Now this is Paul, the great orator, the great debater - this is the guy who it said: hey, he proved from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ (he was talking about Jews who already had a working knowledge of Torah). So this guy is walking into a gentile nation, a gentile city, and he reminds them.
He says: Remember when I came to you, I didn't come to you, to sit down and argue about who was right and who was wrong. I didn't come and sit down, and base out my doctrine in 19 bullet points, and intelligently argue with you - I didn't come like that.
I came only to know, and to demonstrate, a way of life that's found in the cross. That's it; and it goes on, and I think in Verse 5, it says something like this. He repeats himself, which is so Hebrew. He's like - he's repeating himself. He starts here, and then at the end he says the same thing; and he says this.
“I did not come with persuasive words. Rather, I came with a demonstration of God's power”. So he says: when I came to you, I didn't come with these persuasive words, and 19 bullet points and all of this stuff. I came with a demonstration of God's power - which was not really his mode of operandi. Paul's mode of operation, normally, was to sit down in a group of people, and prove that he was smarter than everybody else in the room; and he would prove vigorously from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. Normally, that's how Paul did things.
Why did he do things that way? Because he was dealing with Jews, who had memorised the whole Torah, who should know that Jesus was the messiah - and he's trying to convince them of that, because they have similar belief systems - very similar belief systems.
But Paul changes his mode of operation, as a leader, when he walks into a situation where this is not going to work. In other words, let me just say this simply: cookie-cutter evangelism doesn't work. Sometimes you've got to change what we're doing, to reach a different group of people.
Now why would he have to do that? Well let's think about this. In the late 50-60AD, it was the Romans who were ruling the region of the world that Corinth was in? The Roman Empire was ruling the whole world; and they tried to put that religious part into it, saying that Julius Caesar was god; and then Augustus Caesar was god; then Caesar Tiberius was god. The problem with all that was - all these guys died; so there was just this mental mindset of: yeah, we've kind of got to go along with these guys saying they're god - but they're really not god.
There was a whole plethora of other gods in this region. Let me just tell you about a few of them, so when Paul writes this, here were the people ruling the religious side…
The main god of that region was a god named Mithra; and this religion around Mithra was the central religion of the entire Roman Empire. So 600 years before Christ, this religion comes forward, and it's ruled by a god named Mithra.
Now here's what the followers of Mithra believed: that their god was born in a cave to a virgin; was worshiped by shepherds; and had 12 followers, by which he then spread his message of life over death to the whole world. That was Mithra, 600BC; so this religion from 600BC had now grown, and it was the main religion in the city of Corinth - and it was a god who was born of a virgin, worshiped by shepherds, had 12 followers to whom he disseminated his information to, his way of life. They spread that way of life to the whole world, that death can be conquered by life, if you believe in Mithra. That was Mithra.
There was another god named Addis. His followers believed that he was born of a virgin in 200BC; that he was hung on a tree, was killed, and then rose from the dead, to bring life to his followers. That is the god Addis.
There was another god of the region named Adonis. Now Adonis is the god that every man thinks he is, when he's looking in the mirror. You ever notice that a woman can be like three pounds overweight, and she's like: I am faaaat! A man can be 50 pounds overweight, and still bring Adonis out, man! It's because that's what we are. We're men.