Stop fooling yourselves.  If you count yourself above average in intelligence, as judged by this world’s standards, you had better put this all aside and be a fool rather than let it hold you back from true wisdom from above.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.  As it says in the Book of Job, “God uses man’s brilliance to trap him; he stumbles over his own ‘wisdom’ and falls.” And again, in the Book of Psalms we are told that the Lord knows full well how the human mind reasons, and how foolish and futile it is.

So don’t be proud of following the wise men of this world.  For God has already given you everything you need.  He has given you all of the present and all of the future.  All are yours, and you belong to Christ, and Christ is God’s.  1 Corinthians

But the man who isn’t a Christian can’t understand and can’t accept these thoughts from God, which the Holy Spirit teaches us.  They sound foolish to him, because only those who have the Holy Spirit within them can understand what the Holy Spirit means.  Others can’t take it in.  But the spiritual man has insight into everything, and that bothers and baffles the man of the world, who can’t understand him at all.

So what about these wise men, these scholars, these brilliant debaters of this world’s great affairs?  God has made them all look foolish, and shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense.  For God in His wisdom saw to it that the world would never find God through human brilliance, and then He stepped in and saved all those who believed His message, which the world calls foolish and silly. It seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven as proof that what is preached is true; and is foolish to the Gentiles because they believe only what agrees with their philosophy and seems wise to them.

So when we preach about Christ dying to save them, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense.  But God has opened the eyes of those called to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, to see that Christ is the mighty power of God to save them; Christ Himself is the center of God’s wise plan for their salvation.  This so-called “foolish“ plan of God is far wiser than the wisest plan of the wisest man, and God in his weakness - Jesus dying on the cross - is far stronger than any man.

Notice among yourselves, dear brothers, that few of you who follow Christ have big names or power or wealth.  Instead, God has deliberately chosen to use ideas the world considers foolish and of little worth in order to shame those people considered by the world as wise and great.  He has chosen a plan despised by the world, counted as nothing at all, and used it to bring down to nothing those the world considers great, so that no one anywhere can ever brag, in the presence of God. 1 Corinthians