being true, Paul argues, a believer acting according to God’s precepts in the power of the Holy Spirit is beyond the judgement of mere men. They cannot rightly judge him on two accounts. One - they have no spiritual basis upon which to understand the facts, the words and the actions of believers walking in the Spirit. Two - believers walking in the Spirit cannot sin because they are doing the will of the One True God Who is beyond all judgement of His own creatures. It is no longer we, but Christ lives in us, sanctifying all that we are and do through the obedience of our faith.

Yes, we do not always walk in the Spirit. We do sin, sometimes grievously. We lose our way. We wander. That’s not the point here. The point is that we have been born again into the family of God and we are now joined through betrothal to God the Son. His honour is ours. His righteousness is ours. His discipline is ours. His correction. His salvation. All things are ours in Him and all things work together for our good - even the evil that we still do. God has not judged us and God will never condemn us because the price of all of our sin has been paid by the Lord Jesus Christ. Our sin. The believing ones. The called ones. The elect ones. The chosen of God have been saved to the uttermost for eternity.

When we abide in this truth - that we are justified forever - then who has the right, the understanding or the power to question what God has done? He has declared it and none can say otherwise.

And we have the mind of Christ - but what is meant by this? Nothing more and nothing less than the fact that we have the Holy Spirit in us, communicating to us the things of God, as has just been explained. The means by which the Holy Spirit does this communicating is not via some mystical personal subjective inner experience. It isn’t "voices in the head" or a "feeling that comes over us" or an "intuition". It is our mind thinking God’s thoughts after Him due to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in us. And the way we hear God is through the Word made known and revealed to our hearts for the obedience of faith.